The Batavia, pride of the Dutch East India Company, left Texel in October 1628 on her maiden voyage to the Indies, carrying over 300 people and chests of silver. Aboard were the company merchant Francisco Pelsaert, in overall command; a skipper who despised him; and the under-merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz — a bankrupt Haarlem apothecary fleeing association with a heretical sect, who spent the voyage quietly recruiting for a mutiny that never got its chance to launch.
In the pre-dawn dark of 4 June 1629 the ship drove onto a reef of the Houtman Abrolhos, a low archipelago some 60 km off the Western Australian coast. About 280 people reached nearby islets; the islands offered almost no water. After days of futile searching, Pelsaert, the skipper, and some 45 others took the longboat and made one of the great open-boat voyages — over 3,000 km to Java in 33 days — to fetch rescue.
The kingdom of Jeronimus
Cornelisz, left as senior company official, took command of some 200 castaways — and of all the boats, weapons, and stores. His problem was arithmetic: water and food for too many, and a rescue ship that, when it came, must hear only his version. His solution unfolded with bureaucratic method. He dispatched the soldiers among the survivors — the men most able to resist — to a distant island on the pretext of searching for water, expecting them to die. Then, with a sworn band of followers, he began killing: the sick, the inconvenient, whole families by night, servants drowned on work parties. Some 110-125 men, women, and children were murdered over six weeks; several women were kept alive, enslaved for the killers’ use.
The soldiers did not die. Led by the private Wiebbe Hayes, they found wells on their island, built a small coral-block fort — the oldest standing European structure in Australia — and fattened on wallabies and birds. Warned by escapees, they beat off successive mutineer assaults with improvised pikes. On the day of the final battle, Pelsaert’s rescue ship Sardam appeared on the horizon, and the race between the two parties’ boats was won by Hayes: the rescuers heard the truth first.
The reckoning
Pelsaert tried the mutineers on the islands. Cornelisz and his chief killers were hanged on Seal Island, hands first struck off; two lesser offenders were marooned on the Australian mainland — becoming, by accident, the first recorded European residents of the continent, their fate unknown. Others were broken on the wheel in Batavia city. Pelsaert, held partly responsible, died within the year.
The wreck was relocated in 1963; her raised stern timbers, skeletons bearing blade trauma, and the stone portico she carried as ballast fill the museums of Fremantle and Geraldton — the Dutch Golden Age’s tidiest ship-borne hell, preserved in coral.