July 22, 2023 • 38 mins
This 2014 episode - originally a two-parter - covers a perfect storm of nautical carnage: There's a shipwreck, a mutiny and a massacre.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Some of the research that we talked about
on on Earth related to the Dutch East India Company
ship Batavia. We did a two part podcast on the Batavia,
which included a mutiny, a shipwreck, and a massacre, as
well as a lot of other violence, including sexual assault
and rape. Those episodes came out in April of twenty fourteen.
(00:25):
So one of the things that's wild about this two
partner is if we were recording it today, based on
the outline from twenty fourteen, it would have been one part.
Like in terms of the word count, the outline is
meaningfully shorter than a typical single, one part episode for
me today, so we are running both parts of this
as one episode today. That means if you get to
(00:47):
something later on in the episode that says in part
one that was part of today's episode. Also, if we
were recording this episode today rather than almost a decade ago,
there would be less casual use of words like crazy
or insane. So, keeping all of that in mind and
recognizing that this episode has some very rough elements to it,
(01:11):
we hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly front.
So we have our second shipwreck story in as many weeks,
(01:36):
and the Batavia was not just a shipwreck. It's a
shipwreck and a mutiny and also a massacre. So this
perfect storm of nautical carnage. Yeah, there's a lot going on. Yeah,
as you were researching, Tracy would keep sending these instant
messages of like this is crazy because everything knew she
(01:59):
would uncover would add another layer of insanity to it. Yeah,
it just escalates and escalates. And there are a couple
of notes that we're going to just lay out in
the beginning, and the first is the names in this episode.
So the main cast of characters in the story came
from what's now the Netherlands and Belgium. And at this
point in history, the Dutch didn't generally use surnames the
(02:20):
way most of us are used to today. Instead of
established surnames that were passed down through the family and
stayed the same, people had patronymic names which came from
their father's first names. So Adrian Jakobs, who was our
ship's skipper, was Jakob's son Adrian, and his father would
(02:40):
have been Jakub somebody else's son. But then our ship's
upper merchant, Francisco Pelser. He was from Antwerp, and he
had a more typical family surname that we would expect
to see today, which was Pelser. So for the sake
of consistency, we're just gonna call everybody the equivalent of
what they're saying their name was, because it gets a
(03:01):
little confusing. Yeah. The other note is that you may notice,
as you are listening to this episode and the next one,
because the story is so big, it's in two parts,
the number of passengers and crew on the boat. These
numbers don't seem to quite add up all the time,
and this is because as the voyage went on, people
were born, other people died. Sometimes crew just went a wall.
(03:25):
When the ship would stop to take on supplies somewhere,
people would just decide they were done with this mess
and they would go away. Even the starting number of
people on board is not totally clear because there were
some last minute no shows and people who just never
reported for duty. So if you're if you're doing the
math on this episode and you kind of go with
these numbers. These don't these don't sink. That is why.
(03:50):
So today's episode is going to be about the first
part of the voyage, the shipwreck, and the rescue mission
that happened afterward, and then our next episode will be
about sort of happened to the survivors while their bosses
were away trying to get help. Ready, yeah, okay, so
this whole story starts with the Dutch East India Company
(04:12):
or in Dutch the verenicda Ostendisa Company. I practiced that
I probably still did not say it perfectly, So we're
just going to call them the VOC, which is what
that boils down to. So the VOC was dominating trade
in the East Indies, which is basically Indonesia and the
surrounding islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It became
(04:34):
this political and commercial powerhouse, and it sent ships from
the Netherlands to Asia to buy things like spices and
silk and then to return to Europe to sell them.
And the VOC was headquartered in Batavia, which is what's
now Jakarta in Indonesia. One of the VOC's ships, which
was also called the Batavia, left tessel Holland on its
maiden voyage to Batavia in October of sixteen twenty eight,
(04:56):
and its cargo included an enormous amount of silver and jewel.
The ship also carried materials for a gatehouse which was
to be built at VOC headquarters. In command of the
Batavia was the upper Merchant, also called the Supercargo, and
this was a man named Francisco Pelsert, and he was
one of the most experienced merchants in the Dutch East
(05:17):
India Company's fleet. He was also very fond of women
in money, and at one point, sort of extraneous to
this story, set himself up as a money lender, using
company funds while charging people extremely steep interest. This was
something that was discovered after the end of the Batavia's story,
but it kind of clues you in to a little
(05:39):
about this man's character. Willing to misappropriate company funds, that's
no problem right Next in command was the ship's skipper,
Adrian Jacobs, who was a sea captain with more than
twenty years of experience, and he was in a rather
awkward leadership position because in any other nautical context he
would be the one ultimately in char charge. However, on
(06:01):
a VOC ship, he reported up to the upper merchant
who was a merchant and not a seaman. This is
pretty much how things worked in most of the big
trading companies. You would have somebody who was ultimately in charge,
whose job was to safeguard the financial interests of the company.
Everyone ultimately reported to this person, even though this person
(06:22):
did not necessarily know how to sail a ship. So
that led to some headbutting in many contexts, not just
this one. I imagine we have several listeners at the
moment thinking that this is very similar to some corporate cultures. Yeah,
not ours, I'm happy to report, but it does happen.
(06:43):
I mean, I've certainly been in companies for the person
in charge it doesn't really know how anything works. Yeah.
I tempt one time for a company where there was
somebody who was in charge of it who had a
history degree and they had Yeah, he'd been hired because
he was a people manager, but the people who were
working in it found that very frustrating. Yep, Jacobs and
Pelser had actually sailed together before, and they had never
(07:03):
really gotten along, and their headbutting only got worse after
this incident. On a voyage where Pelser was traveling as
a guest, Jacobs had gotten extremely drunk and insulted him
in a very loud way, and that ship's upper merchant
had given Jacobs a really public reprimand, and Jacobs always
blamed Pelser for having gotten him dressed down in front
(07:25):
of everybody. Always a good relationship to start along voyage with.
Always good to blame other people for your own behavior.
Third in command was the under merchant, Uronymous Cornellis, who
had very little experience at sea. And we'll talk a
little bit more about his backstory as we go on,
because it becomes really really relevant later on in the tale. Yeah,
(07:48):
his story is really relevant to part two, So it's
in part two of the episode. Gotcha. So, also on
board the Batavia were about three hundred and forty other people,
and about two thirds of them were officers and crew
of the ship. There are also about one hundred soldiers
along with some civilians seeking passage to the Indies, and
some of these were women and children. These are mostly
(08:08):
families of Voce employees or other people who were going
to join their family in the Indies. And before we
talk about the voyage itself, shall we take a moment
and talk about a word from our sponsor Capital Idea.
(08:31):
The Batavia left Teeshsel in a convoy of seven ships,
but at the very start of the voyage they went
through a huge storm in the North Sea and most
of the ships lost sight of each other. Only three
of them managed to find one another again. Once the
weather had improved, the Batavia, Asindeft and the Burin sailed
on together towards South Africa. These three ships made really
(08:53):
good time. They got to the Cape of Good Hope
an entire month ahead of schedule. But on board the Batavia,
the under merchant Cornelis and the ship or Yakubs started
to conspire to commit mutiny. They also drew the ship's
high Bosin into their plot as well, and so as
the ship departed from South Africa, in order to further
(09:17):
their plan of mutiny, Jacobs deliberately steered the ship away
from the two remaining ones in the convoy, and so
the Batavia wounded up going on the rest of its
journey alone. And then, during the last stretch of the
Batavia's route northwards through the Indian Ocean, upper merchant Pelsert
became seriously ill and had to be confined to his
cabin under the care of the surgeon Franz Jan's. At
(09:40):
this point, Jacobs and Cornellis put their plotting on hold.
