Batavia’s Graveyard by Mike Dash
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In 1629, the Dutch India Company’s ship Batavia, on her maiden voyage out from Holland, round the Cape of Good Hope, en route to Batavia (now Jakarta), sank after running aground on the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, 40 miles off the coast of Western Australia.
Mike Dash tells what must surely be one of the most dramatic, deranged, bloodthirsty, sex- and alcohol-laden stories in maritime history.
Even before the ship ran aground, there was a mutiny being planned. The under-merchant (the number two company representative) Jeronimus Corneliusz persuaded the skipper Ariaen Jacobsz (who wasn’t the boss but served the East India Company’s top representative, merchant Francisco Pelsaert) that they should steal the ship and its cargo before arriving in the Indies.
The Abrolhos were true desert islands, with neither water nor shelter. Pelsaert and Jacobsz and a few dozen others set sail in a smaller boat for Batavia leaving the rest (several hundred) behind, intended to return to rescue them (as they indeed did).
The Islands did not in fact kill the survivors off. But Corneliusz had not given up his idea of mutiny and seizing an East India Company ship (as well as all the money and jewels that had been left behind). And what follows is an astonishing tale of cold-blooded murder as Corneliusz and his henchman killed off others one by one.
Pelsaert returns to save the day, or what’s left of it.
(If this sounds like an opera, that’s because it is: an opera based on the story of the Batavia premiered in Australia just two years ago.)
Pelsaert may not have managed to save the more that 100 people that Corneliusz bumped off, but he did manage to salvage most of the East India’s Company valuables and cargo, losing several more men in the process, displaying an entrepreneurial spirit that still characterizes much East Asian trade today.
Corneliusz was a real piece of work. He had been an apothecary, had a most peculiar marriage, went bust and went to sea. He also appears to have been completely deranged (imagine Anthony Perkins from the old Hitchcock film Psycho dressed like a Pilgrim)
Dash (in the 100 pages of notes that follow the story itself) presents evidence that Corneliusz was a clinical psychopath. He was also a heretic (an Anabaptist) and Dash argues that he was also belonged to a sect of Rosicrucians who believed (or claimed to believe) that it was impossible to sin, because (conveniently) any ideas we have come from God.
Bloody good story; it hardly matters whether it is exactly true. Mike Dash tries to tread a fine line between historical research and writing a book that people will actually read. On the whole, I think he succeeds; it is truly something that we know with any exactitude at all what happened day-by-day, and what people said and thought almost 400 years ago.
On the other hand, the historical record isn’t exactly complete: Dash relies largely on Pelsaert’s account which is (as he acknowledges) self-exculpatory. And some of the connections that Dash draws between Corneliusz and other individuals and groups that might have influenced him are, while not implausible, not entirely proven either.
A bit speculative, perhaps. This is unfortunate, because the story stands by itself: we didn’t need to know why Anthony Perkins was carrying the knife ...
I can’t imagine why this hasn’t been made into a movie yet.