When you’re writing about a particular time in history, it’s important to get the details right; what people wore, how they thought, what they ate. The life of the Dutch in the seventeenth century is well documented through the wonderful artists of the ‘Golden Age’ – painters like Rembrandt, van Dijk, Brueghel, van de Velde…
There is little doubt that Commandeur Pelsaert was much more lenient in his treatment of Cornelisz’s band of thugs than his masters in Batavia would have been. As mentioned in previous posts, Cornelisz and his major henchmen could count themselves lucky to just have been hanged. Others who were keelhauled or dropped from the yardarm…
Quite a number of psychopaths have made names for themselves. Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin. Ted Bundy is another, more recent, example, as is Hannibal Lecter, featured in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. What about Jeronimus Cornelisz, erstwhile under merchant on the merchantship Batavia, who for a few short months in 1629, strode his tiny…
Once Pelsaert had finished his trial of the conspirators who had been responsible for the deaths of nearly one hundred people on the Abrolhos islands where they had hoped for rescue, he passed sentence. The ring leader, Jeronimus Cornelisz, along with six of his lieutenants, was hanged at the islands. In comparison with what they…
What would it have been like for the people on the Batavia when the ship hit the reef? Especially the soldiers below decks.
At last, the mystery of the Aagtekerke which disappeared after sailing from Table Bay in 1726, may have been solved. It has long been believed that the Aagtekerke, like the Batavia and the Zeewijk, met its end on the reefs of the Abrolhos islands, sixty kilometres or so off the west coast of Australia. Ironically,…
If you ever wanted a lesson in the shortness of human memory a visit to Pevensey castle should convince you. I’ve just been to that fascinating spot down on the south coast of England not far from the towering chalk cliffs of Beachy Head. We drove along the coast down the A259 through the green,…
After the Batavia ran aground on Morning Reef before dawn on 4th June 1629, the captain ferried as many people as he could to nearby islands and then decided to head for Batavia to fetch help. When the Batavia’s longboat left the Abrolhos islands where the survivors from the shipwreck had been landed, she carried…
It’s an interesting fact that of the four Dutch sailing ships known to have been wrecked off the coast of Western Australia, two of them – the Batavia and the Zeewijk – struck the reefs of the Abrolhos Islands and there has long been speculation that a third ship, the Aagtekerk, lies in the deep…
Forget the legends. Jesus was a Jew, and he hated the Romans. I know, because I lived with him and his followers for a year. That’s the first sentence of the blurb for Robin Helweg-Larsen’s novel “The Gospel According to the Romans”. I was brought up in a ‘Christian’ household and attended Sunday school as…