Batavia

1629

Dutch East Indiaman, Australian coral reef, massacre Location: Houtman Abrolhos, Western Australia · Coordinates: 28.43°S 113.78°E · Casualties: ~125 · Survivors: ~165 · Depth: 5 m · Cause: grounding — Struck Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago at night. The captain took the longboat to seek help in Batavia (Jakarta), leaving ~250 survivors marooned on nearby islands. · Fate: recovered 1970s · Type: merchant · East Indiaman · Tonnage: 1,200 tons · Crew: 341 · Flag: Dutch Republic · VOC · Launched: 1628 Struck Morning Reef off Western Australia. The captain sailed for help. In his absence, a conspiracy led by merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz seized control of the marooned survivors and murdered at least 115 men, women, and children over the following weeks. One of the darkest stories in the history of the sea. The Vessel The Batavia was a three-masted East Indiaman built at the Dutch East India Company's Peperwerf yard in Amsterdam in 1628. She was 45 metres long on the keel, 650 tons displacement, and carried 24 cast-iron guns for defence against Portuguese and English interlopers on the Cape-Batavia route. Her holds could carry 1,200 tons of cargo; her passenger decks were fitted for 340 souls. She was built for the Company's most profitable trade, the carriage of silver bullion and trade goods out to Batavia (Jakarta) and the return of nutmeg, clove, pepper, and cinnamon to the Amsterdam market. The VOC dispatched her on her maiden voyage in October 1628 under a senior captain, Ariaen Jacobszoon, and the Company's commercial supervisor François Pelsaert, who held the rank of upper-merchant and outranked the ship's master on all Company business. The third senior figure aboard was a 30-year-old Dutch apothecary named Jeronimus Cornelisz, rated as under-merchant, who had fled Amsterdam ahead of a heresy investigation into the Anabaptist prophet Torrentius and a bankruptcy. He had bought his VOC commission to get out of the Netherlands. Pelsaert and Jacobszoon did not know him. Cornelisz spent the passage cultivating a circle of disaffected young sailors, the core of what would become, before the voyage was over, a mutiny. The Disaster Pelsaert and Jacobszoon, once they had established that the ship was beyond saving, organised the transfer of as many survivors as possible to two small coral cays, Beacon Island and Traitor's Island, and to a nearby third cay they named "High Island". Most of the survivors, some 250 people, were landed on Beacon Island with what food and water could be salvaged. The drinking water supply of the islands was negligible; the party could survive perhaps ten days before thirst began to kill them. Pelsaert, Jacobszoon, a handful of officers, and about forty crew and passengers departed on 8 June 1629 in the ship's longboat for Batavia, 3,200 kilometres to the north, to seek rescue. They took with them most of the remaining water. The voyage, which Pelsaert's journal later described in exacting detail, took 33 days of open-boat sailing in what are among the worst conditions ever documented; they reached Batavia on 7 July and were rushed by the Dutch governor-general Jan Coen onto the VOC yacht Sardam with orders to return immediately to the Abrolhos. In the 90 days between Pelsaert's departure and the Sardam's arrival at the wreck on 16 September, Cornelisz took control of the stranded population. He confiscated the remaining weapons and stores. He reduced the drinking-water ration for everyone except his own inner circle. He then began, with a faction of approximately twenty men, to murder those islanders he judged unreliable, drowning them in the lagoon, killing them at close qua