Merchants of menace launch VOC ship mutiny The way we were

IN OCTOBER 1628, eight VOC ships left Texel in the Netherlands bound for Batavia in Java (now Jakarta in Indonesia), but the pride of the fleet, a new 600-ton East-Indiaman named Batavia, never arrived. It took the Batavia 24 weeks to reach the customary stopover at Table Bay. Most VOC skippers spent three weeks bartering for livestock, filling water barrels and repairing their ships, but Adriaen Jakobsz left after a week, presumably under orders from the man in command, senior merchant Francesco Pelsaert.

Pelsaert is thought to have left dispatches in a pouch under a convenient “post office” stone. However, a subsequent inquiry revealed that tension between the merchant and the unruly hard-drinking skipper rose to boiling during the ship’s maiden voyage.

The Batavia carried 316 passengers and crew, including Jeronimus Cornelisz (under-merchant), Lucretia van der Mijlen (a young woman travelling to join her husband in Batavia, who was befriended by Pelsaert) and Zwaantje Hendrix (her maid). When Lucretia resisted the skipper’s sexual advances, he transferred his attentions to Zwaantje, who was more accommodating.

Meanwhile, Pelsaert stoked the fires of discord by publicly reprimanding Jakobsz for excessive drinking. The skipper shared his grievances with Cornelisz, a sadist with an antisocial personality disorder, who encouraged him to consider mutiny.

Together, they hatched a plan to detach the ship from the fleet, kill the VOC soldiers, throw the hated senior merchant overboard and steal the ship’s bullion. They intended to prowl the oceans as buccaneers, operating from a hideaway in the Indies in imitation of the notorious pirates of the Caribbean.

The Batavia drifted away from the other ships while following the prescribed “Brouwer’s Route” to Java. Instead of using the old Portuguese sailing directions which hugged the east coast of Africa before branching off towards India, the Dutch headed south after leaving the Cape, then sailed east for 1 000 Dutch sea miles, and turned north in search of the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java.

This shorter, quicker passage had many advantages, but mariners had difficulty deciding when to swing north because they were unable to calculate longitude accurately.

The conspirators planned to launch their mutiny by staging an assault on Lucretia van der Mijlen with the intention of forcing Pelsaert to take high-handed action that would stoke resentment among the crew. The drama was unresolved when the ship hit Morning Reef, 60km off the coast of Western Australia, on June 4, 1629 and began to break up, drowning 40.

The survivors struggled ashore on Beacon Island, part of the Wallabi group of Houtman Abrolhos Islands containing 122 barren islets and coral reefs.

Next week: Terror on the islands