April 23, 2014 • 22 mins
While most of the survivors of the Batavia were scattered on a few tiny islands off the coast of Australia, a small group went all the way to Indonesia to get help.Meanwhile, a gruesome scenario was playing out among those they left behind. Read the show notes here.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class is
brought to you by Squarespace, the all in one platform
that makes it fast and easy to create your own
professional website, portfolio, and online store. For a free trial
and ten percent off, visit squarespace dot com, slash history
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web starts with your website. Welcome to Stuff you Missed
(00:23):
in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. Today we
are continuing our story of the Batavia, which is a
story that includes just about everything that can go wrong
at see there's storms and sicknesses that we haven't really
(00:45):
talked about that they were there, and then also a
shipwreck and a mutiny and a massacre. Yeah, definitely some
bad behavior going on a board. Yeah there, there, we're
going to talk about the only people who really come
out looking pretty good in this whole situation. We don't
hear about them until the very end. So our last episode,
which you know, if you're going out of order, I
encourage you to listen to that one first. That was
(01:07):
the shipwreck part of this story. That's a little bit
about a mutiny that never really got off the ground.
Where we left off, the upper Merchant Francisco Pelsert has
left hundreds of survivors on a few tiny islands off
the coast of Australia. Uh He and nearly every other
senior officer on the ship have gone all the way
(01:28):
to Indonesia and back to get help. So we know
that they got to Indonesia, we know they got back.
This episode is what happened while they were gone. So
nobody on the islands, as we talked about at the
end of the last episode, knew that Pelser had decided
to go to Batavia for help. They had no way
(01:48):
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 Cornelis to join the survivors
that were on these islands. So, just for context, about
(02:11):
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 Cornelis in particular survived by climbing
the bowsprit at the four of the ship and then
clinging to it when it broke off and using it
to float to land. And for the backstory we promised
(02:33):
on him earlier, Cornelis was an educated, literate man from
an affluent family. He had trained an apprenticed as an apothecary,
and he started his own apothecary practice. He had been
married and had a child, but the baby unfortunately died
in its infancy. And first a deranged and incompetent midwife
had handled the delivery, and she failed to deliver part
(02:54):
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. What's also kind
of unclear exactly how he was such a poor judge
of character to have hired both an incompetent midwife and,
(03:18):
as we are about to tell you, a clearly unwell
wet nurse for the baby. So in spite of Cornelis
getting sworn statements from basically everybody attesting to the fact
that he was completely clean and the wet nurse was
an abominable character and obviously poor health, everyone still assumed
that the baby had gotten syphilis from his mother, and
(03:39):
this was a huge stigma and a very terrible reflection
on Cornelis and his family and his practice. Like, obviously,
if the baby had gotten syphilis, it had gotten siphilps
from his mother, and that meant that his mother or
his father, somebody had been unfaithful in this situation, Like
there was a whole boatload of social expectation and and
(03:59):
rules for behavior 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 combined with demands for reparation from a
merchant who had known Cornelli's money to put him completely
(04:21):
under and otherwise he'd not really have had any reason
to go to sea. 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 with the blasphemous and heretical philosophies
of a Dutch painter named Johannes Simons Vanderbeek who also
(04:45):
was known as Tarentius, and somewhere along the line he
picked up ideas from Epicurus as well, along with the
Antonomian idea that you only need faith to attain salvation.
So reason number two that Cornellis had taken to a
life at sea. Trentius wound up on trial for his
heretical beliefs and other stuff, and Cornelis realized that he
(05:06):
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 gets as far away as possible. I'm again
lack of judgment. Maybe on top of prompting him to
abandon his wife and his home. These philosophical and religious
(05:28):
influences led Cornelis 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 because it had all been inspired by God.
So when the when the Batavia broke up, this became
(05:52):
the highest ranking man on the islands. And before we
talk about why he did, let's take a moment and
talk about a word from our sponsor. To get back
to Cornelis's plan for world domination, the people who were
left on the islands really felt like Pelser had abandoned
them when they really really needed him, and so Cornelis
(06:16):
was really, without 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.
(06:39):
I feel like 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.
Uh to make sure he would face no opposition. He
started systematically removing people who might not be down with
his mutiny plam from the island. This also gave him
fewer mouths to feed. Even though the current really had
(07:00):
delivered a bunch of 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.
