Batavia's Graveyard (49 page)

“The great Yammer  . . .”
JFP 4 June 1629 [DB 124].

“There was no order to the evacuation  . . .”
In truth, the men
of the
Batavia
were no better and no worse than the other sailors of their day. In
the 1620s—and indeed for the next 200 years—perhaps only 1 in every 7 people
could swim, and it was rare indeed for the crew of any vessel to remain disciplined in the
aftermath of a shipwreck. Skippers were much more likely to save themselves than they were
to remain at their posts until the last of their men had been rescued. Sailors frequently
commandeered the ship’s boats for themselves and left their passengers to drown.
There was no recognized emergency drill for the men to follow. The concept of “women
and children first” did not exist, and the very idea of carrying lifeboats sufficient
to save all passengers and crew on a vessel the size of an East Indiaman was regarded as
preposterous. See the numerous examples cited by Edward Leslie,
Desperate Journeys,
Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors
(London: Papermac,
1991). For the contemporary Spanish view, see Pérez-Mallaína, op. cit., pp.
214–5.

Death of a dozen people by drowning
Pelsaert’s declaration, 20 July
1629, ARA VOC 1098, fol. 223r–224r [R 212–4].

Food and water from the wreck
JFP 4 June 1629 [DB 124–5]. There was
much more food than water—66 gallons of bread (the Dutch measured their food supplies
by volume) to 17 1/2 gallons of water, according to Pelsaert’s journal (ibid.) and
his declaration on arrival at Batavia.

Value of the jewels taken from the wreck
The total was first calculated,
with an exactness entirely typical of the VOC, at 20,419 guilders and 15 stuivers. (There
were 20 stuivers in one guilder.) This figure was later revised upward to 58,000 guilders,
for reasons that are not clear (see chapter 5). Antonio van Diemen to Pieter de
Carpentier, 30 November–10 December 1629, ARA 1009 [DB 42, 49].

“It won’t help at all  . . .”
JFP 4 June 1629 [DB
124].

Indiscipline below
Interrogation of Allert Janssen, JFP 19 Sep 1629 [DB
194–6]; interrogation of Lenert Michielsz Van Os, JFP 23 Sep 1629 [DB 185–6];
interrogation of Mattys Beer, ibid. [DB 189]; verdict on Cornelis Janssen, JFP 30 Nov 1629
[DB 242]; verdict on Jean Thirion, ibid. [DB 243].

Further actions after the wreck
JFP 5–8 June 1629 [DB
125–8].

Houtman’s Abrolhos
J. A. Heeres,
The Part Borne by the Dutch in
the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765
(London: Luzac, 1899), pp. 14–8;
Günter Schilder,
Australia Unveiled: The Share of Dutch Navigators in the Discovery of
Australia
(Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1976), pp. 75–6.

Naming Batavia’s Graveyard
Green, Stanbury, and Gaastra, op. cit., p.
99.

“It was better and more honest  . . .”
JFP 5 June 1629 [DB
125–6].

Chapter 1: The Heretic

The full history of Jeronimus Cornelisz has never been written before and
has had to be pieced together from fragmentary references in surviving Dutch
archives—in particular the Old Solicitors’ Archive, Haarlem, and the Municipal
Archive, Leeuwarden. The most useful general study of Dutch Anabaptism is still Cornelis
Krahn,
Dutch Anabaptism: Origin, Spread, Life and Thought, 1450–1600
(The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), but James Stayer’s
Anabaptists and the Sword
(Lawrence, KA: Coronado Press, 1976) deals specifically with the Anabaptists’
attitudes to violence and relations with the state. For details of the Torrentian scandal,
I have relied on Govert Snoek’s unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
De Rosenkruizers in
Nederland: Voornamelijk in de Eerste Helft van de 17de Eeuw. Een Inventarisatie,
and
the biographies of A. Bredius,
Johannes Torrentius
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1909) and A. J. Rehorst,
Torrentius
(Rotterdam: WL & J Brusse NV, 1939). On the
peculiar story of the Rosicrucian order and their supposed beliefs, I turned to Snoek and
to Christopher McIntosh,
The Rosy Cross Unveiled: The History, Mythology and Rituals of
an Occult Order
(Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1980), and on the social
structure of Haarlem in the 1620s to the work of Gabrielle Dorren, particularly
“Communities Within the Community: Aspects of Neighbourhood in Seventeenth Century
Haarlem,”
Urban History
25 (1998). No history of medicine in the Netherlands
is as detailed as Brockliss and Jones’s recent
The Medical World of Early Modern
France
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and I have used this work, with some caution,
as a guide to the equivalent “world” of the Dutch Republic.

