Xanadu’s Reviews > Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny > Status Update

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.

“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."