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…
I have always felt that one of the most important aspects of writing historical fiction is getting the mindset right. People in the seventeenth century had different beliefs, different sensitivities to ours. Things like torture, which we find reprehensible, was an accepted means of extracting the truth. Infant mortality was a fact of life; if…
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…
More than one person has asked me why I called the book Die a Dry Death. Why not “The Wreck of the Batavia” or something equally prosaic? For a start, Batavia means a few different things; the Roman occupied area which eventually became part of the Netherlands, the capital of the Dutch East Indies which…
