THE WRECK OF THE BATAVIA
The letters VOC represent Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie - Dutch East India Company.
The insatiable seventeenth century European appetite for spices drew into competition Dutch, English and Portuguese mariners to bring back the priceless cargoes from the Spice Islands, in today's Indonesia. These were long and dangerous voyages in the seventeenth century to a part of the world that was far from Europe and little known.
The Dutch colonised the Spice Islands and other parts of what they called the Dutch East Indies - today's Indonesia. Some ships of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) brought settlers to these islands before returning laden with the precious spices.
In 1611, the VOC pioneered a new and healthier route to these islands. Ships sailed south from the Cape of Good Hope, then east and finally turned north to Batavia, todays Djakarta. This route was faster, but passed close to the just discovered and little known New Holland, the western coast of Australia.
Dutch mariners had mapped nearly all the Australian continent's coastline westward from Cape York. But most of the charts were incomplete and inaccurate and the barely known coast was treacherous for shipping. One of the most dangerous parts of the coast was near the point where ships that had crossed the Indian Ocean turned north towards Batavia. This area was named Houtman's Abrolhos.
On the night of 4 June 1629 the Batavia hit a reef off Abrolhos and stuck fast. The weather was stormy, with high winds and rain. The storm thwarted the crew in their attempts to lighten the ship and so escape the reef. It was realised that the ship was doomed and attempts were made to find land for the sailors and the large number of women and children on board.
Many of the passengers were discharged on two small rocky islets that were clear of water at high tide, while seventy people remained on the disintegrating ship.
The next problem was to find food and water.
Commander Francisco Pelsaert, and some of the men searched in small boats along the coast for water and food but were unsuccessful in finding any substantial sources of water.
Commander Pelsaert and most the officers, about 48 in all, then set out in a boat to reach the town of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies to seek help, leaving the rest of the passengers to their fate.
There had already been trouble aboard the ship before the wreck between the captain and senior officers and mutiny had been threatened.
The journey to Batavia took thirty-three days and it took another sixty-three days for Pelsaert to return with a ship after having spent some time in Batavia.
When Commander Pelsaert returned in the yacht Sardam to rescue the shipwrecked passengers of the Batavia, three months after the ship foundered, he found only 116 survivors out 306 people he had left behind.
A man called Jacobs Cornelius, who was one of those who had planned mutiny while still on the high seas, and his followers had taken over after a furious and murderous battle with other survivors. Many of the men had been killed and the women and children had been divided as booty amongst the mutineers. Most of the women and children had subsequently also been killed.
Three hundred people marooned on small barren islands in an unknown place, with little food or water brought out the worst in human nature in a small group of men who had already been planning mutiny and piracy.
Commander Pelsaert condemned Cornelius and his men to death and they were hanged immediately. Pelsaert himself died a year later.
It was not until the 1960s that the wreck of the Batavia and some of the bodies were discovered, though there had been searches for it for hundreds of years. More bodies and a suspected mass grave have recently been found.
Historians and archaeologists, both Dutch and Australian, are still piecing together the story of one of the worst massacres in marine history.
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