They were kind of enjoying Pelser's absence and binding their
time and waiting to see if he would just die
and leave the ship in their hands. Yes, they weren't
sort of an interesting attitude to have about it. They
weren't going to have to put the effort into staging
a mutiny if the you know, the Upper Merchant was
just going to die. Take some work. Yeah, So sadly
(10:04):
thwarting their plans. Eventually, Pelser recovered, and when it became
clear that he was going to live, Yacubs and Cornellis
realized that they had wasted some time and getting their
whole mutiny plan off the ground. They hadn't recruited enough
men to physically take over the ship from the people
who would be loyal to the Upper Merchant, so they
decided to have another ploy. They conspired to have a
(10:29):
wealthy female passenger named Lucretia Yans or you also see
her name as Lucretia Vandermillion, which was her husband's last name.
They conspired to have her sexually assaulted by masked members
of the crew, and Jans was traveling to Batavia to
join her husband, and her station was high enough that
she had one of the best cabins on the ship
(10:51):
and her own maid, And by attacking someone so prominent,
they hoped to lure Pelser into punishing those responsible, which
they hoped would trigger a revolt among the rest of
the Skipper's team. It seemed like a sure thing after
Yan said she recognized the voice of one of her
attackers and it was the high Bozen. What a horrible plan.
It was not a good plan in every possible respect.
(11:14):
It was not good to plan to do that in
the first place, and also on top of that being
a terrible thing to do. It didn't work. Pelser investigated
the incident. You know, he accepted her assessment of who
had attacked her. He didn't punish anybody. Part of this
is because he was still pretty sick, even though he
(11:35):
was now recovering, and he also was starting to suspect
that maybe there was something bigger going on and that
he should not get involved in it quite yet until
he had a better sense of exactly what was happening. Yeah,
so he was kind of keeping his cards close to
his vest, so to speak. Yeah, he didn't want to.
I didn't want to incite the riot that he thought
might becoming now. But before they could come up with
(11:58):
some other ploy to bring the up merchant down, the
mutineer's plan was spectacularly derailed because the ship was wrecked
yes on June fourth, sixteen twenty nine, a couple of
hours before dawn. Pelsert, who at this point was still
not well, He was in his bunk but awake. He
felt a quote rough, terrible movement, the bumping of the
(12:19):
ship's rudder, and then he felt the ship strike rocks
so hard that he was knocked out of his bunk.
Because they were not really anticipating that they were suddenly
going to run into land, they were traveling at full
speed when they struck this reef, and huge waves and
a bit really heavy wind continued to just pound on
(12:40):
the ship and push it harder and harder against the rock.
Pelser ran on deck to see that there were breakers
all around them, and according to his journal, he said
to Yakub's skipper, what have you done that, through your
reckless carelessness, you have run this noose around our necks.
The crew really scrambled to try to lighten the ship.
They threw cannons overboard, they felled the masts, and they
(13:02):
started sounding the depths to try to find a way
that they might be able to work the ship back
into deeper water. But it was no use. The ship
was stuck, and on top of that, they really didn't
know where they were. This part of the sea was
virtually uncharted by Europeans at this point, And on top
of all that, when they felled the main mast of
the ship, it came down in a different direction than
(13:22):
they were expecting, and it crushed everything in its path
all the way down. So their effort to lighten the
ship just broke it worse. It was only after some
discussion that Pelser and Yakubs decided they must be in
the Houtman of Brolos Islands, which is a long chain
of islands about forty kilometers off the western coast of Australia.
Their name comes from Portuguese abro Ojos, or open eyes,
(13:44):
and it got its name after the Dutch East India
company vessel Doordrecht stumbled upon them about ten years earlier,
and the crew believed that they were in open ocean,
and then suddenly reef and islands were everywhere. And these
islands are as, you can imagine, treacherous for ships. More
than sixty vessels are known to have been lost among them,
And at this point in history, Europeans had not explored
(14:06):
or charted all of this, and they're so far off
the coast that they were likely completely unexplored by Australia's
Aboriginal peoples as well. So kind of just a big
mystery danger sitting out there in the ocean. Yeah, that's
why they got that name about keeping your eyes open. Yeah,
there's another collection of islands off the coast of South
America with the same name for the same reason, like
(14:27):
people venturing into them believing they were in totally open
ocean and then whoa, not so much islands everywhere. So
after the wreck, about one hundred and eighty people were
removed from the ship and taken away in boats. Was
included about thirty women and children, and about seventy men
stayed on board, including under merchant Cornellis. Most of the
(14:48):
survivors made their way to an island which was later
named Beacon Island, while the commander of the captain and
about forty other men went to an island that was
nearer the shipwreck, and that later came to be known
as Trader's Island. With the party split up this way,
the majority of the survivors at this point, very panicked
and in poor health from the length of their journey,
(15:08):
were on an island by themselves, and no one was
really in charge. Yeah, you had basically civilians and the
rank and file crew off on an island by themselves,
with no leadership, no leadership, and on top of that,
no supplies. So the men who stayed on board the Batavia,
who were overall the seediest and most disreputable of everyone
(15:31):
on board, largely amused themselves by drinking, plundering the ship's stores,
looting things for themselves, and attacking anybody who came to
the ship to try to salvage supplies from it. A
delightful bunch. The crew did manage to get some provisions
off the ship, but it was not enough to sustain
them for very long, and these islands were basically barren.
(15:55):
There were some birds, there were some fish, and there
were some sea lions that they could eat. Almost nothing
in the way of water, shelter, so it was more
like they were stuck on a big chunk of coral
and rock just sticking out of the ocean. And because
this larger group of survivors just became more and more
desperate as time went on, the officers started to balk
at the idea of trying to get supplies from the
(16:17):
ship to the island where most of the survivors were.
It started to become really risky, like there was a
genuine risk that panicked survivors were going to mob the
boat and capsize it and possibly destroy the cargo or
the boat itself or kill the crew. So after a
while it was sort of like we're just we're just
not going to mess with them on that island because
(16:39):
we're scared of them. This is see, this keeps getting worse.
I know, it's awful. There are so many just callous
and horrible moves made along the way that it's it's
hard to Yeah, you don't there's not really a lot
of people to root for. The officers debated at this
point what to do, because saying where they were seemed
(17:00):
completely hopeless. Once the storms that had driven them into
the islands cleared, they didn't have a source of fresh
water unless it started raining again and they would need
just enough to provide water without threatening their lives, or
an equally unlikely scenario, if the hull of the ship
broke apart and the current happened to carry all of
the ship's stores directly to the islands, they might get
(17:22):
some relief. So what they did was they decided to
start scouting the islands and the mainland for sources of water.
So Pelsert, most of the officers, and some crew and passengers,
including two women and a baby, went searching for water.
This wasn't really Pelsert's idea. He was sort of feeling
like at this point it was his job to stay
with the survivors and to die with them if that
(17:44):
was what happened. His job as upper merchant also involved
the responsibility for making sure the cargo stayed safe, and
so he was really reluctant to leave it behind, like
his priority was definitely more on the cargo than the
people in terms of his job description. But some of
the sailors were pretty set on trying to save themselves
at whatever cost, and so ultimately he went with them
(18:07):
in the ship's longboat forty eight total people went to
look for water while the rest stayed behind. Pretty much
the only senior officer that was not among the scouting
party was Uronymous Cornelis Back aboard the Batavia, their four
day search for water was fruitless, and finally Pelser decided
that the only possible way that they were going to
(18:28):
get out of this mess was to go to Batavia
for help. So they took their longboat, which was about
thirty feet long, and they crossed nine hundred nautical miles
of the open Indian Ocean. Imagine Australia on a map,
so the Houtman Abroljos Islands are about halfway down the
(18:50):
straightish part of the western coast of Australia. Batavia is
in Indonesia, and in between them is just this long
expanse of the Indian Ocean, and that is what they
were crossing. Yes, and a long boat, and a longboat
that had like ten pairs of oars. I mean there
are some shipwreck and mutiny survival stories that are that
(19:11):
involve longer ocean crossings and remarkably small craft in this,
but still the fact that there were just these all
these people packed in the boat, including two women and
a baby is astounding to me. Yeah. Uh So, to
cuttle this part of the long story short, they made it.
