On October 28th 1628, the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia sailed from Texel, an island off the north coast of Holland, on her maiden voyage to Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in Java. The ship was laden with a priceless cargo including jewels, silver coins and objets d’art to be traded for highly prized spices. Francisco Pelsaert, an employee of the Dutch East India Company, was in command of the ship and Jeronimus Corneliez, another Company employee, was second-in-command. However, neither of these well-educated men knew how to sail a ship and responsibility for this lay with the skipper, Ariaen Jacobsz. But his authority could be countermanded at any time by the two company men.
Jacobsz had sailed with Pelsaert on a previous voyage and despised him, so the relationship between Captain and Commander was not a happy one.
There were 316 people on board Batavia. As well as troops for the colonies and sailors, cramped in the squalid lower decks, there were passengers, many of them destitute and hoping for a better life away from their native Holland. A few, however, were wealthy and these passengers were housed in the relative comfort of the cabins astern.
When the ship docked at Cape Town, Captain Jacobsz went on a violent drinking spree and Commander Pelsaert rebuked him publicly, which made the relationship between Captain and Commander worse than ever.
The second-in-command, Under Merchant Jeronimus Corneliez, had joined the company as a last resort, to avoid being arrested at home in Holland. His career as an apothecary was ruined and his creditors had uncovered his association with an heretical sect which believed that sin did not exist. This religious affiliation goes some way to explain his chilling detachment and lack of self-blame during the events on the island. He was also manipulative, persuasive and charismatic, exerting power over his followers and bending them to his will.
Jacobsz and Corneliez formed a dangerous alliance and they began to plan a mutiny, intending to seize the ship and her valuable cargo, kill the Commander and those loyal to him and then live as pirates. They gathered about them some hot-headed cadets and discontented sailors and directed them to attack the Commander’s friend, a high-born young woman, Lucretia van der Meylen, who was on her way to join her husband in Batavia. Jacobsz and Corneliez were sure that the Commander would react violently to this act, and his retaliation would be the signal for the mutiny to begin.
In the event, Pelsaert did not lash out as expected, remaining passive and reasonable. Lucretia could only identify one of her attackers and he was imprisoned on board to await trial on the mainland.
So, the lid was on the mutiny – but only just – when Batavia ran aground on Morning Reef off the Houtman Abrolhos Islands (near Geraldton, Western Australia) on June 4th, 1629.
The details of Batavia’s ill-fated voyage and the subsequent events on the islands were all meticulously recorded by Commander Francisco Pelsaert. He died in 1630, broken and disgraced, a year after the shipwreck. The captain of Batavia, Ariaen Jacobsz, died in prison while awaiting trial in Java. Wiebbe Hayes, however, came out well from the mutiny. He went from ordinary soldier to commissioned officer, receiving a substantial pay rise, and on his return to Batavia (Jakarta) he was promoted even further in recognition of his deeds by the Council for the Indies.
Jan Pelgrom’s crimes are listed as the murder of a cabin boy and assisting in two other murders, as well as ‘misbehaving with married women’.
Wouter Looes’ crimes are listed as taking part in the killing of the preacher’s family and of commanding the mutineers after the capture of Corneliez.
In 1656 the Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon) was wrecked off Cape Leschenault, much further south from the wreck site of Batavia. It is known that at least seventy-five survivors reached the shore and that seven of these sailed for Java. The remaining sixty-eight were never seen again, at least not by subsequent rescue parties.
Jan and Wouter are remembered, not for their crimes, but because they were the first white men to have lived on the continent of Australia.
The first specific report of an Aboriginal with European characteristics in Western Australia was in May 1836 (seven years after European settlement in the region). George Moore encountered ‘a young woman of a very pleasing countenance and something of European features and long, wavy, almost flaxen-coloured hair.’ Perth Gazette, 1836.
In 1839, Lieutenant George Grey wrote: ‘We passed two native villages, the huts of which they were composed differed from those in the southern districts, in being built, and very nicely plastered over the outside with clay, and clods of turf… they were evidently intended for fixed places of residence.’ This suggests that the Nanda people of the Western coastal regions might have absorbed some Dutch building techniques. The area where Grey saw the villages was close to ‘warran grounds’ – warran being the edible root favoured by the Nanda people – and close to the mouth of the Hutt River where it is thought likely that Jan and Wouter were marooned. For the purposes of this book, I have assumed that the warran grounds were established when Jan and Wouter were marooned, but it is possible that the yams were introduced by early Dutch settlers.
In 1848, the explorer Augustus Charles Gregory reported: ‘I explored the country where the mutineers had landed and found a tribe whose character differed considerably from the average Aborigine. Their colour was neither black nor copper, but that peculiar colour that prevails with a mixture of European blood.’
Daisy May Bates, an Irish Australian journalist (1859-1951) and lifelong student of Australian Aboriginal culture and society, recognised European features in Aboriginals of the Western Australian coastal tribes: ‘I also found traces of types distinctly Dutch. When Pelsaert marooned two white criminals on the mainland of Australia these Dutchmen had probably been allowed to live with the natives, and it may be that they are their progeny… there was no mistaking the flat heavy Dutch face, curly fair hair, and heavy, stocky build.’ The Passing of the Aborigines, (Panther, London, 1966).
Lastly, ‘The first white men to settle did so reluctantly as they were the two sailors of the Batavia marooned for their part in the mutiny of 1629, which could account for the natives with fair hair and blue eyes reported by our pioneers.’ The Shire of Northampton, Western Australia, A.C. Henville (Geraldton Newspaper Ltd, 1968).
At the time of going to press, initial DNA tests have confirmed that some Aboriginals from Western Australia carry Western European blood. Further tests should allow researchers to pinpoint the date when that genetic link came about and whether it predated British settlement.