Authors: Peter Fitzsimons
Batavia
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Copyright Act 1968
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Batavia
ePub ISBN 9781742741468
Kindle ISBN 9781742741475
A William Heinemann book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
First published by William Heinemann in 2011
Copyright © Peter FitzSimons 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices
.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
FitzSimons, Peter.
Batavia / Peter FitzSimons.
ISBN 978 1 86471 040 3 (hbk).
Batavia (Ship)
Shipwrecks – Western Australia – Houtman Abrolhos Islands.
Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.
Mutiny – Western Australia – Houtman Abrolhos Islands – History.
919.4104
Jacket images: etchings reproduced courtesy of the Australian National Maritime Museum;
Batavia
painting by John Cornwell,
www.johncornwell.com.au
Jacket design by Adam Yazxhi/MAXCO
Internal maps and diagram of the
Batavia
by James Carlton
To Hugh Edwards OAM, Max Cramer OAM and
Henrietta Drake-Brockman, who did more than any in
the modern era to bring this stunning story to light.
Contents
Chapter One: Across the Seven Seas
Chapter Three: The Shine of the Moon o’er the Waves
Chapter Four: Batavia’s Graveyard
Chapter Five: The Grip Tightens
Chapter Seven: Say Your Prayers
Chapter Nine: Deliver Us from Evil
Chapter Ten: In Justice Reunited
Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is also so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.
Mark Twain, 1897
Preface
In a chance lunch conversation with my two then publishers, Shona Martyn and Alison Urquhart, late in 1999, they mentioned the seventeenth-century story of the shipwreck of the
Batavia
and how it might possibly lend itself to a great book. That afternoon, I went back to the library of the
Sydney Morning Herald
and dug up some stuff on it. I was instantly and totally absorbed. Among other things, I was stunned to read of the grandeur of the ship herself and that when her replica had sailed into Sydney Harbour a couple of months previously, to get to her berth at the Maritime Museum in Darling Harbour, she had needed to do so during an exceptionally low tide so the top of her mighty mast would fit under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And this was a ship that was originally built nearly 400 years earlier. Staggering!
The true wonder of the story, though, had little to do with the physical dimensions of the ship and everything to do with the personal dynamics of the
Batavia
’s company once she got into strife. Sure, a lot of the details might have been well known to many Australians, particularly in Western Australia, but they were totally unknown to me – and I remember thinking at the time that the whole astonishing saga made the story of the sinking of the
Titanic
look like a Sunday School picnic. I frankly couldn’t believe that such a fantastic story wasn’t as well known in this country as Ned Kelly or the Eureka Stockade and decided then and there to write a book on it.
In short order, I had a contract to do exactly that, and I began my research. A lot of water has passed beneath the bridge since then – I have been involved in many other projects, including many other books, and have changed publishing houses – yet I have returned again and again for further bursts of work on the
Batavia
story before dedicating myself to its completion. What you hold in your hands is the result.
Over the last 400 years or so, many other authors have also been bitten by the bug of the
Batavia
, with the first accounts of the 1629 shipwreck appearing in the 1647 Dutch work
Ongeluckige Voyagie, Van’t Schip Batavia
(
Unlucky Voyage of the Ship Batavia
), published by Jan Jansz. A bestseller of its time, this book was predominantly a third-person treatment of the original journal of Francisco Pelsaert,
Commandeur
of the fleet in which the flagship
Batavia
made her maiden voyage, which explains why it was frequently (and incorrectly) known as ‘Pelsaert’s Journal’.
Pelsaert’s actual journal describing this sorry saga from beginning to end is now kept in the Netherlands’ National Archives in The Hague, and it was a special thrill in the researching of this book to have held it in my hands. I am indebted to Lennart Bes of the National Archives for facilitating my access to it.