It took them thirty three days to get there. When
(19:32):
they did get there, after thirty three days across the
ocean open, they had less than two pints of fresh
water left. And once they got to Batavia, Pelser charged
the ship's high bowson for outrageous behavior before the wreck,
because remember he was implicated in the sexual assault of
a passenger and he was executed and skipper Yakubs was
arrested for negligence in causing the wreck. Pelser gathered supplies
(19:55):
and bordered the yachts Artem and they headed back to
find the survivors. It took the sixty three days to
find them again, so basically twice as long, just months
and months of misery. Yeah. So a whole lot happened
on the island in this three month period between when
Pelser left and when he got back with help, and
(20:15):
probably survivors didn't even know they were heading out across
the Indian Ocean to begin with. They had no idea,
so they were just there three months not knowing what
was going on, believing they had been abandoned, and that
is the story that we were going to talk about
in the next episode because as I discovered as I
was researching this crazy story. But they get long and involved,
(20:38):
they do when you're taking a long boat across the
Indian Ocean and when there is a shipwreck and a
mutiny and a massacre. Yeah, so we're going to continue
the mutiny and massacre part of this story in our
next episode. So nobody on the islands, as we talked
(21:01):
about at the end of the last episode, knew that
Pelser had decided to go to Batavia for help. They
had no way of finding out about his progress. They
just knew that they hadn't seen anything of him or
the skipper for days. But about a week after the
search party left in their longboat, the survivors finally got
an authority figure. The Batavia finally broke apart, forcing Cornellis
(21:23):
to join the survivors that were on these islands. So,
just for context, about forty people died when the Batavia
broke apart. The survivors clung to rafts that they had
made on board as it became clear that the time
of the ship was drying to a close. Cornellis in
particular survived by climbing the bowsprit at the four of
(21:44):
the ship and then clinging to it when it broke
off and using it to float to land. And for
the backstory we promised on him earlier, Cornellis was an educated,
literate man from an affluent family. He had trained and
apprenticed as an apothecary, and he started his own apothecary practice.
He had been married and had a child, but the
(22:04):
baby unfortunately died in its infancy. And first a deranged
and incompetent midwife had handled the delivery and she failed
to deliver part of the placenta, so his wife got
a life threatening infection as a result, and then they
had to hire a wet nurse while she recovered, and
the wet nurse unfortunately gave the baby syphilis. It was
just the worst possible series of events for a birth.
(22:27):
It's also kind of unclear exactly how he was such
a poor judge of character to have hired both an
incompetent midwife and, as we are about to tell you,
a clearly unwell wet nurse for the baby. So in
spite of Cornellis getting sworn statements from basically everybody attesting
to the fact that he was completely clean and the
(22:49):
wet nurse was an abominable character and obviously poor health.
Everyone still assumed that the baby had gotten syphilis from
his mother, and this was a huge stigma and a
very tear arrible reflection on Cornellis and his family and
his practice. Like, obviously, if the baby had gotten syphilis,
it had gotten syphilts from his mother, and that meant
that his mother or his father, somebody had been unfaithful
(23:11):
in this situation, Like there was a whole boatload of
social expectation and rules for behavior. Yeah, and that's violated,
And that meant that as an apothecary, there was sickness
introduced into that as well. Yeah, So his business seriously
suffered as a result, and it had already been on
shaky footing even before this scandal happened. All of this
(23:34):
combined with demands for reparation from a merchant who had
loaned Cornellis money to put him completely under and otherwise
he'd not really have had any reason to code, to see,
and he had also developed sort of a strange personal,
religious and moral code. It was a hodgepodge of influences
from throughout his life. It combined Anabaptist and Mennonite teachings
(23:56):
with the blasphemous and heretical philosophies of a Dutch named
Johannes Simons Vanderbeek who also was known as Tarentius, and
somewhere along the line he picked up ideas from Epicurus
as well, along with the Antinomian idea that you only
need faith to attain salvation. So reason number two that
Cornellus had taken to a life at sea. Tarantius wound
(24:19):
up on trial for his heretical beliefs and other stuff,
and Cornellis realized that he was extremely lucky not to
have been named in the proceedings, which would have resulted
in him being prosecuted as well. So all of this
together made it seem really prudent that he get as
far away as possible. I'm again lack of judgment. Maybe
(24:41):
on top of prompting him to abandon his wife and
his home. These philosophical and religious influences led Cornellis to
hold some troubling beliefs of his own. He deeply believed
that every action that he personally undertook was divinely inspired,
and this also meant that nothing he could do, no
matter what it was, could be considered sinful or evil
(25:02):
because it had all been inspired by God. So when
the Batavia broke up, this became the highest ranking man
on the islands. The people who were left on the
islands really felt like Pelser had abandoned them when they
really really needed him, and so Cornelis was really, without
(25:23):
a whole lot of effort, able to recruit about forty
men to continue in his original plan to commit mutiny,
even though the ship they were going to originally use
for this plan was now destroyed. Instead, what he and
his mutineers planned to do was to commandeer whatever ship
came to their rescue and then to use it to
become pirates. It's hard not to giggle. I feel like
(25:46):
this is a plan that like a ten year old
put together. The plans of this story are not good plans,
but the results are horribly tragic. Yeah. To make sure
he would face no opposition, he started systematically removing people
who might not be down with his mutiny plan from
the island. This also gave him fewer mouths to feed,
even though the current really had delivered a bunch of
(26:07):
supplies from the Batavia to the islands. It still wasn't
enough to sustain everyone there, and everybody he got rid
of that was not on his team, so to speak,
would make it all last a little bit longer. Yeah,
everybody had sort of felt like it was a huge
long shot to think that the Batavia would break apart
and the current would bring supplies to them. That did
(26:27):
actually happen. The one thing that worked out. Yeah, And
it sounds like a lot of supplies because it was
like hundreds of barrels of things, but that it was
not when you looked at how many mouths there were
to feed, that did not actually equate many days of
sustenance for anybody. So Cornelis started sending people off to
(26:47):
the other nearby islands, and he would tell them that
there was water there, or he would send them there
to search for water or some other ploy. And he
basically sent them off to these islands and didn't expect
them to survive. He was expecting them to die of
hunger and thirst. A horrible man. I'm edaitorializing, but I
don't know how you can't come to that conclusion at
(27:09):
that point, he also started sending people out in boats,
presumably as scouts, but he'd also put men that were
loyal to him on those boats and they would throw
his targets overboard and leave them to drown. Really systematic. Yeah.
He also straight up had his cronies murder people who
were sick or hurt, and they left most of the
(27:31):
women alive when so that he and his crew could
use them for sexual purposes. He also claimed Lucretia Yn's
as his own sexual toy. So on top of all
these murders, there were many many rapes happening on the island.
When he saw survivors on one island continuing to wander
around the shore when he thought they should be dead
(27:52):
and that his little I'll just get rid of them
this way plan had not worked out, he sent men
in boats to kill them as well. So as a
result of all of this, Beacon Island later came to
be known as Batavia's Graveyard. This strategy of removing threats
from the island became Cornellis's downfall. He sent a group
of soldiers led by Wibby Hayes to two large islands
(28:15):
where they which they were calling the High Islands. Pelser
and company had already searched these islands and reported that
they had no water, but that was not widespread knowledge.
