[The following takes place during the Batavia mutiny. A bit of context: In 1628, the Dutch Republic merchant vessel Batavia was shipwrecked on her maiden voyage, on a small group of barren and uninhabited Abrolhos Islands. Jeronimus Cornelisz, the ship’s under-merchant, had been planning a bloody mutiny during the voyage and, after the shipwreck and subsequent departure of much of the ship’s leadership to seek rescue, he set about following through with his mutiny. He planned to gather a large enough following amongst the nearly 200 survivors to overwhelm any rescue vessel, to commandeer said vessel, and to take the Batavia’s treasure, turning to a short life of piracy in the Indies before retiring to a life of luxury. Here, Cornelisz has already formed a large following and, assuming a leadership role soon after the crash, conspired to send large parties of loyalist refugees and soldiers to nearby barren islands in search of water and to establish camps, all the while making sure any weapons and supplies remained under his care. At this point, Cornelisz has already begun the killing that would see most of the survivors that hadn’t declared loyalty to him dead, and was now setting about getting some of those who had only recently joined him to prove their dedication to him.]
The first mutineer to be tested by the under-merchant was a German soldier named Hans Hardens. He came from Ditmarschen, a province close to Denmark’s border with the Holy Roman Empire. Having taken service with the VOC for a five-year term, Hardens had boarded the Batavia with his wife, Anneken, and his six-year-old daughter, Hilletgie. All three of them had survived the voyage and the wreck and found themselves together on the Batavia’s Graveyard.
Hardens, so far as one can tell, had played no part in the conspiracy on board the ship, but he had gravitated towards Cornelisz’s circle in the month after the wreck, apparently in the hope of feeding and protecting his wife and daughter. In time he became one of the more active mutineers, though he was hardly the most violent. Nevertheless, there was something about him that gave Jeronimus pause. The soldier may have been too slow to obey an order, too free with his opinions, or perhaps too friendly with Frans Jansz. So Cornelisz invited Hardens and his wife into his tent and – while they ate and drank together – sent Jan Hendricxsz to strangle their little girl.
Hilletgie Hardens was the first child to be killed on Batavia’s Graveyard, but if her death was intended to test Hans Hardens’s loyalty, Jeronimus must have been satisfied with the result. No matter what his private grief, Hardens knew he had no choice but to stick to his allegiance to the mutineers, especially if he was to have any hope of protecting his wife. Three days after his daughter’s murder, Hardens swore an oath of fealty to his comrades: a solemn vow, a “written unbreakable agreement, the greatest oath that anyone can take, to be faithful in everything.”
The brutal killing of the little girl perhaps affected the Batavia survivors more than any of the other early murders.
[…]
Her death thus marked a significant deterioration of conditions in the archipelago. From then on, none of the retourschip’s passengers and crew could be certain they were safe. Showing loyalty to the under-merchant, obeying orders and working hard were no longer any guarantee of Jeronimus’s favor. He and his followers had begun to murder indiscriminately.
Source:
Dash, Mike. “The Tiger.” Batavia's Graveyard. Three Rivers Press, 2003. 169-70. Print.
Further Reading:
Batavia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batavia_(ship)
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