Willem Siebenhaar

“ He took the soldiers from thence, arming each with a good musket. With those he proceeded to the island named “Batavia’s Churchyard”, which was close to the wreck his intention was to catch the remaining scoundrels who were still there, and make them prisoners. When they saw the Commodore approaching with his two well-manned boats, their hearts immediately failed them, and their courage sank before they had made any resistance. They said to each other, “Now we are all dead men”, thinking that they were going to be killed in hot haste. ”

“ On the morning of the 14th, the wind was south-west by south with a high roll; during the day the wind changed to south-south-west; they then weighed the anchor and were under sail before noon, bearing west-north-west seaward, to get off the lower shore. At noon they were in southern latitude 28 deg. 50 min.; here the land began slightly to run off north by west and south by east; in the afternoon the wind became south, wherefore they sailed north, about evening they noticed some dry land, straight ahead or west of them. ”

“ But before this the Lord had sent them during the night of the 9th and 10th July a steady rain (the same rain that the Commodore had about the mainland when he and his boat were in great danger of sinking) which furnished them with a good deal of water; so that with this and with that which they had fished out of the sea, all the people might have kept themselves from thirst for a long time, everyone receiving daily three cups of water and two cups of wine; if only the Devil, their chief; had not tempted them to such horrible murder. ”

“ Jan Hendricksz, of Bremen, soldier, about 24 years old, who, according to his confession, borne out more fully by subsequent examination, had murdered, or helped to murder, 17 or 18 people, and has also had the intention to help to seize the first yacht arriving, shall likewise be taken to Seals’ Island, to the place where justice will be done, and first have his right hand cut off, and then punished with the cord at the gallows until he is dead. All his clothes, monthly pay, and whatever he might have to claim against our Lords and Masters will be confiscated. ”

“ He further described how that same morning, one rebel, named Worter Loos, who had been proclaimed chief after the capture of the former Captain, Jerome, had attacked them with two boats full of men, whom they had bravely resisted, and kept off, four of Webbye Hays’ men having been severely wounded in the fray. When the Commodore had learnt all these sad tidings with deep regret, he immediately rowed aboard again, ordering Webbye Hays to row back to his people and to bring the prisoner, Jerome Cornelisz, to the ship, which was done as ordered. ”

“ There are some twenty islands in the Pelsart or southern group, all of coral formation, and many coral reefs. They form a rude triangle of which the apex points south. The western side is a long reef over which the great ocean rollers constantly break in a heavy surf on the east lies the largest island of the group, now named Pelsart Island, but formerly termed Batavia’s Churchyard; and between the reef and the island and to the north lie the balance of smaller islands and reefs. ”

“ But there are exceptions, and the greatest of them is the tragic story of the ill-fated Dutch ship, Batavia, whose passengers and crew were for four months the first settlers — involuntary, it is true — in Australian territory. The portion of the continent now called Western Australia was the first viewed by Europeans. In the far back ages Chinese junks seem to have found the north of our island-continent only to slowly chop back again to their own coasts with true oriental apathy. ”

“ In the afternoon it began to blow and storm, very hard from the north-west, so that the ship was so entirely buried by waves that they could often not see her and that it seemed more than a miracle that she kept together. Those on the shore calculated in the evening how much more there was of the fresh water that they had saved in small casks, and found that on the smallest island, where with the boat and the sloop they counted 40 people, there were 80 cans of water, and on the
larger island for 180 people there were still less. ”

“ They wished to bring this boat back and, if possible, to kill all the people. For this project they had selected twenty-two men. Jerome had said that this plan did not please him. He had begged of them, so he related, to prepare a boat or a shallop to sail to the mainland, and then to India. This they had considered impossible, and, carrying out their own resolution, they had gone across with the twenty-two men. On their return, he (Jerome Cornelisz) had once more begged of them to rig out a vessel, but all in vain. They had again
started, this time with three boats and thirty-seven men. ”

“ He answered that he knew nothing of the conspiracy, neither had he known of it on board, but after the ship had foundered he had heard from divers people, now dead, that such a plot existed between the Skipper, Jerome, the boatswain, Rijckert Woutersz, Allert Jansz, of Assendelft, Cornelis Jansz, of Haarlem, surnamed Boontjen*, Gijabert van Welderen, Coenraldt van Huyssen, and ten or twelve others. The idea had been first to nail down the trap door of the soldiers' berths, and then to get the mastery of the ship. Allert Jansz, of Assendelft, was undoubtedly one of the accomplices. ”

“ He had further planned with David van Seevangh, Coenraldt van Huyssen, and Jacob Pietersz, to seize the first yacht that should arrive, but meanwhile they intended to try and conquer the people on the large island, or bring them to submission. If then a yacht had come they would have induced the crew to come ashore with a boat, and made them drunk; after which it would have been easy to put them out of the way, and to surreptitiously seize the vessel by night They thought this plot could not very well fail, for they calculated that such a yacht would not carry more than 20 or 30 men. ”

“ Offering to lead an expedition of his countrymen to the Indies, he conducted his ships in the closing years of the sixteenth century to Java and other islands. On one tour he sighted a cluster of rocky islets in Australian waters, and named them after his brother, “Frederick Houtman’s Abrolhos”, the latter term being a contraction of the Portuguese “abri vossos olhos” - “Keep your eyes open”. The history of the islands and of the wrecks on them suggests that their christener put into their name a Cassandra warning. In 1616 came Dirk Hartog, who found the island which still bears his name. ”