Cornellis confiscated the soldier's weapons and sent them there, assuming
that they would just die of thirst. Yeah. He was like,
you guys go search these big islands to water over there,
you guys go find it. Yeah. Wibby Hayes, on the
(28:39):
other hand, was a good leader, and you know his
soldiers under his direction were very industrious. They built a shelter.
They conducted this methodical search for water. They would like
they would nourish themselves from water that had been collected
in little pits in the rock. As they systematically conducted
this widespread search, they eventually found two cisterns. On top
(29:02):
of that, the two islands, which they were right next
to each other, they could get between them. They were
later named East and West Wallaby Island. They were home
to wallabies and lots of birds, which gave them a
pretty ample supply of food. Apparently, the fishing near these
islands was also pretty awesome, so they were also In
addition to the fact that they found water, they found food.
(29:25):
They made a shelter and they started making simple weapons
with which to defend themselves. And when Hayes' men found
the cisterns, they sent up a smoke signal. This was
their pre arranged method of letting Cornellis know that there
was water. And while water was awesome and all, Cornellis
immediately saw the soldiers, their water supply, their vantage point,
(29:48):
and their smoke signals as a threat. How dare you
be more industrious and successful than me? Well, so, how
dare you now have things to eat and water to
drink and weapons to defend yourself with? Because they were industrious,
and a little shelter that they built out of rocks. Ye.
So first he tried to persuade them to join his mutineers,
(30:09):
and they refused, after which a big fight followed, and
so Hayes and his men drove Cornellis and his men off.
So after that, Cornellis sent an attack party to try
to kill them. And by this point hayes men, who
had named themselves the Defenders, had really organized themselves. They
had tried to rescue other survivors. They fought back, and
(30:32):
after a really bloody battle, the soldiers executed five of
Cornellis's men and they captured Cornellis himself and held him
prisoner as they continued to wait for rescue. Cornelis's cronies,
who had not been part of this failed overthrow of
Webby Hayes, were smart enough to stay away from the
Wallaby Islands. From that point they recognized that they were
(30:54):
not going to win against the people. They were outmatched.
Yeah by perhaps the man who should have in charge
from the beginning beginning. That is my editorializing of this situation.
So finally, after a month spent getting back to Australia
from Indonesia, and then another month spent in a frustrating
(31:17):
search to try to figure out where they had left
that shipwreck, Pelser and his yacht wound up back at
Batavia's graveyard. It sounds maybe a little ridiculous that they
got back to Australia and they could not find the shipwreck,
but at this point the ship had been destroyed and
the area was not charted in the first place, because
they didn't know where they were when they wrecked to
(31:37):
begin with. So yeah, so he wound up back in
the area. He disembarked on an island that was about
a mile away from the Wallaby Islands, and they had
water and wine and bread for the survivors with them.
Soon Webby Hayes and three other men rode up and
told them to get back aboard the yacht because there
were two parties of Cornellis's men on the loose and
(32:00):
they meant to commandeer the yacht, and they did in
fact try to do that. The remaining mutineers found the yacht,
they tried to board it, but Pelsert and the screw,
having now advanced knowledge of what was going on, captured them,
and while questioning his newfound prisoners, Pelser learned that Jacobs
and cornellis original plan to mutiny had started way way
(32:21):
back before the ship was even shipwrecked in the first place.
After Hayes handed Cornellis over, Pelser questioned him, then went
to round up the rest of his co conspirators, and
while a few seem to have evaded capture, most surrendered
on the spot. Pelser interrogated all of the accomplices and
found out that their crimes included, in addition to mutiny
(32:42):
and murder, rape, looting, and treason, their trials, which were
really torture and interrogation and their executions were carried out
on Seal's Island. All of the primary mutineers had their
right hands cut off, Cornellis had both of his hands
cut off, and then all of them were hanged on
October second of sixteen twenty nine, roughly a year after
(33:03):
the Batavia set sail from Holland, and those hanged on
Seal's Island were left dangling from the gallows. Pelsert also
marooned two of the youngest members of the crew in Australia.
The rest of them were keeled, hauled and dropped from
yard arms and flogged on the way back to Batavia,
where they were ultimately executed. Before leaving the islands, Pelsert
(33:24):
led a pretty successful salvage mission, loading up the Sardam
with as much as they could find before returning to Batavia,
and they arrived Areund December fifth of sixteen twenty nine.
Even though he had done his ultimate job of protecting
the cargo, eventually, after a fashion, his career never really
recovered from this whole incident, and he died not long after,
(33:46):
probably of the same illness that had brought him down
on board, and it was after he died that they
discovered his illicit money lending business, which he was funding
with company money. Yeah, so again, it's hard to root
for many people in the story. Even though he seems
kind of stand up in many ways he compared to
the other people on board, there were still some there
(34:09):
were issues, And then the voc didn't actually make a
lot of money, even though he did salvage a lot
of the stuff, because the person they had been planning
to sell all of this stuff too. By the time
it was all said and done was no longer in power,
and the person who had taken his place did not
really care about the stuff that had been brought over.
It was a failure in a lot of ways. The
(34:31):
last living mutineers who had come all the way back
to Batavia were eventually executed there, and in the end,
out of the three hundred and sixteen people who were
aboard the Batavia when it wrecked, only about one hundred
and sixteen survived. Webbie Hayes was commissioned as an officer
on arrival in Batavia, and all his soldiers were promoted
from privates to cadets. Lucretia Yans, who at one point
(34:55):
during the trials was accused by her rapists of having
tempted them into it, arrived in Batavia to learn that
her husband had been dead for at least five months.
We don't really know whether Cornellis's wife ever learned of
his treacherream. Her story sort of fades away after a
prolonged and public back and forth with the syphilitic wet
nurse that they had hired. So Lobster fishermen found the
(35:19):
Batavia's wreckage in nineteen sixty three and part of the
hull was raised from the ocean floor and it's now
displayed in the Western Australian Maritime Museum, and there are
also other artifacts from the wreck that are on displayed
there and in other museums. There has also been an
extensive study of bodies from Batavia's graveyard and surrounding islands.
It's basically super horrifying. Yeah, lots of evidence of how
(35:43):
people were brutally bludgeoned to death and had multiple broken
bones and skull fractures, and it's pretty terrible. In a
weird way. The Batavia and its shipwreck wound up being
the source of a whole lot of firsts, slash other
notable historical things like it was the first Dutch ship
(36:05):
lost off the coast of Australia. Webby Hayes's shelters were
the first European structures on the continent of Australia, and
the ruins of those shelters still stand today. The two
marooned Mutineers were the first European residents of Australia, and
the Batavia is the only VOC ship to have been
archaeologically raised and conserved. And this whole incident also inspired
(36:27):
the VOC to methodically map the coastline of US Australia
so that perhaps such a disaster would never happen again. Yeah,
that'll make you not want to get on a boat.
It's that the whole story has so many layers of
just awful star awfulness that keeps getting worse and more awful.
(36:50):
I think this is one I don't remember who. I
think this is one that someone suggested on Twitter and
I was kind of like, sound good, and then I
took one look at it and went, wait, this is
more than just a mutiny. There's a whole lot more
than mutiny going on here. Yeah. It's kind of like
a portrait of like the worst of humanity in many ways. Yeah,
(37:14):
that troubling. Yeah, I like Webby Hayes. He kind of
fades away from history. We don't really know what happened
to him. It's kind of assumed that perhaps he died
of some sort of tropical illness. We just don't have
a lot of historical record on him after the end
of the Batavia story. But yeah, while everybody else was
(37:35):
having some Lord of Flies action, he was keeping things
in order civil as ducks were in a row. Thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over
the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
(37:57):
Our current email address is hissed podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at missed Inhistory,
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuffy Missed in History Class is a production
(38:20):
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Some of the research that we talked about
on on Earth related to the Dutch East India Company
ship Batavia. We did a two part podcast on the Batavia,
which included a mutiny, a shipwreck, and a massacre, as
well as a lot of other violence, including sexual assault
and rape. Those episodes came out in April of twenty fourteen.