Life expectancy in the Indies
Jaap Bruijn, F. S. Gaastra, and I. Schöffer
Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
3 vols., 1979–1987), I, 170; Giles Milton,
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One
Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History
(London: Hodder & Stoughton,
1999), p. 242.

“A great refuge . . .”
Quoted in Bruijn et al.,
Dutch-Asiatic
Shipping,
I, 151. The VOC’s soldiers were “louts from the depths of
Germany,” it was commented, and according to a saying current in the Holy Roman
Empire at the time, “Even a man who has beaten his father and mother to death is too
good to go to the East Indies.” C. R. Boxer,
The Dutch Seaborne Empire
1600–1800
(London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 135; R. van Gelder,
Het Oost-Indisch
Avontuur: Duitsers in Dienst van de VOC, 1600–1800
(Nijmegen: SUN, 1997), p.
149.

“Cornelisz came originally from Friesland . . .”
Earlier
authorities have generally been content to label Jeronimus a Haarlemmer, assuming he was
born in the town where he lived immediately prior to joining the
Batavia.
However,
one passing contemporary reference does describe him as a Frisian (anonymous
Batavia
survivor’s letter, printed in Anon.,
Leyds Veer-Schuyts Praetjen, Tuschen een
Koopman ende Borger van Leyden, Varende van Haarlem nae Leyden
(np [Amsterdam: Willem
Jansz], 1630) [R 236]. This suggestion appears to be confirmed by the extensive Frisian
links uncovered in the course of research for this chapter.

Distinctness of Friesland
P. H. Breuker and A. Janse (eds.),
Negen
Eeuwen Friesland-Holland: Geschiedenis van een Haat-Liefdeverhouding
(Zutphen: Walburg
Pers, 1997), pp. 15–17, 20, 30–1, 42–3, 120–1.

Cornelisz’s possible origins in Leeuwarden or Bergum
Jeronimus was
one of the heirs of Griete Douwes, a widow who died in Bergum, and was possibly
apprenticed to a Leeuwarden apothecary named Gerrit Evertsz, as will be seen. See ONAH
129, fol. 63 and below. Griete Douwes’s son, Sijbrant, who was with Jeronimus coheir
to her fortune, also seems to have had some involvement with the local apothecaries; see
RAF HTI 89, fol. 83v. It seems likely that Cornelisz and his family were somehow related
to the Douwes family, either as business partners or through marriage. The marital records
of Bergum are unfortunately absent for the period 1618–1674, and Cornelisz, possibly
for reasons that will be discussed, does not make an appearance in the baptismal registers
of the town. Nor does he appear in Leeuwarden’s
Burgerboek
(citizen book) or
the marital registers of that city. It is, in short, impossible to say with any certainty
that he came from this area of Frisia—merely that his relationship with Griete Douwes
and Gerrit Evertsz suggests it. On the population of Leeuwarden at this time, see Jonathan
Israel,
The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806
(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 332.

Elementary schools
Ibid., pp. 686–90.

Latin schools
Ibid., pp. 43–5. Jeronimus must surely have attended
one of these establishments, since a good knowledge of Latin was one of the main
prerequisites of a career as an apothecary.

Wealth of London apothecaries
Harold Cook,
The Decline of the Old
Medical Regime in Stuart London
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp.
48–9.

Diseases and the intercessory saints
Brockliss and Jones,
The Medical
World of Early Modern France,
pp. 44, 74–5. For St. Fiacre, see
The Catholic
Encyclopaedia,
vol. 6 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909).

The Dutch guild system
Paul Zumthor,
Daily Life in Rembrandt’s
Holland
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1962), pp. 141–3.

Gerrit Evertsz
For his dates and occupation, see CLE I, fol. 2; CLE II
fol. 297, 441; HLE 23, fol. 233. For his status, see ALE 1611–1624, fol. 206, 270,
280, 437, 540, 719. All in GAL. For his appointment as Cornelisz’s agent in
Friesland, see ONAH 129, fol. 63. Cornelisz was disputing the actions of Sijbrant Douwes,
who had apparently sold his mother’s lands in Bergum to a certain Goossen Oebes of
Lutgegeest without the approval of his coheir.

