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Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History

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Class from how Stuff Works dot com.

0:32

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy

0:35

Wilson. Today we are

0:37

continuing our story of the Batavia, which

0:40

is a story that includes just about everything that can

0:42

go wrong at see there's storms and

0:44

sicknesses that we haven't really talked about that they

0:46

were there, and then also a shipwreck and

0:49

a mutiny and a massacre. Yeah,

0:51

definitely some bad behavior going on a board. Yeah

0:53

there, there, we're going to talk about the

0:55

only people who really come out looking

0:58

pretty good in this whole situation. We don't hear about

1:00

them until the very end. So our

1:02

last episode, which you know, if you're

1:04

going out of order, I encourage you to listen to

1:06

that one first. That was the shipwreck part

1:08

of this story. That's a little bit about

1:10

a mutiny that never really got off the ground. Where

1:13

we left off, the upper Merchant

1:16

Francisco Pelsert has left hundreds

1:19

of survivors on a few tiny islands

1:21

off the coast of Australia. Uh He

1:24

and nearly every other senior officer

1:26

on the ship have gone all the way

1:28

to Indonesia and back to get help.

1:31

So we know that they got to Indonesia, we know

1:33

they got back. This episode

1:35

is what happened while they were

1:37

gone. So

1:41

nobody on the islands, as we talked about at

1:43

the end of the last episode, knew that Pelser

1:45

had decided to go to Batavia for help.

1:47

They had no way of finding out about his progress.

1:50

They just knew that they hadn't seen anything of

1:52

him or the skipper for days. But

1:55

about a week after the search party left

1:57

in their longboat, the survivors finally

1:59

got an authority figure. The

2:01

Batavia finally broke apart,

2:04

forcing Cornelis to join the survivors

2:06

that were on these islands. So, just

2:09

for context, about forty people

2:12

died when the Batavia broke apart. The

2:14

survivors clung to rafts that they had

2:16

made on board as it became

2:18

clear that the time of the ship was

2:20

drying to a close Cornelis

2:23

in particular survived by climbing the bowsprit

2:25

at the four of the ship and then clinging to

2:27

it when it broke off and using it to

2:30

float to land. And for the backstory

2:32

we promised on him earlier, Cornelis

2:35

was an educated, literate man from an

2:37

affluent family. He had trained

2:39

an apprenticed as an apothecary,

2:41

and he started his own apothecary practice.

2:44

He had been married and had a child, but the baby

2:47

unfortunately died in its infancy.

2:49

And first a deranged and incompetent

2:51

midwife had handled the delivery, and she

2:53

failed to deliver part of the placenta,

2:56

so his wife got a life threatening infection

2:58

as a result, and then they had to hire

3:00

a wet nurse while she recovered, and

3:02

the wet nurse unfortunately gave

3:05

the baby syphilis. It was just the worst

3:07

possible series of events for a birth.

3:09

What's also kind of unclear exactly how

3:12

he was such a poor judge of character

3:14

to have hired both an incompetent midwife

3:17

and, as we are about

3:19

to tell you, a clearly unwell

3:22

wet nurse for the baby. So in

3:24

spite of Cornelis getting sworn statements

3:27

from basically everybody attesting to

3:29

the fact that he was completely clean and the

3:31

wet nurse was an abominable character and

3:33

obviously poor health, everyone still

3:35

assumed that the baby had gotten syphilis

3:37

from his mother, and this was a huge

3:40

stigma and a very terrible reflection

3:42

on Cornelis and his family and his practice.