(00:25):
So one of the things that's wild about this two
partner is if we were recording it today, based on
the outline from twenty fourteen, it would have been one part.
Like in terms of the word count, the outline is
meaningfully shorter than a typical single, one part episode for
me today, so we are running both parts of this
as one episode today. That means if you get to
(00:47):
something later on in the episode that says in part
one that was part of today's episode. Also, if we
were recording this episode today rather than almost a decade ago,
there would be less casual use of words like crazy
or insane. So, keeping all of that in mind and
recognizing that this episode has some very rough elements to it,
(01:11):
we hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly front.
So we have our second shipwreck story in as many weeks,
(01:36):
and the Batavia was not just a shipwreck. It's a
shipwreck and a mutiny and also a massacre. So this
perfect storm of nautical carnage. Yeah, there's a lot going on. Yeah,
as you were researching, Tracy would keep sending these instant
messages of like this is crazy because everything knew she
(01:59):
would uncover would add another layer of insanity to it. Yeah,
it just escalates and escalates. And there are a couple
of notes that we're going to just lay out in
the beginning, and the first is the names in this episode.
So the main cast of characters in the story came
from what's now the Netherlands and Belgium. And at this
point in history, the Dutch didn't generally use surnames the
(02:20):
way most of us are used to today. Instead of
established surnames that were passed down through the family and
stayed the same, people had patronymic names which came from
their father's first names. So Adrian Jakobs, who was our
ship's skipper, was Jakob's son Adrian, and his father would
(02:40):
have been Jakub somebody else's son. But then our ship's
upper merchant, Francisco Pelser. He was from Antwerp, and he
had a more typical family surname that we would expect
to see today, which was Pelser. So for the sake
of consistency, we're just gonna call everybody the equivalent of
what they're saying their name was, because it gets a
(03:01):
little confusing. Yeah. The other note is that you may notice,
as you are listening to this episode and the next one,
because the story is so big, it's in two parts,
the number of passengers and crew on the boat. These
numbers don't seem to quite add up all the time,
and this is because as the voyage went on, people
were born, other people died. Sometimes crew just went a wall.
(03:25):
When the ship would stop to take on supplies somewhere,
people would just decide they were done with this mess
and they would go away. Even the starting number of
people on board is not totally clear because there were
some last minute no shows and people who just never
reported for duty. So if you're if you're doing the
math on this episode and you kind of go with
these numbers. These don't these don't sink. That is why.
(03:50):
So today's episode is going to be about the first
part of the voyage, the shipwreck, and the rescue mission
that happened afterward, and then our next episode will be
about sort of happened to the survivors while their bosses
were away trying to get help. Ready, yeah, okay, so
this whole story starts with the Dutch East India Company
(04:12):
or in Dutch the verenicda Ostendisa Company. I practiced that
I probably still did not say it perfectly, So we're
just going to call them the VOC, which is what
that boils down to. So the VOC was dominating trade
in the East Indies, which is basically Indonesia and the
surrounding islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It became
(04:34):
this political and commercial powerhouse, and it sent ships from
the Netherlands to Asia to buy things like spices and
silk and then to return to Europe to sell them.
And the VOC was headquartered in Batavia, which is what's
now Jakarta in Indonesia. One of the VOC's ships, which
was also called the Batavia, left tessel Holland on its
maiden voyage to Batavia in October of sixteen twenty eight,
(04:56):
and its cargo included an enormous amount of silver and jewel.
The ship also carried materials for a gatehouse which was
to be built at VOC headquarters. In command of the
Batavia was the upper Merchant, also called the Supercargo, and
this was a man named Francisco Pelsert, and he was
one of the most experienced merchants in the Dutch East
(05:17):
India Company's fleet. He was also very fond of women
in money, and at one point, sort of extraneous to
this story, set himself up as a money lender, using
company funds while charging people extremely steep interest. This was
something that was discovered after the end of the Batavia's story,
but it kind of clues you in to a little
(05:39):
about this man's character. Willing to misappropriate company funds, that's
no problem right Next in command was the ship's skipper,
Adrian Jacobs, who was a sea captain with more than
twenty years of experience, and he was in a rather
awkward leadership position because in any other nautical context he
would be the one ultimately in char charge. However, on
(06:01):
a VOC ship, he reported up to the upper merchant
who was a merchant and not a seaman. This is
pretty much how things worked in most of the big
trading companies. You would have somebody who was ultimately in charge,
whose job was to safeguard the financial interests of the company.
Everyone ultimately reported to this person, even though this person
(06:22):
did not necessarily know how to sail a ship. So
that led to some headbutting in many contexts, not just
this one. I imagine we have several listeners at the
moment thinking that this is very similar to some corporate cultures. Yeah,
not ours, I'm happy to report, but it does happen.
(06:43):
I mean, I've certainly been in companies for the person
in charge it doesn't really know how anything works. Yeah.
I tempt one time for a company where there was
somebody who was in charge of it who had a
history degree and they had Yeah, he'd been hired because
he was a people manager, but the people who were
working in it found that very frustrating. Yep, Jacobs and
Pelser had actually sailed together before, and they had never
(07:03):
really gotten along, and their headbutting only got worse after
this incident. On a voyage where Pelser was traveling as
a guest, Jacobs had gotten extremely drunk and insulted him
in a very loud way, and that ship's upper merchant
had given Jacobs a really public reprimand, and Jacobs always
blamed Pelser for having gotten him dressed down in front
(07:25):
of everybody. Always a good relationship to start along voyage with.
Always good to blame other people for your own behavior.
Third in command was the under merchant, Uronymous Cornellis, who
had very little experience at sea. And we'll talk a
little bit more about his backstory as we go on,
because it becomes really really relevant later on in the tale. Yeah,
(07:48):
his story is really relevant to part two, So it's
in part two of the episode. Gotcha. So, also on
board the Batavia were about three hundred and forty other people,
and about two thirds of them were officers and crew
of the ship. There are also about one hundred soldiers
along with some civilians seeking passage to the Indies, and
some of these were women and children. These are mostly
(08:08):
families of Voce employees or other people who were going
to join their family in the Indies. And before we
talk about the voyage itself, shall we take a moment
and talk about a word from our sponsor Capital Idea.
(08:31):
The Batavia left Teeshsel in a convoy of seven ships,
but at the very start of the voyage they went
through a huge storm in the North Sea and most
of the ships lost sight of each other. Only three
of them managed to find one another again. Once the
weather had improved, the Batavia, Asindeft and the Burin sailed
on together towards South Africa. These three ships made really
(08:53):
good time. They got to the Cape of Good Hope
an entire month ahead of schedule. But on board the Batavia,
the under merchant Cornelis and the ship or Yakubs started
to conspire to commit mutiny. They also drew the ship's
high Bosin into their plot as well, and so as
the ship departed from South Africa, in order to further
(09:17):
their plan of mutiny, Jacobs deliberately steered the ship away
from the two remaining ones in the convoy, and so
the Batavia wounded up going on the rest of its
journey alone. And then, during the last stretch of the
Batavia's route northwards through the Indian Ocean, upper merchant Pelsert
became seriously ill and had to be confined to his
cabin under the care of the surgeon Franz Jan's. At
(09:40):
this point, Jacobs and Cornellis put their plotting on hold.
