Category Archives: Historical fiction
Why are seventeenth century names so difficult?
My historical novel “To Die a Dry Death” was recently reviewed by Kimberly Maloney on her blog Historical Fiction Obsession. While Kimberly rated the novel a five star read and had lots of nice things to say, she said she struggled a little with the unusual names, like Jacobsz and Bastiaenz, so herewith an explanation.
In the seventeenth century people didn’t have surnames. ‘John the baker’ or ‘James the smith’ was quite enough to differentiate. If you had a bunch of sailors, though, you might need something else. So we had ‘John, Peter’s son’ or John, James’s son’. This is the derivation of surnames like ‘Peterson’ and ‘Jameson’. Or you might use where someone came from to identify an individual, for example ‘Peter from London’.
In Holland, it was the same. The letters ‘sz’ at the end of the names denoted ‘szoon’ (the Dutch for son). The letters ‘van’ or ‘van der’ in front of a name mean ‘from’ and ‘from the’ and according to Mike Dash in his book ‘Batavia’s Graveyard’, this indicated someone with property.
I must agree that without surnames, it’s difficult to follow ancestry. Take the predikant (preacher) in this story, Gijsbert Bastiaensz. He had seven children, all of whom would have had ‘Gijsbertsz’ as a ‘surname’. Yes, even the daughters, although the word for daughter is ‘dochter’. One of the predikant’s sons was also called Gijsbert. He would have been referred to as Gijsbert Gijsbertsz.
One problem I had with names in my story was that, unlike in our times, where people’s first names are thought up willy-nilly, in the past there was a relatively restricted list of names that parents could use. ‘Jacob’ was a very common name. Kimberly had a short struggle differentiating between Adriaen Jacobsz, the captain of the Batavia and Jacopsz, the captain of the Sardam. In fact, the name of the captain of the Sardam was Jacob Jacobsz. My beta readers complained about that so I changed the spelling to a pretty common derivation of Jacobsz – Jacopsz. Maybe I should have changed the name completely but although this is fiction, I’m writing about people who lived and died. Somewhere out there in the Indian Ocean, Jacob Jacobsz assuredly lost his life. I felt I owed him that much.
Oh, by the way, ‘To Die a Dry Death‘ is the new ebook, with added material about how the book was written. You can buy ‘Die a Dry Death’ in hardback and paperback from the Book Depository and other on-line book sellers.
Die a Dry Death has a new look – and a new name
I’m absolutely delighted to announce that Pfoxmoor Publishing has published a new electronic edition of the book formerly known as Die a Dry Death. Sporting a brand new cover and now known as ‘To Die a Dry Death’, you can get your copy at a 50% reduction for a short time only. Take a choice of Omnilit or Smashwords (you’ll need coupon AH95U). Amazon will be following soon.
It’s the same harrowing story – but with an added bonus where I explain the evolution of the book, with reference back to the recorded events.
The wreck of the ‘Batavia’ – a different point of view
Many books have been written about the infamous events surrounding the wreck of the Dutch merchantman Batavia in 1629. My novel, To Die a Dry Death, is just another one. But I believe I’ve given a different slant on events.
Having grown up in Western Australia, I heard about the Batavia and the other Dutch wrecks of the 17th and 18th centuries at primary school. That was a long time ago and I think I’ve read most of the non-fiction about all those wrecks. I’ve been to the maritime museum in Fremantle and seen the artefacts recovered from the site, including the Batavia’s actually keel, rebuilt in the basement. I’ve been on the Batavia replica built in Holland (there are some pictures on my website) and I’ve stood on the forbidding cliffs the longboat sailed along. So I’ve been immersed in the story for a long time.
Any book about the Batavia is based on one main account of the events – Pelsaert’s journal. Francisco Pelsaert was an employee of the Dutch East India Company, the Upper Merchant in charge of the fleet of which the Batavia was the flagship. So while Adriaen Jacobsz, the ship’s captain, was in command of the ship he was beholden to Pelsaert. (Who was not a sailor.) After the Batavia was wrecked, Pelsaert started a journal to record events. On his return to the Abrolhos islands to rescue the remaining survivors, he documented the trial of Cornelisz and his band of thugs.