3:45

Like, obviously, if the baby

3:48

had gotten syphilis, it had gotten siphilps from

3:50

his mother, and that meant that his mother or his father,

3:52

somebody had been unfaithful in this situation, Like

3:54

there was a whole boatload of social

3:57

expectation and and rules

3:59

for behavior and that's violated,

4:02

and that meant that as an apothecary,

4:04

there was sickness introduced into that as

4:06

well. Yeah, so his business

4:09

seriously suffered as a result, and

4:11

it had already been on shaky footing even

4:13

before this scandal happened. All

4:15

of this combined with demands for reparation

4:18

from a merchant who had known Cornelli's money

4:20

to put him completely under and otherwise

4:22

he'd not really have had any reason to go

4:25

to sea. And he had

4:27

also developed sort of a

4:29

strange personal, religious, and moral

4:31

code. It was a hodgepodge of influences

4:34

from throughout his life. It combined

4:36

Anabaptist and Mennonite teachings with the

4:38

blasphemous and heretical philosophies

4:41

of a Dutch painter named Johannes Simons

4:43

Vanderbeek who also was known as Tarentius,

4:47

and somewhere along the line he picked up ideas

4:49

from Epicurus as well, along with

4:51

the Antonomian idea that you only

4:53

need faith to attain salvation. So

4:56

reason number two that Cornellis had

4:58

taken to a life at sea. Trentius

5:01

wound up on trial for his heretical

5:03

beliefs and other stuff, and Cornelis realized

5:05

that he was extremely lucky not to

5:08

have been named in the proceedings, which would

5:10

have resulted in him being prosecuted

5:12

as well. So all of this together

5:14

made it seem really prudent that he gets as far away

5:17

as possible. I'm

5:20

again lack of judgment. Maybe

5:22

on top of prompting him to abandon his

5:25

wife and his home. These philosophical

5:27

and religious influences led Cornelis

5:29

to hold some troubling beliefs of

5:32

his own. He deeply believed

5:34

that every action that he personally

5:36

undertook was divinely inspired. And

5:38

this also meant that nothing he could do,

5:40

no matter what it was, could be considered

5:43

sinful or evil because it had all

5:45

been inspired by God. So

5:49

when the when the Batavia broke

5:51

up, this became the highest ranking

5:53

man on the islands. And

5:57

before we

5:59

talk about why he did, let's take a moment and

6:01

talk about a word from our sponsor. To

6:03

get back to Cornelis's plan

6:06

for world domination, the

6:08

people who were left on the islands really

6:11

felt like Pelser had abandoned them when

6:13

they really really needed him, and so

6:15

Cornelis was really, without a whole

6:17

lot of effort able to recruit about forty

6:20

men to continue in his original plan

6:22

to commit mutiny, even though the ship

6:24

they were going to originally use for this plan

6:27

was now destroyed. Instead, what

6:29

he and his mutineers planned to do was

6:31

to commandeer whatever ship came to their rescue

6:34

and then to use it to become pirates. It's

6:38

hard not to giggle. I feel like this is

6:40

a plan that like a ten year old put together.

6:43

The plans of this story are not good

6:45

plans, but the results are horribly

6:47

tragic. Uh to make sure

6:49

he would face no opposition. He started systematically

6:52

removing people who might not be down with his mutiny

6:54

plam from the island. This also

6:56

gave him fewer mouths to feed. Even

6:58

though the current really had delivered a bunch of supplies

7:01

from the Batavia to the islands, it still

7:03

wasn't enough to sustain everyone there. And

7:06

everybody he got rid of that was

7:08

not on his team, so to speak,

7:10

would make it all last a little bit longer.

7:13

Yeah, everybody had sort of felt like it was a

7:15

huge long shot to think that the Batavia

7:17

would break apart and the current would bring supplies

7:19

to them. That did actually happen,

7:22

the one thing that worked out. Yeah, And

7:24

it sounds like a lot of supplies because it was like

7:26

hundreds of barrels of things, but that it

7:28

was not when you looked at how many mouths

7:31

there were to feed, that did not actually equate

7:34

many days of sustenance any any

7:37

So, Cornelis

7:39

started sending people off to the other

7:41

nearby islands, and he would tell them that there

7:44

was water there, or he would send them there

7:46

to search for water or some other

7:48

ploy. And he basically sent them off to these

7:50

islands and didn't expect them to survive. He

7:52

was expecting them to die of hunger

7:54

and thirst. Horrible

7:57

man. Uh,

8:00

meditorializing, But I don't know how you can't come

8:02

to that conclusion. At that point, he

8:04

also started sending people out in boats, presumably

8:06

as scouts, but he'd also

8:08

put men that were loyal to him on

8:11

those boats and they would throw

8:13

his targets overboard and leave them

8:15

to drown. Really systematic.

8:18

Yeah. He also straight

8:20

up had his cronies murder people who were sick or

8:22

hurt, and they left most

8:24

of the women alive when so

8:27

that he and his crew could use them

8:29

for sexual purposes. Uh.

