‘Truth’ in historical fiction
‘Die a Dry Death’ is certainly not the first and will not be the last, novel written about the loss of the Batavia in 1629. I recently had an email conversation with somebody who knows the history well and it got me thinking about the idea of ‘truth’ in history.
You see, conventional history states that the Batavia’s captain, Adriaen Jacobsz, plotted with Jeronimus Cornelisz as far back as when the ship called in at Table Bay to kill Commandeur Pelsaert, steal the vessel and make a fortune from piracy. Pelsaert’s journal includes his summary of the events that took place on the Abrolhos Islands, where Cornelisz and his thugs murdered around one hundred men, women and children. The executive summary hinges around the planned ‘mutiny’ by the skipper and despite his undeniable seamanship in getting the overloaded longboat to the city of Batavia without loss, Jacobsz is remembered as the architect of disaster and some go so far as to suggest that Cornelisz’s behaviour stemmed from Jacobsz.
I have always found that argument difficult to believe, for the following reasons:
- Pelsaert and Jacobsz hated each other. Pelsaert would have readily believed the captain guilty of anything.
- Evidence was extracted using torture and it’s easy enough to answer loaded questions with the expected answer.
- If Jacobsz intended (with Cornelisz) to kill Pelsaert they had plenty of opportunity on the voyage (accidental fall overboard) or when Pelsaert was ill. Cornelisz was an apothecary, after all. Or even in the longboat. You could even ask why Jacobsz took him in the longboat at all.
- Cornelisz was a liar and completely without conscience. He blamed everybody else and lied through his teeth to get out of everything. It was he who testified to the plot between him and Jacobsz at Table Bay, he said Zwaantie was a tart, he said Jacobsz offered Lucretia gold to sleep with him. He’d say anything to avoid torture, too.
- The main players apart from Cornelisz were already dead before the journal was written and couldn’t defend themselves.
- Pelsaert executed most of the more important of Cornelisz’s gang before returning to Batavia, so they couldn’t be interviewed, either.
- We know what happened to all the members of Cornelisz’s gang who were returned to Batavia, so it seems odd to me, given their idea of justice, that Jacobsz was not put to death immediately and that his fate is unknown.
To a point, the journal itself is a work of fiction. I do not doubt that Pelsaert did his best to record the known facts and the interviews with the murderers. But it certainly wasn’t a transcript of a trial in the modern sense. And I have no doubt that Pelsaert had an eye on the person who would read the account – the formidable Governor of the Indies, Jan Pieterszoon Coen.
So my book is that little bit different. I applied a ‘what if’ question. What if the captain was innocent of a planned mutiny? Can the events recorded in the journal be interpreted in this way without fiddling with the facts? I felt it could and I guess my efforts were successful. One reviewer who knows the history described the book as a dramatisation, rather than fiction, which is exactly what I tried to achieve.
That’s the wonderful thing about history. We can (and should) reconsider events and what they meant. But of course, we’ll never know for sure.
Posted on 21 August 2010, in Historical fiction, On writing. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.
I’ve had similar issues with a couple of my novels, and this is always an interesting issue in historical fiction: how to make the events fit the reality, given that sometimes the printed words may be skewed by the writer’s perspective or motives. Also, how far to go in playing with scenes. In my mind, the scene has to fit and make sense with the historical record, but it’s ok to make up scenes (or plot points) as long as they’re consistent. I’ve written both historical fiction that’s very tied to actual events (like the Batavia) and “legend as historical fiction” where the main character is legendary but I try to fit that person into a real world timeline and write the novel as though it were a real person’s story (a challenge but a great deal of fun) so I really relate to this post.
Also: I have “Die a Dry Death” on my Kindle and will be reading it this weekend. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while, but just needed to get enough clear time to enjoy it instead of just snatching moments!
What a post, Greta! This addresses the very core of historical fiction, and why it is so interesting to both read and write.
What I especially liked in your book was the way you convinced us readers that this was an entirely plausible explanation for the incident. While I had not read anything else on the Batavia, your book was such a coherent entity I loved every page.
When I read HF, I get instantly thrown off track if there are details that could not have happened the way they are told. I’ve dropped only a handful of books ever, but all those have had events that were off track, if you knew anything of the actual history the book was based on. Even alternate history books should be credible, and that is why Robert Harris’ Fatherland is such a great book.
One of the hard things for the good historical fiction writer to capture is they didn’t know the outcome of what they were up to, and they didn’t know the outcome of what the other guys were up to either. There’s no hindsight functioning. …
Murderers don’t know they’ll get caught…even mass murderers don’t know that. They think they’re exceedingly clever and they’ll get away with it. And generally, they keep telling their ‘I’m innocent’ story until the cows come home and go back to the fields. They’re masters of that kind of manipulation–great self-editors, if you will.
And those were two compelling and fascinating elements you brought to your work. In my opinion.
Truth in fiction sounds an interesting anomaly! In Crimson Bed I began by writing about the real Rossetti but the constriction of mixing fictional characters with the real man and the time framework of his life didn’t work well, didn’t flow somehow. So I used something of Rossetti’s character and life story for my own fictional chacter while the Pre Raphs hovered in the background like a stage setting. This felt much freer. Maybe this was cheating? It saved a lot of worry about exact accuracy of events such as you needed to have in DaDD, but didn’t, I hope, detract from the sense of the Pre-Raphaelite background.
I knew nothing of the story of the Batavia so no idea if you were historically accurate or not, Greta. But I do know that you brought this story to life for me, got me really fascinated with the time and place so that I wanted to look up more. Your interpretation. the ‘what if’ worked well and was so humane, giving the story a slant, a lift.
Historical facts are often dry bones but good Historical fiction is the flesh and the clothing that makes it suddenly spring to life. I feel you did that with your terrifying but enthralling story.
It’s a fascinating issue and you all have had to deal with similar things in your own writing. I just think we all have to be very careful about believing what we’re told. I don’t think we can play with historical FACT. Unless you’re writing alternative history, which I personally dislike. For instnace, we know the Batavia was wrecked and where and that many people were brutally murdered (the archeological evidence bears witness for the latter point). But motives add a different colour to history. And that’s the ‘people’ element, isn’t it?