Apart from the journal, the only other known contemporary document is a letter written by Predikant Bastiaensz to his family. It is about the only source for what happened in the last few days when the thugs made their final attacks on the soldiers.
Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s ‘Voyage to Disaster’ (UWA Press, 2006) contains a translation of Pelsaert’s journal, Bastiaensz’s letter and other documents she was able to procure from Holland and Jakarta, such as Coen’s orders to Pelsaert. As an aside, Drake-Brockman, an amateur historian, actually deduced the whereabouts of the wreck from reading the descriptions of locations in the journal and the Predikant’s letter. Archaeologists had been looking on the wrong reef. The ship was finally found in 1963, when her book was first published.
Most historians support the notion that the Batavia’s captain, Adriaen Jacobsz, was in a plot with Cornelisz to hijack the Batavia, kill Pelsaert and go pirating. Drake-Brockman supported that belief, so did Mike Dash in his 2002 book ‘Batavia’s Graveyard’. But it seemed strange to me for many, many reasons, not least because there is no record of Jacobsz having been executed.
My picture of Pelsaert soon became one of a man trying to salvage his own reputation. He and Jacobsz had a history, they despised each other. Reading the early part of the journal, where Pelsaert describes the initial wreck, I raised an eyebrow as Pelsaert used ‘I’, implying he gave orders that would have been given by the captain. The same thing happened during the longboat’s journey as Pelsaert claimed credit for things I felt were beyond his knowledge. Jacobsz deserved the credit and received none. It was also important to remember the man for whom Pelsaert was writing this journal – the formidable Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Governor of the Indies. A harsh and puritanical man, he was unimpressed (to say the least) at the loss of a ship and its cargo. One could expect Pelsaert to be at pains to present his own actions in the best possible light.
In contrast, my picture of the captain was of a tough, strong, capable man. A hard drinker, a womaniser sure enough. But a true leader, somebody these hardened seamen would follow. Zwaantie, the young woman who won Jacobsz’s affection, is depicted in the journal as a tart. But again, some of the evidence for that conjecture comes from Cornelisz. I think the mere fact that Jacobsz took Zwaantie with him in the longboat indicates a little more than a casual fling.
The journal reveals Cornelisz as a psychopath, silver-tongued, charismatic and an accomplished liar who would say anything to save himself. The main evidence for the existence of the piracy plot implicating Jacobsz comes from Cornelisz. There is corroborating evidence given by some of the other henchmen, but men said things like “I didn’t know about a plot until after the wreck” or evidence was extracted through torture. I began to wonder if I could build a case that Cornelisz deliberately wove a tale of a plot to seduce his followers. He needed sailors to pull off his plan to capture a rescue ship and he was a merchant. What better way to add validity to his plan than to implicate the popular captain? Pelsaert, of course, jumped at the notion of a plot.
The other two characters, Lucretia and Wiebbe Hayes, are merely bit players in the journal. Dash and Drake-Brockman gave me the wherewithal to paint Lucretia as a real woman, a grieving mother going off to join her husband in a far-off land. Combine that with the perilous situation of a high-born lady left with a mob of louts and it’s easy enough to imagine how difficult it would be for her. I took the opportunity to use her as the eyes of the victims, if you like, interpreting events on Batavia’s Graveyard from her point of view.
Of course I made some things up. It’s a novel, after all. I guess every historian has a duty to examine the facts and interpret them and in a way, that’s what I’ve tried to do in this book. One reader (who knew the history) describes the novel as dramatization rather than fiction. I’ll take that, with a bow.
PS. The book has recently switched to a new publisher, hence the change of name from ‘Die a Dry Death’ to ‘To Die a Dry Death’. The story is the same but the the new version has added bonus material.