Cornelisz’s apprenticeship
Apothecaries in Haarlem served
apprenticeships of three years and were not permitted to become masters before the age of
25—at least according to the regulations of 1692, which are the earliest to have
survived. See D. A. Wittop Koning,
Compendium voor de Geschiedenis van de Pharmacie van
Nederland
(Lochem: De Tijdstroom, 1986), p. 131. Cornelisz would have been 25 in
1623–24.

The medical trinity in early modern Europe
Brockliss and Jones,
The
Medical World of Early Modern France,
esp. pp. 9–10, 164–5, 175, 188–9,
191. The great majority of what Brockliss and Jones say applies equally to the situation
in the Netherlands.

The scarcity of physicians
Haarlem, in 1628, had nine doctors for a
population of 40,000 people. A. T. van Deursen,
Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular
Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth Century Holland
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 237.

Ingredients of potions
See Brockliss and Jones,
The Medical World of
Early Modern France,
pp. 160–2; Cook,
The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in
Stuart London,
p. 134; Sarah Bakewell, “Cooking with Mummy,”
Fortean
Times
124 (July 1999): 34–8. The whole notion that real “mummy” was
made of human flesh was, incidentally, a mistake. The original “mummy” was a
black, bituminous substance called
mumia,
which was thought to have healing
properties and was popular in ancient Persia. The Greeks thought it was used by the
Egyptians for embalming and slowly, over the centuries, the original meaning of the word
was forgotten. Embalmed Egyptian bodies became known as “mummies” and were
associated with the alleged healing properties of
mumia.

Theriac
Gilbert Watson,
Theriac and Mithridatium: A Study in
Therapeutics
(London: The Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1966), pp. 4–5,
98, 102–4; Charles LeWall,
Four Thousand Years of Pharmacy: An Outline History of
Pharmacy and the Allied Sciences
(Philadelphia: JB Lippincott, 1927), pp. 215–8;
Brockliss and Jones,
The Medical World of Early Modern France,
p. 160. Analysis of
surviving recipes suggest that theriac would have possessed mild antiseptic qualities,
thanks to its balsemic ingredients, which may account for its great popularity.

John Evelyn, the noted diarist, records witnessing the preparation of Venice
treacle in 1646. The medicine, he wrote, was mixed annually in an event that had “all
the character of a great proprietary ceremony and public festival. All the public squares
and the courtyards of hospitals and monasteries in Venice were transformed for the
occasion into great open-air theatres, adorned with rich damasks, with busts of
Hippocrates and Galen, and with the great majolica jars destined to receive the precious
medicament. Grave and important personages, sumptuously robed, moved to the applause of
the crowds in an atmosphere of rejoicing and expectation.

“In some cities the preparation was preceded by exhibiting the ingredients
to the public for three consecutive days so that anybody could examine them. On the fourth
day the actual making of the theriac was preceded by a benediction given by the highest
ecclesiastical authority and by a panegyric delivered by the leading physician of the
city. Only the leading pharmacists, who were vested with the office of
Triacanti
(theriac-makers), were allowed to make the theriac, and always under the eye of the chief
physicians.”

Sale of groceries and poisons
Wittop Koning,
Compendium voor de
Geschiedenis van de Pharmacie van Nederland,
pp. 90, 172, 206.

Haarlem
S. Groenveld, E. K. Grootes, J. J. Temminick et al.,
Deugd
Boven Geweld. Een Geschiedenis van Haarlem 1245–1995
(Hilversum: Verloren 1995),
pp. 144, 172–4, 177.

Cornelisz’s house on the Grote Houtstraat
ONAH 130, fol. 219v. For
gapers, see Witlop Koning,
Compendium voor de Geschiedenis van de Pharmacie van
Nederland,
pp. 97–8. Cornelisz does not appear among contemporary lists of
Haarlem property owners, hence the supposition that the building was rented.

Cornelisz’s popularity
His neighbors were prepared to testify to his
character and honesty before solicitors, which, as we will see, was certainly not true for
every citizen of Haarlem.

Cornelisz’s citizenship of Haarlem
ONAH 129, fol. 78v. The Haarlem
poorterboecken,
which would have contained additional details concerning Jeronimus’s life in the
city, have not survived.