The first of the more modern Australian books on it,
The Wicked and the Fair
, was a fictionalised account written by Western Australia’s Henrietta Drake-Brockman and published in 1957. Her seminal non-fiction book
Voyage to Disaster
(1963) came out of her research for
The Wicked and the Fair
and took ten years to write. Her tireless research helped lead to the actual discovery of the
Batavia
by Max Cramer and his little band, working with Hugh Edwards and local fishermen, in the same year. Edwards’s
Islands of Angry Ghosts
came out in 1966 and, among other things, describes the wonderful tale of how the two men finally came to pinpoint the site of the wreck. All of us who follow owe Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Cramer and Edwards a great debt, and I am grateful for the extent to which the two men were able to assist me in my research.
Hugh squired me around the Abrolhos Islands, where it all took place, showed me things that only a man of his deep background in the subject would know and, thereafter, was constantly steering me towards different pieces of information. As to Max Cramer, who organised the trip for Hugh and me, his eyes were the first to see the
Batavia
in 334 years, and he became an acknowledged world authority. Max, too, was wonderfully generous in sharing his knowledge, and he and his wife, Ines, were also warm hosts when I visited Geraldton, the nearest mainland town to the Abrolhos Islands. I was in constant touch with Max throughout the course of this book and was deeply saddened when he died in mid-August 2010.
Vale
, Max.
And then there is the craggy cray fisherman who wishes to be known only as ‘Spags’ and actually lives on those islands, loving and caring for them with an abiding passion. I met him on my visit with Hugh Edwards, and he, too, couldn’t have been more generous in sharing his deep local knowledge.
In recent years, interest in the
Batavia
has slowly grown, and a slew of books on the subject appeared just after the millennium, as did a well-received
Batavia
-related opera. Yet, generally, the passion of the writers for the wonder of the story has not been remotely matched by the awareness and enthusiasm of the reading public. As I speak at various events around Australia, I frequently ask for a show of hands as to how many people know of it, and, on the east coast particularly, it is usually between five and ten per cent of the audience. The story of the
Titanic
is a thousand times better known.
How can this be? The most obvious answer is that it is very difficult for the modern writer to breathe life into a 400-year-old story that relies on just two primary documents for its base, being firstly Pelsaert’s Journal and, secondly, a sketchy retrospective account of the terrible drama by the
Batavia
’s preacher, which he addressed to his relatives. Known as the ‘Predikant’s Letter’, it was written on 11 December 1629, just a short time after the saga’s conclusion.
This very problem of how to successfully resuscitate the tragedy was identified by the Dutch-born Australian Willem Siebenhaar. In an article for Perth’s
The Western Mail
on 24 December 1897 – an article that for the first time in Australia provided a broad translation for the 1647 work
Ongeluckige Voyagie
– he wrote:
The story has been used by Mr. W. J. Gordon as the basis of a novel entitled
The Captain-General
, but still awaits the coming of someone who will put permanent life into its dry bones. If there is any ambitious Australian poet who desires to emulate, say Browning’s ‘Ring and the Book’, he may find in these records something that will afford more scope than the old parchment-bound tale of Roman murder and the trial of Count Guido, on which that great poem was reared.
Ahem. (The author is heard to rather nervously clear his throat.)
I am not an Australian poet, but I certainly am in possession of a small poetic licence, which I have long felt was always going to be the key to making the
Batavia
story resonate for the wider audience. In his meticulously researched book of 2002,
Batavia’s Graveyard
, Cambridge-trained English historian Mike Dash makes the legitimate claim that there is not one line of dialogue in his work not
corroborated by primary documents
. While Dash’s
Batavia’s Graveyard
is, and will remain, far and away the most authoritative work on the subject, I make no such claim for this book. It seemed to me from the beginning of writing this book that, while not embarking on flights of fancy that take the reader well away from the documented storyline, limiting the protagonists’ dialogue to the few broken shards of conversation that have survived would make it very difficult to convey the emotional depth of this tragedy and do justice to a story of such shocking spiritual and physical magnitude.
I have previously likened the writing of other ‘creative non-fiction’ books that I have done, such as
Kokoda
,
Tobruk
,
The Ballad of Les Darcy
and
Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men
, to having 50,000 pieces of a jigsaw puzzle at one’s disposal . . . with space for only 1000 pieces. In these cases, the challenge was to find the
right
1000 pieces, so that the picture I finally drew was illustrative of the whole.