Batavia's Graveyard (47 page)

Notes

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

General

T
HE WRECK OF THE
Batavia
was one of the more sensational events of
the seventeenth century, and it attracted considerable contemporary interest. A number of
pamphlets on the subject were published, some when news of the disaster first reached the
United Provinces, and others two decades later when there was a surge of interest in
travel literature in the Netherlands. The most popular of these pamphlets were published
in several editions and must have achieved a relatively wide circulation. Consequently,
the events of the mutiny remained fairly well known, in the United Provinces at least, for
30 or 40 years afterward.

During the second half of the seventeenth century, the
Batavia
’s
story was gradually forgotten, and references to the mutiny become progressively scarcer.
Interest did not revive until the late nineteenth century, when the Abrolhos became a
center of the guano trade and excavations on the islands began to turn up artifacts that
were thought to have come from the ship (but which, it eventually emerged, in fact came
from later, less well known wrecks); and after that, publications on the subject began to
appear in Australia as well as the Netherlands. The rediscovery of the wreck of the
Batavia
in 1963, which coincided with the publication of one of the key historical works on the
subject, significantly increased interest in the subject, though even in the last 40 years
the
Batavia
story has remained little known outside the two countries most closely
connected with it. In the last quarter of a century the wreck site has been thoroughly
excavated, adding substantially to our knowledge of the ship. Several accounts of the
Batavia
’s
story have been published in Dutch and German over the last 10 years, but none in English,
and this is the first book to make use of freshly discovered information from provincial
archives across the Netherlands.

Eyewitness Accounts

The accounts of the
Batavia
disaster that have come down to us are
unusually detailed for such a relatively early period. Moreover, the evidence that does
survive covers the ship’s story from several different perspectives. We have
accounts, however fragmentary, written by people who sailed to the Indies in the
ship’s longboat, by a VOC merchant who was hunted down by the mutineers but escaped,
and by another man who survived Batavia’s Graveyard. Most important, we have the
confessions of the mutineers themselves, written down during or just after their
interrogations.

We are fortunate this is the case. The Dutch archives covering the
country’s Golden Age are still voluminous, but the material they contain largely
concerns the doings of the moneyed classes, and records of those who owned no property and
had little money—those, in other words, who made up the great majority of the
Batavia
’s
passengers and crew—are largely nonexistent. Nor were there newspapers to record
sensational events or reporters to take an interest in the experiences of the
Batavia
’s
survivors. Taken together, Francisco Pelsaert’s detailed summaries of the evidence he
heard on Batavia’s Graveyard make up one of the most complete accounts of a single
mutiny that survives in any language, for it was comparatively rare for a large group of
mutineers to be captured and tried together.

Pelsaert’s version of events is contained within the
commandeur
’s
MS journal of the
Batavia
’s maiden voyage, which has been preserved among the
VOC papers now in the Algemeen RijksArchief in The Hague. The journal has been bound up
among the volumes of correspondence received annually from the Indies and now occupies
folios 232r–317r of the volume known as ARA VOC 1098. An earlier volume of
Pelsaert’s, which concerned the outward voyage of the
Batavia
from Amsterdam
to the Abrolhos, was thrown overboard by the mutineers and lost when the
commandeur
’s
cabin was ransacked after the wreck. The surviving account covers the period from the
wreck on 4 June 1629 to Pelsaert’s final return to the East Indies in December of the
same year.

The journals vary considerably from page to page in content and tone. In places
they are little more than a traditional ship’s log; elsewhere they become a personal
account of the author’s experiences in the aftermath of the mutiny. The bulk of the
manuscript, however, consists of lengthy summaries of Pelsaert’s interrogation of the
Batavia
mutineers, followed by what appear to be more or less verbatim transcripts
of the verdicts handed down to the guilty men.

The journals have been assembled in roughly chronological order. However, it is
evident from the arrangement of the documents that they were not written
contemporaneously. Each of the major mutineers is dealt with separately, the account of
his interrogation in the third week of September being immediately followed by the verdict
passed on him on the 28th of the month, after which the account moves back to the
interrogation of the next man, and so on. At one point in this compilation [ARA VOC 1098,
fol. 278v], the writer has crammed in some additional testimony concerning the mutineer
Mattys Beer, made on the day of his execution, in a blank he had previously left at the
bottom of one of the pages. This may indicate that the journals were written up in their
current form between the passing of the sentences on 28 September and the hanging of the
principal mutineers on 2 October. On the other hand, the sheer bulk of the testimony is
such that it is perhaps more likely that all the accounts were taken down in rough during
the interrogations, and then copied into journals later, while salvage operations were
proceeding or even during the survivors’ voyage to the Indies, which occupied the
period from mid-November to 5 December. In that case it may be that the compiler simply
mislaid Beer’s final confession when he was writing up his account of the
mutineer’s examination and was forced to interpolate this evidence when it eventually
emerged from the pile of papers on his desk.

It would, anyway, be unwise to treat Pelsaert’s journals as a spontaneous,
contemporary account of the
Batavia
mutiny. A good deal of care must have gone into
their compilation, and they were unquestionably edited in the course of the work. Thus the
summaries of the various interrogations are just that—summaries, put into the third
person—and not word-for-word transcripts of what each prisoner actually
said.