(07:20):
That did 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 any any So, Cornelis started sending people off
(07:41):
to 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. Horrible man. Uh, meditorializing, But I
don't know how you can't come to that conclusion. At
(08:03):
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
(08:25):
women alive when so that he and his crew could
use them for sexual purposes. Uh. He also claimed Lucretia
yawns as his own sexual toy. So on top of
all these murders, there were many many rates happening on
the island. When he saw survivors on one island continuing
to wander around the shore when he thought they should
be dead, uh, and then his little I'll just get
(08:48):
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 Corneli's downfall. He
sent a group of soldiers led by Wibby Hayes to
(09:08):
two large islands 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, and Cornelis confiscated the soldiers weapons and
sent them there, assuming that they would just die of thirst. Yeah.
He was like, you guys, go search these big islands.
Water over there, you guys go find it. Yeah. Wibby Hayes,
(09:32):
on the 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.
(09:55):
On top of that, the two islands, which they were
right next to each other, they could 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,
you know, in addition to the fact that they found water,
(10:17):
they found food, 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 prearranged method of letting Cornelis know that
there was water. And while water was awesome and all,
Cornelis immediately saw the soldiers, their water supply, their vantage point,
(10:41):
and their smoke signals as a threat. How dare you
be more industrious and successful than me? Well, as how
there 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.
So first he tried to persuade them to join his mutineers,
(11:03):
and they refused, after which a big fight followed um
and so Hayes and his men drove Cornelis and his
men off. So after that Cornelis sent an attack party
to try to kill them, and by this point hayes men,
who had named themselves the defenders have really organized themselves.
They had tried to rescue other survivors. They fought back
(11:25):
and after a really bloody battle, the soldiers executed five
of Cornelis's men, and they captured Cornelis himself and held
him prisoner as they continued to wait for rescue. Cornelis
Is Coronis, 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 recognize that
(11:47):
they were not going to win again. They were outmatched,
uh by perhaps the man who should have been in
charge from the beginning. Hitting 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
(12:09):
a frustrating search to try to figure out where they
had left that shipwreck, Pelzer and his yacht wound up
back at Batavia's graveyard. Uh 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
(12:30):
when they wrecked to begin with. So yeah, so he
wound up back 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 Corneliss
(12:52):
men on the loose and they meant to commandeer the
yacht u And they did in fact try to do that.
They they were eating mutineers found the yacht. They tried
to board it, but Pelser 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
cornelis original plan to mutiny had started way way back
(13:15):
before the ship was even shipwrecked in the first place.
After Hayes handed Cornelis 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
uh found out that their crimes included, in addition to
mutiny and murder, rape, looting and treason. Their trials, which
(13:40):
were really torture and interrogation, and their executions were carried
out on Seals Island. All of the primary mutineers had
their right hands cut off, Cornelis had both of his
hands cut off, and then all of them were hanged
on October two of six nine, roughly a year after
the Batavia set sail from Holland, and those hanged on
Seals Island were left dangling from the gallows. Pelser also
(14:03):
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, Pelser
led a pretty successful savage salvage mission, loading up the
Stardum with as much as they could find before returning
(14:24):
to Batavia, and they arrived there on December five 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,
probably of the same illness that had brought him down
on board. And it was after he died that they
(14:46):
discovered his illicit money lending business, which he was funding
with company money. Yeah. So again it's hard to root
for very many people in the story, even though he
seems kind of stand up in many ways he compared
to the other people on board, but there were still
there were issues, And then the v o C didn't
actually make a lot of money, even though he he
(15:08):
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. Uh. The last living mutineers who had
come all the way back to Batavia were eventually executed there,
(15:30):
and in the end, out of the three hundred and
sixteen people who were aboard the Batavia when it wrecked,
only about a hundred and sixteen survived. Webby Hayes was
commissioned as an officer on arrival in Batavia, and all
his soldiers were promoted from privates to cadets. Lucretia Jahns,
who at one point during the trials was accused by
(15:51):
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 Cornelis's
wife ever learned of his treachery. Her story sort of
fades away after a prolonged and public back and forth
with the syphilitic wet nurse that they had hired. So
(16:11):
Lobster fisherman found the Batavia's wreckage in nineteen sixty three
and part of the hall 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
(16:36):
evidence of how people were brutally bludgeoned to death and
had multiple broken bones and skull fractures, and that's pretty
terrible uh. In a weird way, the Batavia and its
shipwreck wound up being the source of a whole lot
of first slash other notable historical things, like it was
(16:57):
the first Dutch ship 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. That two marooned Mutineers were the first European
residents of Australia. And the Batavia is the only v
o C ship to have been archaeologically raised and conserved.
(17:19):
And this whole incident also inspired the v o C
to methodically map the coastline of US Australia so that
perhaps such a disaster would never happen again. Yeah, that
will make you not want to get on a boat.
It's the The whole story has so many layers of
just awful, our awfulness that keeps getting worse and more awful.