Planet-hopping might not be so silly
My new science fiction book ‘The Iron Admiral : Conspiracy’ includes a certain amount of planet-hopping. Now, I know that there will be some sneering and lip-curling over this. But don’t be in too much of a hurry to point a derisive finger.
Come with me on a cosmic journey. We’ll start here, on dear old Mother Earth, the only planet we know a huge amount about. Journey back in time, four hundred years… The world was beginning to open up. Intrepid explorers travelled to the other side of the Earth in search of trade and riches. Dutch merchant ships sailed from Amsterdam to what is now Jakarta in Indonesia to trade in spices. At the turn of the 17th century, they sailed down the west coast of Africa, re-provisioned at Table Bay and then set off past Madagascar and across the Indian Ocean up to Java. Makes sense, really, if you look at the journey on a map; down to the tip of Africa, then up at an angle to Indonesia. The journey took a year, sometimes as much as eighteen months if the winds were poor or the storms struck hard.
Then in 1610 Henrik Brouwer did something completely counter-intuitive and sailed south from Table Bay. Makes no sense, does it? Well, yes it does. The Earth is not a 2D Mercator’s projection on a tabletop, it’s a spheroid. The distance around the equator is greater than the distance around the lines we call ‘latitude’ to the north and south. Brouwer took advantage of that fact to shorten the distance he had to travel east and had the bonus of the reliable winds of the ‘roaring forties’ to push his ships along. All he had to do was remember to turn left when he reached the longitude for the Sunda Strait, sail up the coast of Western Australia and he was home. Taking this route shortened the journey by two thousand miles and more than halved the duration. The route was not without its dangers – as you’ll find in my book ‘Die a Dry Death’ – but that’s another story.
Over the years, sea travel became faster and more reliable. Steam and then diesel replaced sail. When my family migrated to Australia from Amsterdam the sea journey took about a month. Apart from the improved mode of transport, the ship also avoided the long journey around the Cape of Good Hope by going through a short cut – the Suez Canal.
Eventually, the obstacles forced upon us by oceans and continents were removed, too, with the advent of air travel. These days you can get on a jet at Schiphol in Amsterdam and get off twenty four hours laterat Perth International Airport. With airliners like the beautiful and now-departed Concord, you could do the journey in half the time. So in four hundred years we have shortened a journey that took about a year – let’s say 350 days – to one that routinely takes 1 day or (with the right aircraft) an awful lot less. Wow.
Still with me? Trust me, it’s all relevant to space travel. Imagine what reaction a person would have received if, in 1600, she’d said that in four hundred years, we’d be able to travel from Amsterdam to that southern continent we didn’t know anything about, in less than a day.
Yes, but that’s just the Earth, I hear you say. We’re talking inter-stellar distances. For Pete’s sake, the nearest star system from ours is over 4 light years away. Very true. We have no way of spanning these vast distances in anybody’s lifetime. Regardless, the notion of ‘hyperspace’ in science fiction to allow for the possibility of space travel has been around for a long time. I don’t think I ever saw an explanation of hyperspace – just that the ship entered another dimension, if you will, travelling externally to our normal, 3D + time. But hey ho; never let the facts get in the way of a good story. The Grand Master, Isaac Asimov, did rather a lot of planet-hopping. Have a look at his ‘Foundation’ series. Many of the more modern writers like Mc Devitt and Moon have FTL (faster than light) travel but show it as still a very time-consuming business with journeys taking weeks or months..
I don’t believe that restriction is cast in concrete. Even Mc Devitt in his book ‘A Talent for War’ postulated a quantum drive, where a ship moves from one place to another instantaneously. We don’t hear so much about worm holes these days, but they would also allow for an instantaneous transfer.