8:31

He also claimed Lucretia yawns

8:33

as his own sexual toy. So on top

8:35

of all these murders, there were many many rates happening

8:38

on the island. When he saw

8:40

survivors on one island continuing

8:42

to wander around the shore when he thought they should

8:45

be dead, uh, and then his little

8:47

I'll just get rid of them this way plan had not worked

8:49

out, he sent men in boats to kill them

8:52

as well. So as a result

8:54

of all of this, Beacon Island later came

8:56

to be known as Batavia's Graveyard. This

9:00

strategy of removing threats from the island

9:02

became Corneli's downfall. He

9:04

sent a group of soldiers led by Wibby Hayes

9:07

to two large islands where they

9:10

which they were calling the High Islands. Pelser

9:12

and company had already searched these islands and

9:14

reported that they had no water, but that

9:17

was not widespread knowledge, and

9:19

Cornelis confiscated the soldiers weapons

9:21

and sent them there, assuming that they would

9:23

just die of thirst. Yeah. He was

9:25

like, you guys, go search these big islands.

9:28

Water over there, you guys go find it.

9:30

Yeah. Wibby Hayes, on the

9:32

other hand, was a good leader,

9:35

and you know his soldiers under his

9:37

direction were very industrious. They

9:39

built a shelter. They conducted this

9:42

methodical search for water. They would like

9:44

they would nourish themselves from water that had

9:46

been collected in little pits in the rock. As

9:49

they systematically conducted

9:51

this widespread search, they eventually

9:53

found two cisterns. On

9:56

top of that, the two islands, which

9:58

they were right next to each other, they could between

10:00

them. They were later named East and

10:02

West Wallaby Island. They were home to wallabies

10:05

and lots of birds, which gave them a

10:07

pretty ample supply of food. Apparently

10:09

the fishing near these islands was also pretty

10:12

awesome, so they

10:14

were also, you know, in addition to the fact that they

10:16

found water, they found food, they

10:20

made a shelter, and they

10:22

started making simple weapons with which

10:24

to defend themselves. And

10:26

when Hayes men found the cisterns,

10:28

they sent up a smoke signal. This was

10:30

their prearranged method of letting Cornelis

10:33

know that there was water. And

10:35

while water was awesome and all, Cornelis

10:37

immediately saw the soldiers, their

10:39

water supply, their vantage

10:41

point, and their smoke signals as

10:43

a threat. How dare you be more industrious

10:46

and successful than me? Well,

10:48

as how there you now have things

10:50

to eat and water to drink, and weapons

10:52

to defend yourself with because they were industrious,

10:56

and a little shelter that they built out of rocks.

10:58

So first he tried to persuade

11:00

them to join his mutineers, and

11:03

they refused, after which

11:05

a big fight followed um

11:08

and so Hayes and his men drove Cornelis

11:10

and his men off. So after

11:13

that Cornelis sent an attack party to

11:15

try to kill them, and by this point hayes

11:17

men, who had named themselves the defenders

11:20

have really organized themselves. They had tried

11:22

to rescue other survivors. They fought

11:25

back and after a really bloody battle,

11:27

the soldiers executed five of Cornelis's

11:29

men, and they captured Cornelis

11:32

himself and held him prisoner as

11:34

they continued to wait for rescue.

11:37

Cornelis Is Coronis, who had not been part

11:39

of this failed overthrow of Webby Hayes,

11:42

were smart enough to stay away from the Wallaby

11:44

Islands. From that point, they

11:46

recognize that they were not going to win again. They

11:49

were outmatched, uh

11:51

by perhaps the man who should have been

11:53

in charge from the beginning. Hitting

11:56

That is my editorializing of this

11:58

situation. So finally,

12:02

after a month spent getting back

12:05

to Australia from Indonesia,

12:07

and then another month spent in a frustrating

12:10

search to try to figure out where they had left

12:12

that shipwreck, Pelzer and his yacht

12:15

wound up back at Batavia's graveyard. Uh

12:18

It sounds maybe a little ridiculous

12:20

that they got back to Australia and they could

12:23

not find the shipwreck, but at this point

12:25

the ship had been destroyed and

12:27

the area was not charted in the first

12:29

place. Because they didn't know where they were when they wrecked

12:31

to begin with. So yeah,

12:33

so he wound up back back in

12:35

the area. He disembarked on an

12:38

island that was about a mile away from

12:40

the Wallaby Islands, and they had water

12:42

and wine and bread for the survivors with

12:44

them. Soon Webby

12:46

Hayes and three other men rode up and told

12:49

them to get back aboard the yacht because there

12:51

were two parties of Corneliss men on

12:53

the loose and they meant to commandeer the yacht

12:56

u And they did in fact try to do that. They

12:59

they were eating mutineers found the yacht.

