The Batavia — A shipwreck became a massacre of about 125 stranded survivors

The Batavia, flagship of the Dutch East India Company on her maiden voyage from the Netherlands to the East Indies, struck Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos off the coast of Western Australia before dawn on 4 June 1629. She carried roughly 340 people. About forty drowned in the wreck; the rest, some 280 men, women and children, reached a cluster of small, low coral islands that had no fresh water and almost no food. What followed was not principally a story of exposure but of murder. While the commander went for help, one man turned the marooned survivors into victims of a planned slaughter.

The upper-merchant Francisco Pelsaert and the skipper took the ship’s longboat and about forty-seven people and made an open-boat voyage of roughly 1,900 nautical miles over thirty-three days to the port of Batavia (present-day Jakarta) to bring a rescue ship. In his absence the under-merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz, who had been entangled in a mutiny plot before the wreck, seized control of the largest island. To stretch the scant supplies and remove anyone who might oppose him, he and a band of followers murdered an estimated 125 of the stranded — men, women and children — by drowning, strangling and the sword over some weeks, while a number of women were kept and abused.

Cornelisz had sent a party of soldiers under Wiebbe Hayes to a separate island, expecting them to die of thirst. Instead they found water and game, learned of the killings from escapees, armed themselves with improvised weapons, and repulsed the mutineers’ attacks. When Pelsaert returned on the rescue ship Sardam in late September 1629, the soldiers’ resistance had held. Cornelisz and the chief murderers were tried on the islands and hanged in October, several first having a hand struck off; two lesser mutineers were marooned on the Australian mainland. Of the roughly 340 who had sailed, only a fraction reached Java alive.