I refer to my version of hyperspace as ‘shift space’. I’ve done that deliberately because in my universe the ships use the geometry of extra dimensions to get around. Ships ‘shift’ to another dimension for the duration of a journey. It’s pretty much accepted that our 3D notion of the universe is just a perception, that there are many other dimensions we are not equipped to see. Such an understanding certainly helps to explain the apparent complexities of quantum physics and the anomalous behaviour of sub-atomic particles. Way back in the 1980’s Carl Sagan in his wonderful TV series ‘Cosmos’ showed us a tesseract (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract), a four-dimensional object portrayed as best we could in a 3D world. To understand what you’re looking at, think about a standard, 2D drawing of a cube. According to mathematics, there are many, many more than four dimensions out there, not to mention parallel universes. The biggest limitation imposed upon us in reaching a real understanding of things like this is that we are constrained by our own world view and our ability to perceive. As far back as 1884 E.A. Abbott in his book ‘Flatland’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland) described the problems of seeing three dimensions in a 2D world. We are faced with the same thing, on a 3D scale, if we attempt to visualise four, five or six dimensions. Or many, many more.
However, I can give you some sort of idea of where I’m coming from. Take a piece of A4 paper. Let’s label two diagonally opposite corners as A and B. Starting from B, we can reach A by going straight up one side then along the top to A. Hang on, you say, wouldn’t you just go across the diagonal, thereby reducing the distance and time taken? Sure you would. Now curl the paper over into a cylinder. All you have to do to get from B to A is move along a straight line. The length of the line will depend on how you make the roll (short edges together or long edges together).
Now take point A in one hand and point B in the other and bring them together so they meet. Getting from B to A in this instance is like walking from one room into another.
That’s my notion of ‘shift drive’. I have included some duration in the journey in the book because I found it useful. Don’t ask me how the shift drive (the engine that makes it possible to take advantage of the geometry) works. I’m speculating a fusion drive to do something or other. When I work it out, I’ll let you know.
Why didn’t he use the muskets?
Jeronimus Cornelisz, arch-villain of the Batavia tragedy, wasn’t a soldier or a sailor but when he divided the survivors of the shipwreck and sent them of to the several islands of the Houtman Abrolhos in the vicinity of Batavia’s Graveyard, where he was based, he made sure they left their weapons behind. His intention with the soldiers he sent to the High Island was that they would die of hunger and thirst. They were lucky; they found the only source of fresh water in the group and an extra food source in the native wallabies. Eventually, Cornelisz realised he’d have to deal with them (aka kill them) and take over the water and food they had found.
Cornelisz’s group had swords, pikes and muskets. Wiebbe Hayes’s group on the High Island had none of these things. To be sure, they were clever, resourceful men who were able to use flotsam from the wreck to build makeshift weapons. Six inch nails can be formidable, after all. But the modern-day reader is going to be thinking – how do you beat muskets?
The 17th century musket is a long way from a modern rifle. The illustration at left shows the process of loading and firing. The cartridges around the musketeer’s neck contain powder. He also carried musket balls (bullets) and what was known as a match. Not red-heads in little cardboard boxes; a coal or a glowing ember which had to be applied to the powder. Muskets were not accurate over any distance greater than one hundred yards or so and were supposed to be used en masse in a battle, a bit like machine guns might have been in the modern day. Evidence suggests Cornelisz only had a few muskets, two, maybe three, at his disposal.
We first hear of Jeronimus trying to use his superior firepower against Wiebbe Hayes’s group when Coenraat van Huyssen led an attack across the causeway between the two high islands at low tide. Despite several attempts, the muskets didn’t fire. The weapon wasn’t the most reliable, anyway. Add to this the fact that the attackers had to travel several miles in a small boat, keeping their powder dry and their ‘match’ lit, it is little wonder that they had difficulties.
The muskets came into their own at the final battle between Wiebbe’s defenders and the attackers under the command of Wouter Loos. Loos was a soldier and that may have been the difference, because he was still faced with the problems outlined above. He attacked from a different direction, not across the causeway. There is a tiny island about four hundred yards off the coast but that is too great a distance for muskets to be effective and we know that one man was killed and another injured.
