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1629

Batavia (Francisco Pelsaert)

Early encounters with the Australian coast were never more dramatic, or as tragic, as the wreck of the flagship of the VOC (Dutch East India Company) fleet, Batavia, and its vicious aftermath.

On 4 June 1629, the Batavia, ran aground on Houtman Abrolhos, off present-day Geraldton, in Western Australia. While a rescue was being organised in Java, a massacre by mutinous crew members claimed the lives of 96 men, women and children.

Under the command of Francisco Pelsaert, the Batavia had set sail for Batavia (present-day Jakarta) on 25 October 1628. Aboard the 45-metre vessel were 316 passengers, soldiers and crew. In her holds were cloth, wines, cheeses, trade goods, 12 chests filled with silver coin worth 250,000 guilders and a casket of jewels.

After leaving the Cape of Good Hope, the Batavia lost contact with the two ships accompanying her. Below decks, discontent was brewing: Adriaen Jacobsz, the ship’s skipper, bitterly resented Pelsaert, and Jeronimus Cornelisz, her undermerchant, was a man of barely controlled depravity and violence.

Just before dawn on 4 June 1629, and before the two men could organise a mutiny, the ship ran aground on Morning Reef, a coral reef off Houtman Abrolhos. Forty drowned in the wreck and the remaining passengers and crew managed to find safety on the shores of two deserted low-lying coral islands. Four days later, Pelsaert, Jacobsz and 46 passengers and crew set sail in two ship’s boats in search of fresh water.

For about a week the boats sailed north, hugging the coast of the mainland. Their search was unsuccessful, however, and Pelsaert decided to head for Batavia and mount a rescue mission. The 3220-kilometre voyage to Java took 33 days.

In their absence, Cornelisz seized the treasure and, with his followers, began a reign of massacre and rape. He planned to seize the rescue ship with a force of 40 men, but 268 people remained on the islands. Over the next three months, the mutineers began to systematically kill them off.

Meanwhile, Pelsaert set off from Batavia in the Sardam on 15 July. When they arrived on the islands on 17 September, the sailors were confronted with the horrific news that more than 100 people had been murdered or died of disease.

After a short battle, the mutineers were captured and tried before Pelsaert and a council of his fellow officers. Seven men were found guilty of murder and, in the case of Cornelisz, heresy. Three days later, after having their right hands cut off, they were hanged. Two men who were condemned to death were reprieved and abandoned on the mainland. Another six mutineers were later hanged in Batavia.

Two of the mutineers became Australia’s first European settlers: a soldier and a cabin boy were left on the Australian mainland at Wittecarra Gully, near the mouth of the Murchison River.

The site of the tragedy is marked as text on the map from French scientist Melchisedech Thevenot’s 1663 travel anthology, Relations de divers voyages curieux, which brought to the public’s attention major Dutch discoveries such as Tasman’s.