[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 hard ordered so many murders on the islands, that both he and his men had started showing signs of becoming almost literally addicted to murdering.]
Gijsbert had not been allowed to mourn his murdered family. The day after his wife and children had been killed, the mutineers had found him “weeping very much,” and ordered him to stop. “Said that I ought not to do so,” the preacher noted. “Said, that does not matter; be silent, or you go the same way.” Nor did Bastiaensz receive, in Jeronimus’s kingdom, the respect and special treatment normally accorded to a minister. He not only worked, as everybody had to work, but ate the same meager rations as the other people on Batavia’s Graveyard. And, like them, the predikant heard Zevanck and the others freely discuss who they would kill next and how, and he feared daily for his life:
”Every day it was, ‘What shall we do with that Man?’ The one would decapitate me, the other poison me, which would have been a sweeter death; a third said, ‘Let him live a little longer, we might make use of him to persuade the folk on the other Land to come over to us.’… And so, briefly, this being the most important thing, my Daughter and I, we both went along as an Ox in front of the Axe. Every night I said to her, you have to look tomorrow morning, whether I have been murdered… and I told her what she had to do if she found me slaughtered; and that also we must be prepared to meet God.”
Source:
Dash, Mike. “Who Wants to Be Stabbed To Death?” Batavia's Graveyard. Three Rivers Press, 2003. 213-14. Print.
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