In my description of the battle, I had to account for the damage in a realistic manner. Once again, I turned to Doctor Anthony Saunders, expert on weapons and military history, and discussed the use of muskets in warfare. In order to kill somebody, the muskets would have to be fired much closer to the target. That’s why I wrote the scene as I did, bringing two musketeers up onto a sandbar with a group of pikemen to defend them while they reloaded.
Did you hear about Peter Fitzsimon’s ‘Batavia’ book?
Well, yes, I did, actually. Quite a few people have told me about it one way or the other. The events of the 1629 shipwreck are a matter of historical record and I have no problem that yet another person has written yet another book. I have every confidence that it will happen again. And again. After all, there are many, many books about Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, many books about Trafalgar, D Day and Jack the Ripper.I known of at least four other novels about the wreck of the Batavia, apart from my own.
I’ve just now seen Fitzsimon’s book. It is yet another hostorical account based largely on Pelsaert’s journal – as it must be.
Have I read the book? No. I might, since it is a history, but from what I’ve seen and heard I find it hard to believe that it will be much different to what Mike Dash described so eloquently in his book “Batavia’s Graveyard.” He has accepted Pelsaert’s version of events of a ship seething with intrigue well befre the shipwreck and allocating a large portion of blame on the skipper, Adriaen Jacobsz.
I have a different interpretation. So often in history, the victor tells the story. In the case of the Batavia, the person with the most to lose wrote the only real record of events. That was Pelsaert. I’ve written before about my theory, about the hatred between the captain and the senior merchant, about Pelsaert’s absolute need to absolve himself as much as he could for responsibilty for the tragic events after the wreck. I’ve mentioned Cornelisz’s psychopathic personality and his refusal to accept any blame, his silver tongue, his ability to blame anybody else. In that respect, I think ‘To Die a Dry Death’ is a little bit different from other people’s accounts. It’s out there for people to take or leave as they will. See more here.
I feel absolutely no rancour but I’ll admit to a touch of envy; I would’ve liked the man’s publicity engine. Peter Fitzsimons is well known in Australian journalistic circles and his book was published by a major so it’s out there in the bookshops and he can can organise book signings, get himself interviewed on the radio. Ah well. Maybe I’ll get to that point with my science fiction books. Only time will tell.
Getting inside the mind of a psychopath
… is interesting. And challenging.
Quite a number of psychopaths have made a name for themselves. Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin. Ted Bundy is another, more recent, example and the picture at left is, of course, Hannibal Lecter. What about Jeronimus Cornelisz, erstwhile under merchant on the merchantship Batavia, who for a few short months in 1629, strode his tiny island like a colossus, or a God, dealing out death and destruction on a whim. What’s makes a person a psychopath? How do you pick them from the rest of humanity?
In my novel ‘Die a Dry Death’, I had to try to get into Jeronimus Cornelsiz’s head and understand – or at least explain – his behaviour. So – to try to understand. To quote from a handout produce by Oregon Counseling;
The psychopath is one of the most fascinating and distressing problems of human experience. For the most part, a psychopath never remains attached to anyone or anything. They live a “predatory” lifestyle. They feel little or no regret, and little or no remorse – except when they are caught. They need relationships, but see people as obstacles to overcome and be eliminated. If not, they see people in terms of how they can be used. They use people for stimulation, to build their self-esteem and they invariably value people in terms of their material value (money, property, etc..).
A psychopath can have high verbal intelligence, but they typically lack “emotional intelligence”. They can be expert in manipulating others by playing to their emotions. There is a shallow quality to the emotional aspect of their stories (i.e., how they felt, why they felt that way, or how others may have felt and why). The lack of emotional intelligence is the first good sign you may be dealing with a psychopath. A history of criminal behavior in which they do not seem to learn from their experience, but merely think about ways to not get caught is the second best sign.
The following is a list of items based on the research of Robert Hare, Ph.D. which is derived from the “The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, .1991, Toronto: Multi-Health Systems.” These are the most highly researched and recognized characteristics of psychopathic personality and behavior.