They were kind of enjoying Pelser's absence and binding their
time and waiting to see if he would just die
and leave the ship in their hands. Yes, they weren't
sort of an interesting attitude to have about it. They
weren't going to have to put the effort into staging
a mutiny if the you know, the Upper Merchant was
just going to die. Take some work. Yeah, So sadly
(10:04):
thwarting their plans. Eventually, Pelser recovered, and when it became
clear that he was going to live, Yacubs and Cornellis
realized that they had wasted some time and getting their
whole mutiny plan off the ground. They hadn't recruited enough
men to physically take over the ship from the people
who would be loyal to the Upper Merchant, so they
decided to have another ploy. They conspired to have a
(10:29):
wealthy female passenger named Lucretia Yans or you also see
her name as Lucretia Vandermillion, which was her husband's last name.
They conspired to have her sexually assaulted by masked members
of the crew, and Jans was traveling to Batavia to
join her husband, and her station was high enough that
she had one of the best cabins on the ship
(10:51):
and her own maid, And by attacking someone so prominent,
they hoped to lure Pelser into punishing those responsible, which
they hoped would trigger a revolt among the rest of
the Skipper's team. It seemed like a sure thing after
Yan said she recognized the voice of one of her
attackers and it was the high Bozen. What a horrible plan.
It was not a good plan in every possible respect.
(11:14):
It was not good to plan to do that in
the first place, and also on top of that being
a terrible thing to do. It didn't work. Pelser investigated
the incident. You know, he accepted her assessment of who
had attacked her. He didn't punish anybody. Part of this
is because he was still pretty sick, even though he
(11:35):
was now recovering, and he also was starting to suspect
that maybe there was something bigger going on and that
he should not get involved in it quite yet until
he had a better sense of exactly what was happening. Yeah,
so he was kind of keeping his cards close to
his vest, so to speak. Yeah, he didn't want to.
I didn't want to incite the riot that he thought
might becoming now. But before they could come up with
(11:58):
some other ploy to bring the up merchant down, the
mutineer's plan was spectacularly derailed because the ship was wrecked
yes on June fourth, sixteen twenty nine, a couple of
hours before dawn. Pelsert, who at this point was still
not well, He was in his bunk but awake. He
felt a quote rough, terrible movement, the bumping of the
(12:19):
ship's rudder, and then he felt the ship strike rocks
so hard that he was knocked out of his bunk.
Because they were not really anticipating that they were suddenly
going to run into land, they were traveling at full
speed when they struck this reef, and huge waves and
a bit really heavy wind continued to just pound on
(12:40):
the ship and push it harder and harder against the rock.
Pelser ran on deck to see that there were breakers
all around them, and according to his journal, he said
to Yakub's skipper, what have you done that, through your
reckless carelessness, you have run this noose around our necks.
The crew really scrambled to try to lighten the ship.
They threw cannons overboard, they felled the masts, and they
(13:02):
started sounding the depths to try to find a way
that they might be able to work the ship back
into deeper water. But it was no use. The ship
was stuck, and on top of that, they really didn't
know where they were. This part of the sea was
virtually uncharted by Europeans at this point, And on top
of all that, when they felled the main mast of
the ship, it came down in a different direction than
(13:22):
they were expecting, and it crushed everything in its path
all the way down. So their effort to lighten the
ship just broke it worse. It was only after some
discussion that Pelser and Yakubs decided they must be in
the Houtman of Brolos Islands, which is a long chain
of islands about forty kilometers off the western coast of Australia.
Their name comes from Portuguese abro Ojos, or open eyes,
(13:44):
and it got its name after the Dutch East India
company vessel Doordrecht stumbled upon them about ten years earlier,
and the crew believed that they were in open ocean,
and then suddenly reef and islands were everywhere. And these
islands are as, you can imagine, treacherous for ships. More
than sixty vessels are known to have been lost among them,
And at this point in history, Europeans had not explored
(14:06):
or charted all of this, and they're so far off
the coast that they were likely completely unexplored by Australia's
Aboriginal peoples as well. So kind of just a big
mystery danger sitting out there in the ocean. Yeah, that's
why they got that name about keeping your eyes open. Yeah,
there's another collection of islands off the coast of South
America with the same name for the same reason, like
(14:27):
people venturing into them believing they were in totally open
ocean and then whoa, not so much islands everywhere. So
after the wreck, about one hundred and eighty people were
removed from the ship and taken away in boats. Was
included about thirty women and children, and about seventy men
stayed on board, including under merchant Cornellis. Most of the
(14:48):
survivors made their way to an island which was later
named Beacon Island, while the commander of the captain and
about forty other men went to an island that was
nearer the shipwreck, and that later came to be known
as Trader's Island. With the party split up this way,
the majority of the survivors at this point, very panicked
and in poor health from the length of their journey,
(15:08):
were on an island by themselves, and no one was
really in charge. Yeah, you had basically civilians and the
rank and file crew off on an island by themselves,
with no leadership, no leadership, and on top of that,
no supplies. So the men who stayed on board the Batavia,
who were overall the seediest and most disreputable of everyone
(15:31):
on board, largely amused themselves by drinking, plundering the ship's stores,
looting things for themselves, and attacking anybody who came to
the ship to try to salvage supplies from it. A
delightful bunch. The crew did manage to get some provisions
off the ship, but it was not enough to sustain
them for very long, and these islands were basically barren.
(15:55):
There were some birds, there were some fish, and there
were some sea lions that they could eat. Almost nothing
in the way of water, shelter, so it was more
like they were stuck on a big chunk of coral
and rock just sticking out of the ocean. And because
this larger group of survivors just became more and more
desperate as time went on, the officers started to balk
at the idea of trying to get supplies from the
(16:17):
ship to the island where most of the survivors were.
It started to become really risky, like there was a
genuine risk that panicked survivors were going to mob the
boat and capsize it and possibly destroy the cargo or
the boat itself or kill the crew. So after a
while it was sort of like we're just we're just
not going to mess with them on that island because
(16:39):
we're scared of them. This is see, this keeps getting worse.
I know, it's awful. There are so many just callous
and horrible moves made along the way that it's it's
hard to Yeah, you don't there's not really a lot
of people to root for. The officers debated at this
point what to do, because saying where they were seemed
(17:00):
completely hopeless. Once the storms that had driven them into
the islands cleared, they didn't have a source of fresh
water unless it started raining again and they would need
just enough to provide water without threatening their lives, or
an equally unlikely scenario, if the hull of the ship
broke apart and the current happened to carry all of
the ship's stores directly to the islands, they might get
(17:22):
some relief. So what they did was they decided to
start scouting the islands and the mainland for sources of water.
So Pelsert, most of the officers, and some crew and passengers,
including two women and a baby, went searching for water.
This wasn't really Pelsert's idea. He was sort of feeling
like at this point it was his job to stay
with the survivors and to die with them if that
(17:44):
was what happened. His job as upper merchant also involved
the responsibility for making sure the cargo stayed safe, and
so he was really reluctant to leave it behind, like
his priority was definitely more on the cargo than the
people in terms of his job description. But some of
the sailors were pretty set on trying to save themselves
at whatever cost, and so ultimately he went with them
(18:07):
in the ship's longboat forty eight total people went to
look for water while the rest stayed behind. Pretty much
the only senior officer that was not among the scouting
party was Uronymous Cornelis Back aboard the Batavia, their four
day search for water was fruitless, and finally Pelser decided
that the only possible way that they were going to
(18:28):
get out of this mess was to go to Batavia
for help. So they took their longboat, which was about
thirty feet long, and they crossed nine hundred nautical miles
of the open Indian Ocean. Imagine Australia on a map,
so the Houtman Abroljos Islands are about halfway down the
(18:50):
straightish part of the western coast of Australia. Batavia is
in Indonesia, and in between them is just this long
expanse of the Indian Ocean, and that is what they
were crossing. Yes, and a long boat, and a longboat
that had like ten pairs of oars. I mean there
are some shipwreck and mutiny survival stories that are that
(19:11):
involve longer ocean crossings and remarkably small craft in this,
but still the fact that there were just these all
these people packed in the boat, including two women and
a baby is astounding to me. Yeah. Uh So, to
cuttle this part of the long story short, they made it.