Owing to the quirks of the Dutch legal system, which placed overwhelming
significance on confessions, there is virtually no room in the journals for evidence from
ordinary passengers who witnessed the extraordinary events that took place on the
Abrolhos; in particular, it is noteworthy—though unsurprising—that none of the
Batavia
’s
women were heard. It is, furthermore, entirely possible that other material—perhaps a
good deal of material—has been omitted altogether, either because it seemed
irrelevant or because it cast some of the protagonists in an unfavorable light. Finally,
it is important to remember that the journals were compiled to be read by the directors of
the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC. It was these gentlemen who would determine the future
career—if any—of Pelsaert and the other officers of the
Batavia.
It would
be naive to suppose that they were not written with this thought very much in
mind.

Some idea of the degree of editing that may have occurred during the writing-up
emerges from a study of the journal’s authorship. The
commandeur
’s report
is not in Pelsaert’s own cramped and unconfident hand, which is known from a single
surviving letter in the VOC archives [ARA VOC 1098, fol. 583r–4r], and throughout
much of it Pelsaert himself is referred to in the third person. It would appear,
therefore, that the
Batavia
journals were actually written by one of the
commandeur
’s
clerks, almost certainly Salomon Deschamps, who was himself one of the unwilling
mutineers. This contention is supported by the fact that the handwriting in the journal
matches that in the VOC’s copy of Pelsaert’s
remonstrantie
on Mogul
India, which Deschamps is known to have compiled. It is therefore noteworthy that although
the lists of Cornelisz’s followers, copied into the journal, are given—as was
the custom—in descending order of rank, the name of the relatively high-ranking
Deschamps always appears at the bottom of the lists. From this it would appear that the
hapless clerk was doing what he could to distance himself from the mutineers [R
42–7]. It is, thus, not strictly accurate to refer to Pelsaert’s journal as
“his,” though for the sake of simplicity I have often done so.

The only other account of the mutiny that still exists in manuscript form comes
to us at third hand in the form of a collection of anecdotes concerning Dutch journeys to
the Indies, preserved among the municipal archives of Harderwijk, a small port in
Gelderland. This MS [Gemeente Archief Harderwijk, Oud Archief 2052, fol. 30–7]
contains some details of events on the Abrolhos—such as the story of Wybrecht
Claasen’s swim to the wreck for water, and the anecdote of Cornelisz being imprisoned
in a limestone pit and forced to pluck birds—that do not appear in any other sources.
It seems likely that the anonymous compiler had them from a member of the
Batavia
’s
crew. From internal evidence, it would appear that these anecdotes were written down in
about 1645 [R 22–8, 57].

Four further eyewitness accounts were printed and preserved in various
contemporary and near-contemporary pamphlets. The most important of these was produced,
anonymously, by Isaac Commelin, an Amsterdam bookseller whose
Origin and Progress of
the United Netherlands Chartered East-India Company,
published in 1645, helped to
start the Dutch vogue for accounts of voyages to foreign lands.

Commelin (1598–1676) followed up this success with
Ongeluckige Voyagie,
Van ’t Schip
Batavia
(The Unlucky Voyage of the Batavia),
a densely packed
pamphlet, illuminated with copper-plate engravings, that included not only the details of
Cornelisz’s mutiny but also accounts of two other voyages. The book was first
published by the Amsterdam printer Jan Jansz in 1647 and was closely based on
Pelsaert’s unpublished journals, rearranged and transposed where necessary to the
third person from the first. It includes one short interpolation [OV (1647) pp.
59–60], in the form of a purported statement by Wiebbe Hayes that does not appear
among the VOC archives. This rather puzzling piece of evidence is discussed in the notes
to chapter 8; suffice it to say here that it seems more likely than not that it is
authentic.

How Jansz obtained sight of Pelsaert’s manuscript, which should have been
filed among the papers of the Amsterdam chamber, remains something of a mystery; but the
pamphleteer is known to have had close contacts with several of the VOC’s directors,
and Commelin’s earlier publications had already featured accounts based on official
sources, which he must have purchased, clandestinely or otherwise, from employees of the
Company. In any event,
The Unlucky Voyage
was a considerable success and was
republished several times over the next two decades, keeping the
Batavia
’s
name before the Dutch public. Commelin’s work was also swiftly pirated by other
publishers, as was common at the time; in 1648 Joost Hartgers of Amsterdam brought out his
own edition of the text, supplementing Pelsaert’s text with a lengthy letter by
Gijsbert Bastiaensz that described events on Batavia’s Graveyard from the
predikant
’s
perspective. The original MS of the letter is now lost, but it appears, from internal
evidence, to be authentic. Two years later Lucas de Vries of Utrecht published a third
variant, including in his edition a list of the rewards given to the
Batavia
’s
loyalists. (C. R. Boxer’s “Isaac Commelin’s ‘Begin ende
voortgangh’ ” in
Dutch Merchants and Mariners in Asia 1602–1795,
pp.
2–3, 5, and DB 4–5, 78–9, contain further information about Commelin,
Jansz, and the various editions of
The Unlucky Voyage
.)