(17:44):
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, Mutine's me and you 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, that troubling. Yeah, I like Webby Hayes.
(18:12):
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 having some Lord of Flies action, he
was keeping things. Ducks were in a row. So I
(18:36):
have a little listener mail dependent. This listener mail is
from Alexander, and Alexander says, Dear Tracy and Holly. I've
been a longtime listener of the podcast, and while not
as regular as I like to me, try to listen
as much as I can. They certainly help an otherwise
slow day at work fly by. While listening to past episodes,
I heard your podcast on say Shown a Gone and
(18:58):
I wanted to pass on an interesting fact about the period.
As a history major that focused on Asian studies. I
had always wondered why medieval Japan had so many female
authors as opposed to the rest of the world, which
focused more on male dominated traditions. While women in the
hand Court were responsible for many great literary works of
the time and then in parentheses the Tale of Ganji
and the Pillow Talks in particular, the men of the
(19:19):
period didn't really come up with much to match. This
had remained a mystery to me until recently. It turns
out that a big reason for hay on courts, prolific
female population and lackluster showing for the men has to
do with court tradition. As you Guys mentioned in the podcast,
the hand court was largely dominated by Chinese culture, and
tradition has had a major effect on how court nobles
(19:41):
conducted themselves, including the language that they would write in.
It was considered proper and sophisticated for male noblemen to
write and speak in Chinese, while women were expected to
know Japanese. This ironically had a negative influence on men
and their poetry because they will be writing using a
second language, which resulted in mediocre literary works. On the
other hand, women in the hand court were able to
(20:02):
write in their first language, which facilitated much more artistic
and literary ability. Has resulted at a much higher quality
of literary writings, such as the Tale of Genji Uh
and pillow books from the fetal population, while the male
population tended to lag behind. That is fascinating. It is
it rang a distant bell in my head. I vaguely
(20:23):
remember at one point hearing about um the separation of
languages across the sexes, but that's as far as my
brain went with it. Yeah, so it's cool to get
more in depth analysis of how that all panned out.
So thank you very much for that note. If you
would like to write to us, you can. We're at
History Podcasts that Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook
(20:44):
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Slast missed in History one more time. We are at
missed in History dot com as well. Uh. You can
come to our website our other website, which is how
stuff Works dot com. We have two websites now. If
(21:04):
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bit more about we talked about today. Put in the
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web starts with your website. Welcome to Stuff you Missed
(00:23):
in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Wilson. Today we
are continuing our story of the Batavia, which is a
story that includes just about everything that can go wrong
at see there's storms and sicknesses that we haven't really
(00:45):
talked about that they were there, and then also a
shipwreck and a mutiny and a massacre. Yeah, definitely some
bad behavior going on a board. Yeah there, there, we're
going to talk about the only people who really come
out looking pretty good in this whole situation. We don't
hear about them until the very end. So our last episode,
which you know, if you're going out of order, I
encourage you to listen to that one first. That was
(01:07):
the shipwreck part of this story. That's a little bit
about a mutiny that never really got off the ground.
Where we left off, the upper Merchant Francisco Pelsert has
left hundreds of survivors on a few tiny islands off
the coast of Australia. Uh He and nearly every other
senior officer on the ship have gone all the way
(01:28):
to Indonesia and back to get help. So we know
that they got to Indonesia, we know they got back.
This episode is what happened while they were gone. So
nobody on the islands, as we talked about at the
end of the last episode, knew that Pelser had decided
to go to Batavia for help. They had no way
(01:48):
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 Cornelis to join the survivors
that were on these islands. So, just for context, about
(02:11):
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 Cornelis in particular survived by climbing
the bowsprit at the four of the ship and then
clinging to it when it broke off and using it
to float to land. And for the backstory we promised
(02:33):
on him earlier, Cornelis was an educated, literate man from
an affluent family. He had trained an apprenticed as an apothecary,
and he started his own apothecary practice. He had been
married and had a child, but the baby unfortunately died
in its infancy. And first a deranged and incompetent midwife
had handled the delivery, and she failed to deliver part
(02:54):
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. What's also kind
of unclear exactly how he was such a poor judge
of character to have hired both an incompetent midwife and,
(03:18):
as we are about to tell you, a clearly unwell
wet nurse for the baby. So in spite of Cornelis
getting sworn statements from basically everybody attesting to the fact
that he was completely clean and the wet nurse was
an abominable character and obviously poor health, everyone still assumed
that the baby had gotten syphilis from his mother, and
(03:39):
this was a huge stigma and a very terrible reflection
on Cornelis and his family and his practice. Like, obviously,
if the baby had gotten syphilis, it had gotten siphilps
from his mother, and that meant that his mother or
his father, somebody had been unfaithful in this situation, Like
there was a whole boatload of social expectation and and
(03:59):
rules for behavior 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 combined with demands for reparation from a
merchant who had known Cornelli's money to put him completely
(04:21):
under and otherwise he'd not really have had any reason
to go to sea. 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 with the blasphemous and heretical philosophies
of a Dutch painter named Johannes Simons Vanderbeek who also
(04:45):
was known as Tarentius, and somewhere along the line he
picked up ideas from Epicurus as well, along with the
Antonomian idea that you only need faith to attain salvation.