It took them thirty three days to get there. When
(19:32):
they did get there, after thirty three days across the
ocean open, they had less than two pints of fresh
water left. And once they got to Batavia, Pelser charged
the ship's high bowson for outrageous behavior before the wreck,
because remember he was implicated in the sexual assault of
a passenger and he was executed and skipper Yakubs was
arrested for negligence in causing the wreck. Pelser gathered supplies
(19:55):
and bordered the yachts Artem and they headed back to
find the survivors. It took the sixty three days to
find them again, so basically twice as long, just months
and months of misery. Yeah. So a whole lot happened
on the island in this three month period between when
Pelser left and when he got back with help, and
(20:15):
probably survivors didn't even know they were heading out across
the Indian Ocean to begin with. They had no idea,
so they were just there three months not knowing what
was going on, believing they had been abandoned, and that
is the story that we were going to talk about
in the next episode because as I discovered as I
was researching this crazy story. But they get long and involved,
(20:38):
they do when you're taking a long boat across the
Indian Ocean and when there is a shipwreck and a
mutiny and a massacre. Yeah, so we're going to continue
the mutiny and massacre part of this story in our
next episode. So nobody on the islands, as we talked
(21:01):
about at the end of the last episode, knew that
Pelser had decided to go to Batavia for help. They
had no way of finding out about his progress. They
just knew that they hadn't seen anything of him or
the skipper for days. But about a week after the
search party left in their longboat, the survivors finally got
an authority figure. The Batavia finally broke apart, forcing Cornellis
(21:23):
to join the survivors that were on these islands. So,
just for context, about forty people died when the Batavia
broke apart. The survivors clung to rafts that they had
made on board as it became clear that the time
of the ship was drying to a close. Cornellis in
particular survived by climbing the bowsprit at the four of
(21:44):
the ship and then clinging to it when it broke
off and using it to float to land. And for
the backstory we promised on him earlier, Cornellis was an educated,
literate man from an affluent family. He had trained and
apprenticed as an apothecary, and he started his own apothecary practice.
He had been married and had a child, but the
(22:04):
baby unfortunately died in its infancy. And first a deranged
and incompetent midwife had handled the delivery and she failed
to deliver part of the placenta, so his wife got
a life threatening infection as a result, and then they
had to hire a wet nurse while she recovered, and
the wet nurse unfortunately gave the baby syphilis. It was
just the worst possible series of events for a birth.
(22:27):
It's also kind of unclear exactly how he was such
a poor judge of character to have hired both an
incompetent midwife and, as we are about to tell you,
a clearly unwell wet nurse for the baby. So in
spite of Cornellis getting sworn statements from basically everybody attesting
to the fact that he was completely clean and the
(22:49):
wet nurse was an abominable character and obviously poor health.
Everyone still assumed that the baby had gotten syphilis from
his mother, and this was a huge stigma and a
very tear arrible reflection on Cornellis and his family and
his practice. Like, obviously, if the baby had gotten syphilis,
it had gotten syphilts from his mother, and that meant
that his mother or his father, somebody had been unfaithful
(23:11):
in this situation, Like there was a whole boatload of
social expectation and rules for behavior. Yeah, and that's violated,
And that meant that as an apothecary, there was sickness
introduced into that as well. Yeah, So his business seriously
suffered as a result, and it had already been on
shaky footing even before this scandal happened. All of this
(23:34):
combined with demands for reparation from a merchant who had
loaned Cornellis money to put him completely under and otherwise
he'd not really have had any reason to code, to see,
and he had also developed sort of a strange personal,
religious and moral code. It was a hodgepodge of influences
from throughout his life. It combined Anabaptist and Mennonite teachings
(23:56):
with the blasphemous and heretical philosophies of a Dutch named
Johannes Simons Vanderbeek who also was known as Tarentius, and
somewhere along the line he picked up ideas from Epicurus
as well, along with the Antinomian idea that you only
need faith to attain salvation. So reason number two that
Cornellus had taken to a life at sea. Tarantius wound
(24:19):
up on trial for his heretical beliefs and other stuff,
and Cornellis realized that he was extremely lucky not to
have been named in the proceedings, which would have resulted
in him being prosecuted as well. So all of this
together made it seem really prudent that he get as
far away as possible. I'm again lack of judgment. Maybe
(24:41):
on top of prompting him to abandon his wife and
his home. These philosophical and religious influences led Cornellis to
hold some troubling beliefs of his own. He deeply believed
that every action that he personally undertook was divinely inspired,
and this also meant that nothing he could do, no
matter what it was, could be considered sinful or evil
(25:02):
because it had all been inspired by God. So when
the Batavia broke up, this became the highest ranking man
on the islands. The people who were left on the
islands really felt like Pelser had abandoned them when they
really really needed him, and so Cornelis was really, without
(25:23):
a whole lot of effort, able to recruit about forty
men to continue in his original plan to commit mutiny,
even though the ship they were going to originally use
for this plan was now destroyed. Instead, what he and
his mutineers planned to do was to commandeer whatever ship
came to their rescue and then to use it to
become pirates. It's hard not to giggle. I feel like
(25:46):
this is a plan that like a ten year old
put together. The plans of this story are not good plans,
but the results are horribly tragic. Yeah. To make sure
he would face no opposition, he started systematically removing people
who might not be down with his mutiny plan from
the island. This also gave him fewer mouths to feed,
even though the current really had delivered a bunch of
(26:07):
supplies from the Batavia to the islands. It still wasn't
enough to sustain everyone there, and everybody he got rid
of that was not on his team, so to speak,
would make it all last a little bit longer. Yeah,
everybody had sort of felt like it was a huge
long shot to think that the Batavia would break apart
and the current would bring supplies to them. That did
(26:27):
actually happen. The one thing that worked out. Yeah, And
it sounds like a lot of supplies because it was
like hundreds of barrels of things, but that it was
not when you looked at how many mouths there were
to feed, that did not actually equate many days of
sustenance for anybody. So Cornelis started sending people off to
(26:47):
the other nearby islands, and he would tell them that
there was water there, or he would send them there
to search for water or some other ploy. And he
basically sent them off to these islands and didn't expect
them to survive. He was expecting them to die of
hunger and thirst. A horrible man. I'm edaitorializing, but I
don't know how you can't come to that conclusion at
(27:09):
that point, he also started sending people out in boats,
presumably as scouts, but he'd also put men that were
loyal to him on those boats and they would throw
his targets overboard and leave them to drown. Really systematic. Yeah.
He also straight up had his cronies murder people who
were sick or hurt, and they left most of the
(27:31):
women alive when so that he and his crew could
use them for sexual purposes. He also claimed Lucretia Yn's
as his own sexual toy. So on top of all
these murders, there were many many rapes happening on the island.
When he saw survivors on one island continuing to wander
around the shore when he thought they should be dead
(27:52):
and that his little I'll just get rid of them
this way plan had not worked out, he sent men
in boats to kill them as well. So as a
result of all of this, Beacon Island later came to
be known as Batavia's Graveyard. This strategy of removing threats
from the island became Cornellis's downfall. He sent a group
of soldiers led by Wibby Hayes to two large islands
(28:15):
where they which they were calling the High Islands. Pelser
and company had already searched these islands and reported that
they had no water, but that was not widespread knowledge.
