BATAVIA’S GRAVEYARD
By Mike Dash
Ways of escape follow fashion. At one time, anti-realistic, romantic or
fantastic art was criticized for being escapist. We feel that same need to
escape today - witness the success, even among adult audiences, of the Harry
Potter books and the film version of The Lord of the Rings - but more of
us seem to have different destinations in mind. We seek a more intense, physical
experience of reality - desiring, in the words of Thoreau, "to live deep
and suck all the marrow out of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to
put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."
This new escape to reality, or sous-reality, is everywhere. We have "X-treme"
sports with no other purpose than to put people in danger of injury, reality
television shows that strand everyday people in a wilderness where they join
tribes and eat bugs, and bestselling books providing true accounts of mountain
climbing tragedies and perfect storms.
Historians know a good thing when they see it. Last year’s National Book
Award winner for non-fiction was Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the
Sea, the X-treme story of what happened to the crew of a nineteenth-century
whaleship that sank in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Here was Thoreau with a
vengeance: life reduced to its lowest terms, life driven into a corner, all of
the marrow (literally) sucked out of its bones.
Mike Dash’s Batavia’s Graveyard takes us even further back, to a
time when nautical life was even more nasty, brutish and short than it was for
Nantucket whalers. The story concerns the wreck of the Dutch East India Company
vessel Batavia on a reef just off the coast of Australia in the year
1629. Fortunately, the reef they ran aground on was part of a tiny archipelago
known as Houtman’s Abrolhos, and the passengers and crew were almost all
saved. Unfortunately, as the captain and chief merchant sailed a longboat to
Java for help the rest of the survivors were left to be terrorized and murdered
by a bloodthirsty gang led by a homicidal heretic named Jeronimus Corneliszoon.
It is a horrific story, and those looking for another extreme tale of
survival and life-in-the-raw will no doubt be thrilled. But Batavia’s
Graveyard is also a very good book in its own right. The story is terrific,
and the material is excellently arranged - turning the screw of suspense with a
professional hand while also managing to pack in a lot of history. Discursions
on the spice trade and the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century
are intimately connected to the rest of the narrative, and every bit as
fascinating as the demonic game of Survivor played on Houtman’s Abrolhos.
Batavia’s Graveyard is a psycho-historical thriller, and at the center
of it all is the mysterious figure of Jeronimus Corneliszoon. Dash tries to
figure him out, but both the historical and modern labels he comes up with,
"heretic" and "psychopath", miss the mark. In large part
this is because of gaps in the historical record. Despite all of Dash’s
research into the story, much remains speculation (to be aware just how much is
speculation, readers should take the time to read the extensive endnotes with
care).
But it might also be that a modern mind will never understand the psychology
of people living at a time when life was so cheap. Hard times make hard men, and
brutal conditions will make men brutes. As terrible as the crimes of
Corneliszoon and his gang were, Dash makes it clear that they didn’t have a
monopoly on torture, violence, lust and greed. There are few heroes in this
book.
Thoreau wanted to reduce life to its lowest terms to see if it was sublime or
mean. If it proved to be mean, he wanted to "get the whole and genuine
meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world." It is a job Dash
has taken about as far as it can go.
Notes:
Review first published March 9, 2002.
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