- glibness/superficial charm
- need for stimulation/prone to boredom
- conning/manipulative
- shallow emotional response
- parasitic lifestyle
- promiscuous sexual behavior
- lack of realistic long term goals
- irresponsibility
- many short term relationships
- revocation of conditional release
- grandiose sense of self worth
- pathological lying
- lack of remorse or guilt
- callous/lack of empathy
- poor behavioral controls
- early behavioral problems
- impulsivity
- failure to accept responsibility for their own actions
- juvenile delinquency
- criminal versatility
Read more: http://personalitydisorders.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_can_psychopaths_be_identified#ixzz0YJtyjjNU
Michael G. Conner, Psy.D Has this to say.
A psychopath is usually a subtle manipulator. They do this by playing to the emotions of others. They typically have high verbal intelligence, but they lack what is commonly referred to as “emotional intelligence”. There is always a shallow quality to the emotional aspect of their stories. In particular they have difficulty describing how they felt, why they felt that way, or how others may feel and why. In many cases you almost have to explain it to them. Close friends and parents will often end up explaining to the psychopath how they feel and how others feel who have been hurt by him or her.
They can do this over and over with no significant change in the person’s choices and behavior. They don’t understand or appreciate the impact that their behavior has on others. They do appreciate what it means when they are caught breaking rules or the law even though they seem to end up in trouble again. They desperately avoid incarceration and loss of freedom but continue to act as if they can get away with breaking the rules. They don’t learn from these consequences. They seem to react with feelings and regret when they are caught. But their regret is not so much for other people as it is for the consequences that their behavior has had on them, their freedom, their resources and their so called “friends.”
They can be very sad for their self. A psychopath is always in it for their self even when it seems like they are caring for and helping others. The definition of their “friends” are people who support the psychopath and protect them from the consequence of their own antisocial behavior. Shallow friendships, low emotional intelligence, using people, antisocial attitudes and failure to learn from the repeated consequences of their choices and actions help identify the psychopath.
Armed with a description like this, it wasn’t so hard to get into Cornelisz’s head. In some ways it was more difficult to sort out Lucretia, who had to deal with this man at a very intimate level, always conscious that the slightest mistake may have cost her her life.
It still stops me in my tracks to think that this one man was effectively responsible for the deaths of ninety-six people. Put that into perspective. There were about one hundred and eighty people on Batavia’s Graveyard when Pelsaert and Jacobsz headed for Java. Cornelisz’s crew killed a little over half of them. Yet Cornelisz never accepted responsibility, never showed any remorse, always kept coming back to the fact that he himself never killed anybody.
But you know what? The most frightening thing of all was how easy it was for him to recruit people more than willing to carry out his orders.
Ah, the frailty of the human psyche.
Are Voldemort and Sauron good villains?
I’ve just read a blog post about villains and how important they are to a story. If your hero is up against a villain, better make sure that villain’s powerful. And while I agreed with the overall premise, it’s left me thinking; hence this post. Sure, you need conflict to make a story. Or should I say, an interesting story. But the writer of the post in question used Voldemort and Sauron as her two examples of good villains.
Now at this point I should rush in and say that I love the Harry Potter books and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is one of those books on that shelf up there, battered and much loved. The point, however, is that both are fantasy. Sauron, in particular, is an archetype. We never meet him; he is just a flame-ringed eye on the top of a fantastically powerful tower. To be sure he evokes the ultimate evil – for that is what he is; the Devil, if you will. His only purpose is to subjugate and destroy. Voldemort isn’t much different. His only purpose seems to be to destroy Muggles and live forever. Neither has any redeeming features. Not one.
If you want a believable villain in ‘Lord of the Rings’ you could look at Saruman who started off as the wisest of the wise and was inveigled, seduced by the power of Sauron and the lure of the One Ring. As is often mentioned – by Gandalf and Galadriel, for example, the power of the ring is such that people would use it for good; at first, before it consumed their will. I could probably make a convincing case that the REAL villain in LOTR is the Ring.