So reason number two that Cornellis had taken to a
life at sea. Trentius wound up on trial for his
heretical beliefs and other stuff, and Cornelis realized that he
(05:06):
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 gets as far away as possible. I'm again
lack of judgment. Maybe on top of prompting him to
abandon his wife and his home. These philosophical and religious
(05:28):
influences led Cornelis 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 because it had all been inspired by God.
So when the when the Batavia broke up, this became
(05:52):
the highest ranking man on the islands. And before we
talk about why he did, let's take a moment and
talk about a word from our sponsor. To get back
to Cornelis's plan for world domination, the people who were
left on the islands really felt like Pelser had abandoned
them when they really really needed him, and so Cornelis
(06:16):
was really, without 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.
(06:39):
I feel like 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.
Uh to make sure he would face no opposition. He
started systematically removing people who might not be down with
his mutiny plam from the island. This also gave him
fewer mouths to feed. Even though the current really had
(07:00):
delivered a bunch of 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.
(07:20):
That did 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 any any So, Cornelis started sending people off
(07:41):
to 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. Horrible man. Uh, meditorializing, But I
don't know how you can't come to that conclusion. At
(08:03):
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
(08:25):
women alive when so that he and his crew could
use them for sexual purposes. Uh. He also claimed Lucretia
yawns as his own sexual toy. So on top of
all these murders, there were many many rates happening on
the island. When he saw survivors on one island continuing
to wander around the shore when he thought they should
be dead, uh, and then his little I'll just get
(08:48):
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 Corneli's downfall. He
sent a group of soldiers led by Wibby Hayes to
(09:08):
two large islands 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, and Cornelis confiscated the soldiers weapons and
sent them there, assuming that they would just die of thirst. Yeah.
He was like, you guys, go search these big islands.
Water over there, you guys go find it. Yeah. Wibby Hayes,
(09:32):
on the 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.
(09:55):
On top of that, the two islands, which they were
right next to each other, they could 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,
you know, in addition to the fact that they found water,
(10:17):
they found food, 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 prearranged method of letting Cornelis know that
there was water. And while water was awesome and all,
Cornelis immediately saw the soldiers, their water supply, their vantage point,
(10:41):
and their smoke signals as a threat. How dare you
be more industrious and successful than me? Well, as how
there 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.
So first he tried to persuade them to join his mutineers,
(11:03):
and they refused, after which a big fight followed um
and so Hayes and his men drove Cornelis and his
men off. So after that Cornelis sent an attack party
to try to kill them, and by this point hayes men,
who had named themselves the defenders have really organized themselves.
They had tried to rescue other survivors. They fought back
(11:25):
and after a really bloody battle, the soldiers executed five
of Cornelis's men, and they captured Cornelis himself and held
him prisoner as they continued to wait for rescue. Cornelis
Is Coronis, 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 recognize that
(11:47):
they were not going to win again. They were outmatched,
uh by perhaps the man who should have been in
charge from the beginning. Hitting 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
(12:09):
a frustrating search to try to figure out where they
had left that shipwreck, Pelzer and his yacht wound up
back at Batavia's graveyard. Uh 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
(12:30):
when they wrecked to begin with. So yeah, so he
wound up back 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 Corneliss
(12:52):
men on the loose and they meant to commandeer the
yacht u And they did in fact try to do that.
They they were eating mutineers found the yacht. They tried
to board it, but Pelser 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
cornelis original plan to mutiny had started way way back
(13:15):
before the ship was even shipwrecked in the first place.
