Status Updates From Batavia's Graveyard: The Tr...

Freed of normal constraints by the wreck and the departure of the ship’s officers, Jeronimus took to living by his own moral code. It may well be that he adopted the tenets of the Libertines not out of any religious conviction, but because they mirrored the feelings he already had.

Indeed, all attempts to explain the Batavia mutiny in terms of philosophy are doomed to failure, for they fail to explain why the under-merchant was so indifferent to the suffering of others. The answer to that question seems to lie within Jeronimus’s mind itself.

It's (kind of) cool, really but...I want to read my thrillers 👀😭

“We learned from their own confessions, and the testimony of all the living persons, that they have drowned, murdered and brought to death with all manner of cruelties, more than 120 persons, men, women and children as well..."

At his command, the swivel guns on the Sardam’s poop were leveled at mutineers’ boat and men with pikes lined the deck. Thus reinforced, the commandeur...hailed the boat, demanding: “Wherefore do you come aboard armed?”Even now, Jan Hendricxsz and the other cutthroats in the sloop were not quite ready to surrender. “They answered me that they would reply to that when they were on the ship,”...

The sudden appearance of the jacht...at the height of the climactic battle between the Defenders and the mutineers, had had a dramatic effect...For Wiebbe Hayes it seemed to be, quite literally, the product of divine intervention. Salvation had arrived...For Loos and the other mutineers, Pelsaert’s return meant something altogether different: not life, but death; not rescue, but the certainty of retribution.

In the space of perhaps five minutes, the balance of power in the Abrolhos had shifted for good. The mutineers had lost their leader and his principal lieutenants, while Hayes had won the first real victory in the indecisive island civil war, immeasurably strengthening his men’s morale. The Defenders had secured the wine and clothing they had coveted, for the mutineers’ supplies had been abandoned on the beach...

"The captain-general had complete faith in his own powers of persuasion and perhaps did not understand that the loyalists mistrusted every word he said. Having seen Zevanck and Van Huyssen fail to overwhelm Hayes by force, it may have seemed to him that he was teaching his companions a lesson in how to handle malcontents. And, of course, he retained the absolute conviction that his God was protecting him."

...Jeronimus never explained how the mutineers were to bribe their counterparts, or arrange a betrayal without Wiebbe realizing what was going on. Cornelisz’s cunning had once been an asset to the mutineers but now his inability to think things through, coupled with an invincible belief in his own rightness, would cost them dearly.

Building to this point after establishing the incoming rescue is a great narrative device:
"It must have been obvious that the mutineers would eventually turn their gaze on Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, and that when they did the unarmed loyalists would find themselves at a fatal disadvantage.
It was imperative that they organize themselves, construct makeshift defenses, and improvise some weapons."

ad Pelsaert and the skipper had the sense to explore the archipelago with any thoroughness, they would surely have transferred the survivors of the wreck to Wiebbe Hayes’s Island, which offered far more in the way of natural resources than Batavia’s Graveyard and could have supported the whole company for months.

Cornelisz, Zevanck, and Beer found this incident tremendously amusing. But Pelgrom, who had “daily begged that he should be allowed to kill someone, because he would rather do that than eat or drink,” did not share in their laughter: “When he was not allowed to cut off the head of the foresaid youngster, Jan wept.”

‘Come now, devils with all the sacraments, where are you? I wish that I now saw a devil. And who wants to be stabbed to death? I can do that very beautifully.’ ”

On the one occasion that Bastiaensz...beseeched God to take all those on the island “under His wings,” he looked up to find Jeronimus’s men capering about behind his tiny congregation. The mutineers were flapping the bloody, severed flippers of dead sea lions above their heads and sneering at his piety. “No need,” they hooted, “we are already under them.”

...by removing his followers from contact with the one authority in the islands that might have had the power to restrain them: the Dutch Reformed Church. By silencing the predikant, Cornelisz shielded the mutineers from the fear of criticism and divine retribution...in effect began to create a new society...in which his followers...were bound together...by their rejection of conventional authority.

...in 1623 on the spice isle of Ambon, when the VOC wrongly suspected itsEnglish competitors of plotting an attack on the Dutch factory. Fifteen East India Company merchants were arrested, along with several Japanese mercenaries. The men were tortured until they confessed—one had flames played along the soles of his feet “until the fat dropt and put out the candles”—and then were executed.

Jeronimus had perhaps derived some satisfaction from crushing Hardens, for he next turned his attention to Andries de Vries...The chosen victims were people in the sick tent. There were 11 of them in all—useless mouths, Cornelisz observed...De Vries crept into their tent by night and cut their throats...Three days later the assistant was compelled to return and slaughter another four or five men...

He invited Hardens and his wife into his tent and—while they ate and drank together—sent Jan Hendricxsz to strangle their little girl. Hilletgie Hardens was the first child to be killed on Batavia’s Graveyard...Hardens knew he had no choice...especially if he was to have any hope of protecting his wife. Three days after his daughter’s murder, Hardens swore an oath of fealty to his comrades...

Tormented by the vermin and the heat, some Dutchmen were driven insane...Depression was not uncommon....as those on board realized the magnitude of the ordeal they faced...the victims refused to talk or even eat. Becalmed...others went mad as they waited long, excruciating days—sometimes weeks—for winds that never came. The archives of the East India Company contain many records of men who jumped overboard...

The captain of one Danish East Indiaman was so maddened by the plague of scuttling vermin on board his ship that he offered his sailors a tot of brandy for every thousand cockroaches they killed. Within days, the crushed bodies of 38,250 insects had been presented for his inspection.

...passengers who had never experienced such unbearable temperatures wrote that the sun had “dried the feces within the body”....everyone suffered agonies from sunburn. Cooling these burns in brine brought only temporary relief, and the salt in the water caused rashes that itched unbearably....exacerbated by the fact that, in the absence of fresh water, sailors traditionally washed their filthy clothes in urine.

Fistfights were tolerated as an amusing diversion, and when they could the men played the “execution game,” a contest involving forfeits that included being smeared with pitch and tar. This game was so dangerous that it could only be played with the express permission of the skipper.