Jon Turner's Reviews > Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny

Interesting story, but it suffers considerably from its author's propensity to wander off on tangents.

My impression of about half of the book:

"Finally, the governor-general was ready to deliver his sentence. Legal records show that there was one additional mutineer at the questioning, about whom all we know is that he had two missing teeth.

Missing teeth were very common among 17th-century sailors, especially lower-ranking ones, who could have lost their teeth in many ways. Missing teeth would have been an inconvenience for a sailor, especially when chewing on salted meat and hard biscuits, and would have given him an appearance considered somewhat fearsome by ordinary townsmen, who would have kept their teeth clean by scraping them with forked twigs and salt paste.

Regardless of the cause of these missing teeth, however, the scribe clearly felt that they were important enough to record in his summary of the proceedings. The fact that this particular mutineer's state of dental hygiene was considered remarkable says much about hygiene standards in general at a time when scurvy was exceptionally common on long voyages..."