Those of us who don’t write fantasy, who can’t rely on a faceless, motiveless ‘evil’ need believable villains. Villains don’t seem themselves as villains. They have their own motives and they are often couched in the language of ‘the greater good’. If you want your villain to be believable you have to be able to convey to the reader what his/her motives are. And he/she cannot be wholly evil. Hitler loved his dogs and presumably Eva Braun; Napoleon had Josephine.
In ‘Die a Dry Death’ the villain is Jeronimus Cornelisz. Nobody knows what he looked like. Pelsaert’s journals don’t give descriptions of physical characteristics. Research has revealed something of his background but the history books need to be read carefully, since more than once an albeit plausible story is built on a few facts and a lot of conjecture. But Pelsaert’s journals provide us with enough information to deduce a great deal about Jeronimus’s character.
I’ve written elsewhere about describing a psychopath. But even psychopaths must have motives and they cannot be totally evil. I guess we’ll never know at what point Lucretia consented to a physical relationship with Jeronimus. It has been said that some of the stories about her ‘holding out’ for quite some time after Jeronimus took over were written subsequently, to salve her reputation. I hardly think it matters. Easy enough to sit in retrospective judgement. Although for him, winning the alpha female was part of status, I’m quite prepared to believe he actually did care for her. And that’s how I’ve written him. Even the worst human monster was once an innocent child.
Murder by decapitation
Pappenheimer
Have you ever wondered about how easy it is to cut off somebody’s head with one blow of a sword? No, I hadn’t either until I wrote ‘Die a Dry Death’. It’s one of the most famous of the many murders, often quoted, how with just one blow with a sword, one of the murderers struck off the head of a lad about twelve years old simply for amusement.
This event happened towards the end of Cornelisz’s reign of terror after the sinking of the Batavia and I thought it was an excellent opportunity to show both the depravity of the murderers and the pervading terror in the hearts and minds of the few remaining potential victims, forced to witness the killing. I also wanted to get my facts straight.
A careful check of Pelsaert’s journal (translated in Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s ‘Voyage to Disaster’) revealed that Mattijs Beer did not decapitate the boy with one blow. To quote the transalation,
Meanwhile Jan van Bemel was busy to blindfold the boy and Jeronimus, who stood next to him, said, “Now boy, sit still, we are only having some fun with you,” and Mattijs Beer with one blow near enough struck off his head. (p181)
Near enough to one blow is not one blow. So I asked a friend, Anthony Saunders PhD, who is an expert in military history, a fencer and swordsman, whether this was possible. I told him that the sword was probably like one used in the Thirty Years War and would have been a soldier’s weapon, not naval.
This is what he told me.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a sword was more often used for executions in Germany and central Europe than the axe. Anne Boleyn was beheaded with a sword. The victim knelt, as did Anne, or sat in a chair or a stool, eyes bound, and the sword was swung horizontally. But these were executioners’ swords. That is not to say that a broad-bladed weapon would not serve equally well. With that in mind, I would suggest that the sword is one typical of the Thirty Years War period (1618–48). For example, a schiavona-style basket hilt (used by Croatian mercenaries) but this might be a bit late for 1629, or a broadsword with a swept hilt or a Pappenheimer (with a shell inside the guard). Broadswords were military swords, of course, so their hilts varied more in style than the civilian rapier. Some had a curved down crosspiece (quillon) on one side of the hilt which turned up into a knuckleguard on the other side, with a large shell guard to cover the rest of the hand. Here are some swords of the right period. To be honest, to be effective for execution, the short-handled weapons would be of less use as looking at contemporary engravings of sword executions, the executioner used a two-handed grip.
L–R schiavona, Pappenheimer
- Pappenheimer
So I went with the experts. In my version, Cornelis Aldersz’s head was almost (but not quite) removed with one blow.
Doctor Saunders was also able to give me valuable insight into what happens to the human body when such a blow is delivered. Lots of blood as the pressure is released from the arteries and often some twitching and jerking.
Once I’d written the scene, I sent it to him to check my description. He approved. So now you know a little more about swords than you did before. Fascinating stuff.
‘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.