After Hayes handed Cornelis 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
uh found out that their crimes included, in addition to
mutiny and murder, rape, looting and treason. Their trials, which
(13:40):
were really torture and interrogation, and their executions were carried
out on Seals Island. All of the primary mutineers had
their right hands cut off, Cornelis had both of his
hands cut off, and then all of them were hanged
on October two of six nine, roughly a year after
the Batavia set sail from Holland, and those hanged on
Seals Island were left dangling from the gallows. Pelser also
(14:03):
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, Pelser
led a pretty successful savage salvage mission, loading up the
Stardum with as much as they could find before returning
(14:24):
to Batavia, and they arrived there on December five 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,
probably of the same illness that had brought him down
on board. And it was after he died that they
(14:46):
discovered his illicit money lending business, which he was funding
with company money. Yeah. So again it's hard to root
for very many people in the story, even though he
seems kind of stand up in many ways he compared
to the other people on board, but there were still
there were issues, And then the v o C didn't
actually make a lot of money, even though he he
(15:08):
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. Uh. The last living mutineers who had
come all the way back to Batavia were eventually executed there,
(15:30):
and in the end, out of the three hundred and
sixteen people who were aboard the Batavia when it wrecked,
only about a hundred and sixteen survived. Webby Hayes was
commissioned as an officer on arrival in Batavia, and all
his soldiers were promoted from privates to cadets. Lucretia Jahns,
who at one point during the trials was accused by
(15:51):
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 Cornelis's
wife ever learned of his treachery. Her story sort of
fades away after a prolonged and public back and forth
with the syphilitic wet nurse that they had hired. So
(16:11):
Lobster fisherman found the Batavia's wreckage in nineteen sixty three
and part of the hall 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
(16:36):
evidence of how people were brutally bludgeoned to death and
had multiple broken bones and skull fractures, and that's pretty
terrible uh. In a weird way, the Batavia and its
shipwreck wound up being the source of a whole lot
of first slash other notable historical things, like it was
(16:57):
the first Dutch ship 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. That two marooned Mutineers were the first European
residents of Australia. And the Batavia is the only v
o C ship to have been archaeologically raised and conserved.
(17:19):
And this whole incident also inspired the v o C
to methodically map the coastline of US Australia so that
perhaps such a disaster would never happen again. Yeah, that
will make you not want to get on a boat.
It's the The whole story has so many layers of
just awful, our awfulness that keeps getting worse and more awful.
(17:44):
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, Mutine's me and you 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, that troubling. Yeah, I like Webby Hayes.
(18:12):
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 having some Lord of Flies action, he
was keeping things. Ducks were in a row. So I
(18:36):
have a little listener mail dependent. This listener mail is
from Alexander, and Alexander says, Dear Tracy and Holly. I've
been a longtime listener of the podcast, and while not
as regular as I like to me, try to listen
as much as I can. They certainly help an otherwise
slow day at work fly by. While listening to past episodes,
I heard your podcast on say Shown a Gone and
(18:58):
I wanted to pass on an interesting fact about the period.
As a history major that focused on Asian studies. I
had always wondered why medieval Japan had so many female
authors as opposed to the rest of the world, which
focused more on male dominated traditions. While women in the
hand Court were responsible for many great literary works of
the time and then in parentheses the Tale of Ganji
and the Pillow Talks in particular, the men of the
(19:19):
period didn't really come up with much to match. This
had remained a mystery to me until recently. It turns
out that a big reason for hay on courts, prolific
female population and lackluster showing for the men has to
do with court tradition. As you Guys mentioned in the podcast,
the hand court was largely dominated by Chinese culture, and
tradition has had a major effect on how court nobles
(19:41):
conducted themselves, including the language that they would write in.
It was considered proper and sophisticated for male noblemen to
write and speak in Chinese, while women were expected to
know Japanese. This ironically had a negative influence on men
and their poetry because they will be writing using a
second language, which resulted in mediocre literary works. On the
other hand, women in the hand court were able to
(20:02):
write in their first language, which facilitated much more artistic
and literary ability. Has resulted at a much higher quality
of literary writings, such as the Tale of Genji Uh
and pillow books from the fetal population, while the male
population tended to lag behind. That is fascinating. It is
it rang a distant bell in my head. I vaguely
(20:23):
remember at one point hearing about um the separation of
languages across the sexes, but that's as far as my
brain went with it. Yeah, so it's cool to get
more in depth analysis of how that all panned out.
So thank you very much for that note. If you
would like to write to us, you can. We're at
History Podcasts that Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook
(20:44):
at facebook dot com, slash miss in History and on
Twitter at missed in History. Are tumbler is missed in
History dot tumbler dot com. Our pinterest is pinterest dot com.
Slast missed in History one more time. We are at
missed in History dot com as well. Uh. You can
come to our website our other website, which is how
stuff Works dot com. We have two websites now. If
(21:04):
you would like to learn more about what we talked
about today. You can come to our other website, which
is how stuff works dot com to learn a little
bit more about we talked about today. Put in the
words East India Company and you will learn about one
of the other East India companies, which is the British
East India Company. You can do all of that and
a whole lot more at our website which is how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
(21:30):
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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