13:01

They tried to board it, but Pelser and the screw,

13:04

having now advanced knowledge of what was going on, captured

13:06

them, and while questioning his newfound

13:09

prisoners, Pelser learned that Jacobs

13:11

and cornelis original plan to mutiny

13:13

had started way way back before

13:15

the ship was even shipwrecked in the first place. After

13:18

Hayes handed Cornelis over, Pelser

13:20

questioned him, then went to round up the rest

13:23

of his co conspirators, and while

13:25

a few seem to have evaded capture, most

13:27

surrendered on the spot. Pelser

13:30

interrogated all of the accomplices, and

13:32

uh found out that their crimes included, in addition

13:35

to mutiny and murder, rape, looting

13:37

and treason. Their trials,

13:40

which were really torture and interrogation, and

13:42

their executions were carried out

13:44

on Seals Island. All of the primary

13:46

mutineers had their right hands cut off, Cornelis

13:49

had both of his hands cut off, and then

13:51

all of them were hanged on October two

13:53

of six nine, roughly

13:55

a year after the Batavia set sail

13:57

from Holland, and those hanged on

14:00

Seals Island were left dangling from the gallows.

14:02

Pelser also marooned two of the

14:04

youngest members of the crew in Australia.

14:07

The rest of them were keeled, hauled and

14:09

dropped from yard arms and flogged on

14:11

the way back to Batavia, where they were ultimately

14:14

executed. Before leaving

14:16

the islands, Pelser led a pretty successful

14:19

savage salvage mission, loading

14:21

up the Stardum with as much as they could find

14:23

before returning to Batavia, and they

14:26

arrived there on December five nine.

14:29

Even though he had done his ultimate job

14:31

of protecting the cargo, eventually,

14:34

after a fashion, his career

14:36

never really recovered from this whole incident, and

14:38

he died not long after, probably

14:41

of the same illness that had brought him down on

14:43

board. And it was after he

14:45

died that they discovered his illicit

14:47

money lending business, which

14:49

he was funding with company money. Yeah.

14:52

So again it's hard to root for very many people

14:54

in the story, even though he seems kind of stand up

14:56

in many ways he compared

14:59

to the other people on board, but

15:01

there were still there were issues, And

15:04

then the v o C didn't actually

15:06

make a lot of money, even though he

15:08

he did salvage a lot of the stuff, because

15:10

the person they had been planning to sell all

15:12

of this stuff too. By the time it was all said

15:14

and done was no longer in power, and the

15:17

person who had taken his place did not really care

15:19

about the stuff that had been brought over. It

15:22

was a failure in a lot of ways. Uh.

15:24

The last living mutineers who had come

15:27

all the way back to Batavia were eventually

15:29

executed there, and in the end, out

15:31

of the three hundred and sixteen people who

15:33

were aboard the Batavia when it wrecked, only

15:36

about a hundred and sixteen survived. Webby

15:39

Hayes was commissioned as an officer on arrival

15:41

in Batavia, and all his soldiers

15:43

were promoted from privates to cadets.

15:46

Lucretia Jahns, who at one point

15:49

during the trials was accused by

15:51

her rapists of having tempted them into

15:53

it, arrived in Batavia

15:55

to learn that her husband had been dead for

15:57

at least five months. We

16:00

don't really know whether Cornelis's wife

16:02

ever learned of his treachery. Her story

16:04

sort of fades away after a prolonged and public

16:06

back and forth with the syphilitic wet

16:09

nurse that they had hired. So Lobster

16:11

fisherman found the Batavia's wreckage in

16:14

nineteen sixty three and part of the

16:16

hall was raised from the ocean floor and

16:18

it's now displayed in the Western Australian

16:20

Maritime Museum, and there are also

16:22

other artifacts from the wreck that are on displayed

16:24

there and in other museums. There

16:27

has also been an extensive study of bodies

16:29

from Batavia's graveyard and surrounding

16:31

islands. It's basically

16:33

super horrifying. Yeah, lots

16:36

of evidence of how people were brutally

16:38

bludgeoned to death and had multiple

16:41

broken bones and skull fractures,

16:43

and that's pretty terrible

16:46

uh. In a weird way,

16:48

the Batavia and its shipwreck wound up

16:50

being the source of a whole lot of first

16:53

slash other notable historical

16:55

things, like it was the first

16:57

Dutch ship lost off the coast of Australia.

