Jan-Maat's Reviews > Batavia's Graveyard

Where to begin.

Non-fiction story of a seventeenth-century shipwreck. A Dutch East India company ship carrying over 300 people, chests of silver coins and the prefabricated gateway to the fort at Batavia (Jakarta) ran aground on a coral reef 50 miles west of Australia. Most of those onboard survived. Only after they disembarked on Houtman's Abrolhos, a misery inducing collection of low coral islands did it all start to get much worse, eventually very few manage to survive and make it to the Dutch East Indies and not because they ran out of wallabies or sea lion to eat either.

Reading this book, I thought of Lord of the Flies, but also of Rites of Passage, perhaps Golding was aware of the story, the wreck site was rediscovered in June 1963 (view spoiler)[ about 250 Dutch East India company ships are known to have sunk of which about one third have been excavated, so there are plenty out there from the Netherlands to Indonesia waiting to be discovered, piles of silver coin lying around on the sea bed (hide spoiler)] and then comprehensively stripped over for a second (view spoiler)[ or third, depending on how you are counting (hide spoiler)] the salvaged canon and the gate to the fort at Jakarta are apparently on display in Fremantle(view spoiler)[ I assume it was offered first to the Indonesians, but maybe not (hide spoiler)], later a replica of the ship was built in the Netherlands - this took a team of modern craftsmen ten years from the mid 80s through to the mid 90s, their predecessors knocked the original out in a few months, but then they had practise and a wharf and slipway designed to facilitate the rapid construction of such a vessel. Anyway if you can imagine the crew and passengers of Rites of Passage with their class distinctions, hierarchies, sexual tensions(view spoiler)[ but without an Anglican Priest parting his ceremonial robes to receive sexual services from a seaman (hide spoiler)], habituation to casual violence, shipwrecked with little hope of rescue one might imagine that what Lord of the Flies teaches us above all is how sweet and innocent even schoolboys are compared to that more mixed group.

I also thought that it was a surprise that nobody had made a film of the story(view spoiler)[ but maybe they have and luckily I've never seen it (hide spoiler)], as a film it would never be a summer blockbuster because the film classification would restrict viewing pretty sharply based on the content, it would be the kind of film only on late at night, that you'd sit through, regretting having done so afterwards and resolving to always sleep with a rolling pin by your side there after. I don't want to say much more about the actual story than that for fear of spoiling the events if you haven't been comprehensively warned off by now, let me say the reading experience is far less graphic than the action of the imagination.

Dash starts out with the outward voyage of the Batavia, there are the familiar problems of Longitude and scurvy (view spoiler)[ if travelling back in time you find yourself a sea Captain don't forget the sauerkraut, it'll save your teeth and prevent bleeding gums (hide spoiler)] he led the ship on to the coral reef and the evacuation and then with three hundred odd people faced with the prospect of running out of water waltzes off on the back story of the Dutch East India company and the biographies of some of the main people on board as far as they are known, he takes a leisurely hundred or so pages to get back to shipwrecked people which I felt rather careless seeing as they were thirsty and facing exposure and a not very hopefully future. Only of course when he does get back to the story that is when things really start to go wrong.

(view spoiler)[ essentially the Captain (view spoiler)[ which in context is less strange than it seems (hide spoiler)] and some of the crew ferment the idea of staging a bloody mutiny and becoming pirates, despite being shipwrecked, enough of them are determined to stick to this plan (view spoiler)[ in for a penny in for Pieces of eight! Pieces of Eight! I suppose (hide spoiler)] to really ruin the voyages of many of the other survivors (view spoiler)[ because there are quite a few things worse than subsisting on a diet of wallaby and sea-lion as it turns out (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

and then of course (view spoiler)[ along comes Justice with the long sword of the law (view spoiler)[ and by sword, I don't mean sword I mean something much blunter, slower and more painful, for Justice must be seen to be done by as many people as possible because the seventeenth century was much more medieval when it came to crime and punishment than the middle ages (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

but there is also mercy in the world (view spoiler)[ relatively speaking, I admit I haven't been to Western Australia in the early seventeenth century, but then I haven't been a teenager brought face to face with the long sword of the law either (hide spoiler)] and one or two of the sentences were commuted to being marooned on the western coast of Australia. There follows some speculation as to the fates of the men so treated, some writers considering the tragic propensity of men of the Nanda people to baldness as proof definite of partial Dutch ancestry (view spoiler)[ there is no mention of residual loyalty to the House of Orange or adherence to the tenets of the Dutch Reformed Church (hide spoiler)], but what mere doubt can stand in the path of a receding hairline when nothing stops that tide from going out. Though Dash goes on to mention some more Dutch shipwrecks off that coast so the gentlemen so punished in this story didn't necessarily get to become a pater patriae.

With a critical hat on (view spoiler)[ which helps to keep the burning rays of enthusiasm at bay, and afterall you don't want to end up like Don Quixote the treatment of one of the main characters is a bit of a weakness, literally in the last pages the idea of his being a psychopath is introduced, I'd have preferred to have seen that idea developed and explored somewhat earlier although to use layman's terms the idea that he may have been barking mad is not a surprise. Dash lays some stress on his Anabaptist background and possible exposure to Epicureanism and the ideas of the Rosicrucians, though some of what he said (allegedly) to the effect that nothing is a sin to one of the Elect reminds me more of The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution as it was one of the spiritual crises that Calvinists could get into in the seventeenth century (view spoiler)[ it doesn't seem to have been much of a problem since, but I'm not a church goer (hide spoiler)].

Skeletal remains of the victims have also been recovered, the injuries don't match up with those described in the written accounts, however the bones show signs of various stresses -in particular having been close to starvation and malnutrition, these Dash comments the stresses and facts of life that drove people to try their fortunes in the East Indies were many Europeans died of disease. The Dutch Golden Age was not an age of gold for all Dutch people.

Anyway, a real life William Golding story with added Gujarati divers, and treasure. (hide spoiler)]