“ Houses have been built on the larger islands, Rat, Pelsart, and Gun Islands, with quarters and laboratories. Jetties and tramways have been constructed, and the group has undergone a marked transformation since its islands were untenanted, except by the sea-fowl, who seem to go to the Abrolhos from far and near as their breeding-ground. The noddy terns are specially numerous. Hair seals were visitors to the islands till the arrival of regular inhabitants scared them away. There are many rabbits on Pelsart Island. ”

“ On Square Island are two pits which may have been dug as rifle pits to resist an invading force. The Abrolhos have been the scene of many wrecks. In the century following 1639 the Dutch East India Company had to mourn the loss of the following vessels there: The Batavia in 1629, the Verfulde Draeck in 1656, the Ridderschap van Holland in 1693, the Zuysdorp in 1711, the Zeewyk in 1726. The last resembled the Batavia wreck in so much as the vessel was totally destroyed, and the crew had to build a boat from the wreckage in which to go north to the Straits. ”

“ David van Seevangh, Gijsbert van Welderen, Coenraldt van Huyssen, Cornelisz Pietersz of Utrecht, Jan Hendricksz of Bremen, Rutgert Frederiksz of Groningen, Hans Jacob Heylwerck of Basel, and others, making them sign the following contract and swear to it:
“We the undersigned, in order to take away all distrust that exists or might arise amongst us, bind ourselves herewith, on the salvation of our souls, and on the solemn oath that God shall truly help us, to be true to each other in everything, and to love each other as brothers ”

“ Governor, or whether they should be here sentenced and put to death according to their deserts as an example to others; for the danger existed that the ship and all her cargo might be lost, if they went to sea with so many half and wholly corrupted people. It was their duty to prevent this catastrophe, which undoubtedly threatened the vessel through the presence of such miscreants as Jerome Cornelisz and his accomplices, especially as already some, or perhaps all the remaining mates, might have imbibed the poison of their ill-intentioned seduction. ”

“ When they came to conclude the peace with solemn oaths, promising to forget and forgive all that had passed, David van Seevanck and Coenraldt van Huyssen tried to bribe some soldiers to treason, offering them each six thousand guilders, if, when they returned
next day after the conclusion of the peace, these men would side with them and help to kill the others. ”

“ The remaining women, the sisters Catherine and Susan Fredericks, Annie Bosnchietsters, and Mary Lorrysen, were allotted to the other men. To prevent all disastrous dissension, he made a code of regulations, which every one signed under oath, as is given in the preceding pages. The women also, if they wished to save their lives, had to swear allegiance to those regulations.
On the 20th of September, before noon, the boat was sent to the vessel to bring ashore some necessaries, and the long boat to the island on which Webbye Hays and his people were to find some fresh water. ”

“ Now that the people, all except 30 men and four boys, were mostly massacred and put out of the way, these miscreants resolved to go to the high island with two flat-bottomed sloops, in order to attack Webbye Hays and his men by surprise, and to kill them, thinking that otherwise he might give warning of their intention to any yacht that should come to their rescue, and thus their design would be frustrated. ”

“ The scoundrels, themselves, show an equally theological tendency, and their worse of deeds, the partition of the unhappy women was duly-chronicled in a resolution by which they “bind themselves on their soul’s salvation, and by the help of God to be true to each other”, while in another document they consign the man who proves false to be “the Devil’s own”, a title which they seem to have deserved in any case. ”

“ The Pelsart group is about twelve miles long and seven broad, and lies some thirty-five miles from the mainland, being separated from the Easter group by the Zeewyk Channel, which is so wide that with a good glass on a fine day the nearest
islands of the two groups are barely within sight of each other. They are accordingly so detached that the shipwrecked crew of the Batavia when wrecked upon them naturally kept to their first position, and did not transfer themselves northwards to any larger island. ”

“ It contains the shipwreck; the massacre of 125 of the party, including women and children: the treatment of the women captured and kept alive by the mutineers;
the inhuman conduct of the principal conspirators; the heroic and successful resistance of the few faithful men fighting for life and honour almost without the smallest hope of success; the long boat voyage of the Commodore’s party hurrying to Batavia for rescue for the men they knew were in peril, and, perhaps, at the point of death on the barren islands behind them ”

“ He confessed in the presence of Jerome that by Jerome's order David van Seevanck had commanded him together with Laenert Michielsz and Jan Hendricksz, to kill Passchier van den Enden, musketeer, and Jacob Heyndricksz, carpenter. Coming at the tent, Jan Hendricksz had rushed inside, and cut Passchier's throat, but Jacob Heyndricksz they had only ordered to remain in his tent. Then David van Seevanck had gone to Jerome, saying "Jacob Heyndricksz is a good carpenter; let him live". But Jerome had answered, "He is nothing but a turncoat and quite unreliable. He will only tell on us some day ”

“ To which he replied, that, they should not blame him for what had happened, putting it all on David van Seevanck, Coenraldt van Huyssen and others, who had been killed in the last encounter with Webbye Hays’ men. He said they had forced him to it, threatening otherwise to take his life. One had often to do a great deal to save oneself. ”

“ The Abrolhos, it may be mentioned, stretch for nearly fifty miles along the coast of Western Australia — a dreaded line of low islands and sharp-toothed coral reefs, among which a vessel fares ill. They fall naturally into three groups — the Wallabi and then the Pelsarto group in the south; a group in the north, then the Eastern group. As Mr. Saville-Kent shows in his recent work “The Naturalist in Australia”, these islands give a unique opportunity for scientific research. ”

“ On the 21st the breeze blew fresh from the east-south-east They then noticed that the water remained very low there, and the longboat could not come back from the island that day on account of the strong wind;, they therefore spent that day examining the prisoners. ”