17:00

Webby Hayes's shelters were the first European

17:03

structures on the continent of Australia,

17:05

and the ruins of those shelters still stand

17:07

today. That two marooned

17:09

Mutineers were the first European

17:12

residents of Australia. And the Batavia

17:14

is the only v o C ship to have been archaeologically

17:17

raised and conserved. And this whole

17:19

incident also inspired the v o C

17:22

to methodically map the coastline

17:24

of US Australia so that perhaps such

17:27

a disaster would never happen again.

17:30

Yeah, that will

17:32

make you not want to get on a boat. It's

17:35

the The whole story has so many layers

17:38

of just awful, our awfulness

17:40

that keeps getting worse and more

17:43

awful. I think this is one

17:45

I don't remember who. I think this is one that someone

17:48

suggested on Twitter and

17:50

I was kind of like, Mutine's me and you sound

17:52

good. And then I took one look at it and went,

17:54

wait, this is more than just a mutiny. There's

17:57

a whole lot more than mutiny going on here. Yeah,

18:00

it's kind of like a portrait

18:02

of like the worst of humanity in many

18:04

ways. Yeah,

18:07

that troubling. Yeah,

18:10

I like Webby Hayes. He

18:12

kind of fades away from history. We don't really know

18:14

what happened to him. It's kind of assumed that perhaps

18:17

he died of some sort of tropical illness. We

18:20

just don't have a lot of historical

18:22

record on him after the end

18:24

of the Batavia story. But

18:27

yeah, while everybody else was having some Lord of Flies

18:29

action, he was keeping

18:32

things. Ducks were in a row.

18:35

So I have a little listener

18:37

mail dependent. This listener

18:39

mail is from Alexander,

18:42

and Alexander says, Dear Tracy and Holly. I've

18:45

been a longtime listener of the podcast, and while not

18:47

as regular as I like to me, try to listen as

18:50

much as I can. They certainly help an

18:52

otherwise slow day at work fly by.

18:54

While listening to past episodes, I heard your podcast

18:57

on say Shown a Gone and I wanted to pass on an

18:59

interesting fact about the period. As a

19:01

history major that focused on Asian studies.

19:03

I had always wondered why medieval Japan had

19:05

so many female authors as opposed

19:07

to the rest of the world, which focused more on male

19:09

dominated traditions. While women in

19:12

the hand Court were responsible for many great

19:14

literary works of the time and then in parentheses

19:16

the Tale of Ganji and the Pillow Talks in particular,

19:19

the men of the period didn't really come up with much

19:21

to match. This had remained

19:23

a mystery to me until recently. It turns

19:25

out that a big reason for hay on courts,

19:28

prolific female population and lackluster

19:31

showing for the men has to do with court tradition.

19:33

As you Guys mentioned in the podcast, the hand

19:35

court was largely dominated by Chinese culture,

19:38

and tradition has had a major effect

19:40

on how court nobles conducted themselves,

19:42

including the language that they would write in.

19:45

It was considered proper and sophisticated for male

19:47

noblemen to write and speak in Chinese, while

19:49

women were expected to know Japanese.

19:52

This ironically had a negative influence

19:54

on men and their poetry because they will be writing

19:56

using a second language, which resulted in mediocre

19:59

literary works. On the other hand,

20:01

women in the hand court were able to write in their

20:03

first language, which facilitated much more

20:05

artistic and literary ability. Has

20:08

resulted at a much higher quality of literary writings,

20:10

such as the Tale of Genji Uh

20:12

and pillow books from the fetal population,

20:15

while the male population tended to lag

20:17

behind. That is fascinating.

20:20

It is it rang a distant bell in

20:22

my head. I vaguely remember at one point hearing

20:24

about um the separation

20:26

of languages across the sexes, but that's

20:29

as far as my brain went with it. Yeah, so

20:32

it's cool to get more in depth

20:35

analysis of how that all panned out. So

20:37

thank you very much for that note. If you would

20:39

like to write to us, you can. We're at History Podcasts

20:41

that Discovery dot com. We're also on Facebook

20:44

at facebook dot com, slash miss in History and

20:46

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