Cornellis confiscated the soldier's weapons and sent them there, assuming
that they would just die of thirst. Yeah. He was like,
you guys go search these big islands to water over there,
you guys go find it. Yeah. Wibby Hayes, on the
(28:39):
other hand, was a good leader, and you know his
soldiers under his direction were very industrious. They built a shelter.
They conducted this methodical search for water. They would like
they would nourish themselves from water that had been collected
in little pits in the rock. As they systematically conducted
this widespread search, they eventually found two cisterns. On top
(29:02):
of that, the two islands, which they were right next
to each other, they could get between them. They were
later named East and West Wallaby Island. They were home
to wallabies and lots of birds, which gave them a
pretty ample supply of food. Apparently, the fishing near these
islands was also pretty awesome, so they were also In
addition to the fact that they found water, they found food.
(29:25):
They made a shelter and they started making simple weapons
with which to defend themselves. And when Hayes' men found
the cisterns, they sent up a smoke signal. This was
their pre arranged method of letting Cornellis know that there
was water. And while water was awesome and all, Cornellis
immediately saw the soldiers, their water supply, their vantage point,
(29:48):
and their smoke signals as a threat. How dare you
be more industrious and successful than me? Well, so, how
dare you now have things to eat and water to
drink and weapons to defend yourself with? Because they were industrious,
and a little shelter that they built out of rocks. Ye.
So first he tried to persuade them to join his mutineers,
(30:09):
and they refused, after which a big fight followed, and
so Hayes and his men drove Cornellis and his men off.
So after that, Cornellis sent an attack party to try
to kill them. And by this point hayes men, who
had named themselves the Defenders, had really organized themselves. They
had tried to rescue other survivors. They fought back, and
(30:32):
after a really bloody battle, the soldiers executed five of
Cornellis's men and they captured Cornellis himself and held him
prisoner as they continued to wait for rescue. Cornelis's cronies,
who had not been part of this failed overthrow of
Webby Hayes, were smart enough to stay away from the
Wallaby Islands. From that point they recognized that they were
(30:54):
not going to win against the people. They were outmatched.
Yeah by perhaps the man who should have in charge
from the beginning beginning. That is my editorializing of this situation.
So finally, after a month spent getting back to Australia
from Indonesia, and then another month spent in a frustrating
(31:17):
search to try to figure out where they had left
that shipwreck, Pelser and his yacht wound up back at
Batavia's graveyard. It sounds maybe a little ridiculous that they
got back to Australia and they could not find the shipwreck,
but at this point the ship had been destroyed and
the area was not charted in the first place, because
they didn't know where they were when they wrecked to
(31:37):
begin with. So yeah, so he wound up back in
the area. He disembarked on an island that was about
a mile away from the Wallaby Islands, and they had
water and wine and bread for the survivors with them.
Soon Webby Hayes and three other men rode up and
told them to get back aboard the yacht because there
were two parties of Cornellis's men on the loose and
(32:00):
they meant to commandeer the yacht, and they did in
fact try to do that. The remaining mutineers found the yacht,
they tried to board it, but Pelsert and the screw,
having now advanced knowledge of what was going on, captured them,
and while questioning his newfound prisoners, Pelser learned that Jacobs
and cornellis original plan to mutiny had started way way
(32:21):
back before the ship was even shipwrecked in the first place.
After Hayes handed Cornellis over, Pelser questioned him, then went
to round up the rest of his co conspirators, and
while a few seem to have evaded capture, most surrendered
on the spot. Pelser interrogated all of the accomplices and
found out that their crimes included, in addition to mutiny
(32:42):
and murder, rape, looting, and treason, their trials, which were
really torture and interrogation and their executions were carried out
on Seal's Island. All of the primary mutineers had their
right hands cut off, Cornellis had both of his hands
cut off, and then all of them were hanged on
October second of sixteen twenty nine, roughly a year after
(33:03):
the Batavia set sail from Holland, and those hanged on
Seal's Island were left dangling from the gallows. Pelsert also
marooned two of the youngest members of the crew in Australia.
The rest of them were keeled, hauled and dropped from
yard arms and flogged on the way back to Batavia,
where they were ultimately executed. Before leaving the islands, Pelsert
(33:24):
led a pretty successful salvage mission, loading up the Sardam
with as much as they could find before returning to Batavia,
and they arrived Areund December fifth of sixteen twenty nine.
Even though he had done his ultimate job of protecting
the cargo, eventually, after a fashion, his career never really
recovered from this whole incident, and he died not long after,
(33:46):
probably of the same illness that had brought him down
on board, and it was after he died that they
discovered his illicit money lending business, which he was funding
with company money. Yeah, so again, it's hard to root
for many people in the story. Even though he seems
kind of stand up in many ways he compared to
the other people on board, there were still some there
(34:09):
were issues, And then the voc didn't actually make a
lot of money, even though he did salvage a lot
of the stuff, because the person they had been planning
to sell all of this stuff too. By the time
it was all said and done was no longer in power,
and the person who had taken his place did not
really care about the stuff that had been brought over.
It was a failure in a lot of ways. The
(34:31):
last living mutineers who had come all the way back
to Batavia were eventually executed there, and in the end,
out of the three hundred and sixteen people who were
aboard the Batavia when it wrecked, only about one hundred
and sixteen survived. Webbie Hayes was commissioned as an officer
on arrival in Batavia, and all his soldiers were promoted
from privates to cadets. Lucretia Yans, who at one point
(34:55):
during the trials was accused by her rapists of having
tempted them into it, arrived in Batavia to learn that
her husband had been dead for at least five months.
We don't really know whether Cornellis's wife ever learned of
his treacherream. Her story sort of fades away after a
prolonged and public back and forth with the syphilitic wet
nurse that they had hired. So Lobster fishermen found the
(35:19):
Batavia's wreckage in nineteen sixty three and part of the
hull was raised from the ocean floor and it's now
displayed in the Western Australian Maritime Museum, and there are
also other artifacts from the wreck that are on displayed
there and in other museums. There has also been an
extensive study of bodies from Batavia's graveyard and surrounding islands.
It's basically super horrifying. Yeah, lots of evidence of how
(35:43):
people were brutally bludgeoned to death and had multiple broken
bones and skull fractures, and it's pretty terrible. In a
weird way. The Batavia and its shipwreck wound up being
the source of a whole lot of firsts, slash other
notable historical things like it was the first Dutch ship
(36:05):
lost off the coast of Australia. Webby Hayes's shelters were
the first European structures on the continent of Australia, and
the ruins of those shelters still stand today. The two
marooned Mutineers were the first European residents of Australia, and
the Batavia is the only VOC ship to have been
archaeologically raised and conserved. And this whole incident also inspired
(36:27):
the VOC to methodically map the coastline of US Australia
so that perhaps such a disaster would never happen again. Yeah,
that'll make you not want to get on a boat.
It's that the whole story has so many layers of
just awful star awfulness that keeps getting worse and more awful.
(36:50):
I think this is one I don't remember who. I
think this is one that someone suggested on Twitter and
I was kind of like, sound good, and then I
took one look at it and went, wait, this is
more than just a mutiny. There's a whole lot more
than mutiny going on here. Yeah. It's kind of like
a portrait of like the worst of humanity in many ways. Yeah,
(37:14):
that troubling. Yeah, I like Webby Hayes. He kind of
fades away from history. We don't really know what happened
to him. It's kind of assumed that perhaps he died
of some sort of tropical illness. We just don't have
a lot of historical record on him after the end
of the Batavia story. But yeah, while everybody else was
(37:35):
having some Lord of Flies action, he was keeping things
in order civil as ducks were in a row. Thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over
the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
(37:57):
Our current email address is hissed podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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(38:20):
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