Batavia

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 Voyage

She sailed from Texel on 29 October 1628 with 341 aboard: crew, soldiers, merchants, passengers, and a small number of women and children. She called at the Cape of Good Hope in April 1629 and resumed her passage for Batavia. By the afternoon of 3 June 1629 she was sailing east under the "Brouwer Route" across the Southern Indian Ocean, using the roaring forties for speed, and was expected to turn north-east on sighting the Western Australian coast at roughly 28 degrees south.

Jacobszoon had by this point developed a deep personal quarrel with Pelsaert, who was ill with fever and confined to his cabin. The two men were by accounts of the subsequent inquiry no longer speaking. Jacobszoon was drinking heavily. Pelsaert was keeping watch by proxy. Cornelisz was moving between them, consolidating his faction.

At 03:00 on the morning of 4 June 1629 the Batavia struck Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos archipelago, some 50 kilometres off the Western Australian coast, at full sail. The lookout had reported white water ahead at 02:30 and had been told by the helmsman that it was the moon on the sea. She grounded hard and fast, her mainmast coming down within the hour, her hull beginning to work open on the coral.

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 quarters, or marooning them on adjacent cays without water. Over sixty days he and his men murdered at least 115 men, women, and children, including almost all the remaining soldiers and most of the women and older children.

The Legacy

The Sardam arrived on 16 September 1629 to find Beacon Island in open violence and the rest of the archipelago fortified against Cornelisz by a counter-faction of twenty soldiers under the ship's corporal Wiebbe Hayes, who had resisted the mutiny from West Wallabi Island. Pelsaert and Hayes together arrested Cornelisz and his closest accomplices within a day. Pelsaert conducted a military tribunal on Seal Island between 28 September and 2 October 1629, hearing sworn testimony from survivors and conducting the most detailed homicide investigation of the seventeenth century.

Cornelisz and six of his principal lieutenants had their hands cut off and were hanged on Seal Island on 2 October 1629. Five more accomplices were hanged on arrival at Batavia. Two younger conspirators, Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom de Bye, were sentenced to marooning on the Western Australian mainland, becoming the first two Europeans known to have lived ashore in Australia. Their fate is unknown; no subsequent sighting has been established.

The wreck was rediscovered in 1963 by Dave Johnson and Hugh Edwards on Morning Reef. Australian marine archaeologists recovered a large portion of the hull structure, anchors, cannon, stone masonry intended for the Castle of Batavia gateway, and personal possessions of the survivors, including skeletons with injury patterns matching the tribunal testimony. The recovered artefacts are preserved at the Shipwrecks Gallery of the Western Australian Museum in Fremantle.

The Batavia case is one of the best-documented atrocities of the early modern period and one of the few seventeenth-century shipwreck events for which the victims' identities, causes of death, and perpetrators' testimony are all recorded to modern archaeological standards. Mike Dash's 2002 Batavia's Graveyard and Peter FitzSimons's 2011 Batavia have kept the story in contemporary circulation. The 340-year-old skeletons of her dead remain under excavation. She is both a wreck and a crime scene that the sea has gradually released.