The Genre of Disaster

Maritime disaster stories were popular across seventeenth-century Europe, following an unprecedented flood of travel and exploration publications in the Dutch Republic during the first years of the century. Spread via printed journals, pamphlets, broadsheets, and song books, they reached beyond elite readers to all social classes with a mixture of sensational drama and reportage.Footnote ⁵ In the Republic, narratives of mutiny and disaster largely replaced those of discovery in publishers’ lists by the 1630s.Footnote ⁶ Often written as eyewitness reports, they purported to offer their readers an unmediated glimpse into the challenges of life at sea in the East Indies, shaping the conceptions of VOC officers, investors, and prospective mariners, many of whom came from landlocked provinces and had no direct experience of the sea prior to joining the Company.Footnote ⁷

The four stories discussed in this paper were chosen out of the large corpus of disaster narratives because they satisfy three critical criteria. First, the stories show moments of mutinous disobedience and disorder among ships’ crews, offering the closest Dutch parallels to the stories discussed in The Many-Headed Hydra and Manifest Perdition.Footnote ⁸ Second, they consist of substantial, detailed narratives, allowing for their publication under separate cover as stories of individual note.Footnote ⁹ Third, they were among the most popular and widely available stories in the Dutch Republic, showing a lasting appeal and influence. Willem Bontekoe’s Journael has been reprinted frequently since its first publication in 1646, with over 30 editions; “a voyage out of Bontekoe” has become a stock phrase in Dutch to describe any endeavour marked by constant setbacks.Footnote ¹⁰ Francois Pelsaert’s Ongeluckige voyagie van’t schip Batavia (“disastrous voyage of the ship Batavia”) saw at least nine reprints between 1647 and 1664, and was translated into French and German.Footnote ¹¹ Nicolaas Camstrup and Haye Blaauwhuysen’s Rampspoedige Reys-beschryving (“Calamitous voyage”) of the Blydorp in 1733 was published as news in 1735, but continued interest in the incident was demonstrated when a further account was found and published 36 years later.Footnote ¹² Finally, the Echt relaas (“true account”) of the 1763 mutiny on the Nijenburg was so successful that it prompted two “spin off” volumes, journals purportedly written by the captain, Jacob Ketel, who had died before he could return to the Republic.Footnote ¹³

The Basic Narrative Form: the Nieuw Hoorn

The structural prototype of the stories is provided by Willem Bontekoe’s account of the 1619 wreck of the Nieuw Hoorn. In all the stories, an initial misfortune imperils the ship but lack of discipline seals its fate. Disaster is eventually overcome through a reintegration of the crew and re-establishment of proper discipline.

The ship’s troubles begin when the junior steward, sent into the ship’s hold to collect brandewyn, drops his candle into the vat causing gouts of burning alcohol to leap out into the surrounding cargo and, ultimately, the stores of coal.Footnote ¹⁴ Fire at sea was one of the early modern sailor’s greatest fears. In the Nieuw Hoorn’s case it was especially dangerous because the ship was carrying a large quantity of gunpowder for the Company’s war efforts.Footnote ¹⁵ Bontekoe, the ship’s master, organizes a bucket chain to throw water into the hold, apparently suppressing the fire. Hours later, however, smoke begins to pour out of the hatches again. The master abandons his post on the quarterdeck to lead fire-fighting efforts and to drag the bodies of fallen sailors out of the hold.Footnote ¹⁶ While Bontekoe is away from his post a great number of sailors, fearing an explosion, desert the vessel by swimming to the ship’s boat, towed some distance astern. These sailors persuade the merchant “captain” to abandon the quarterdeck and join them, without declaring his intention or calling for the crew to abandon ship.

In Bontekoe’s account the disaster that destroys the ship is linked to a loss of social cohesion. On its first outbreak, the fire is suppressed (temporarily) by concerted action of the crew under Bontekoe’s leadership. The second outbreak of fire, however, is met by the mutinous desertion of the crew and the flight of the merchant “captain”, against VOC regulations.Footnote ¹⁷ Merchant “captains” or “generals” were the highest authorities on VOC ships, commanding in consultation with their shipmasters and officers: in practice the merchant and the master formed two poles of command.Footnote ¹⁸ The loss of unity between merchant and master therefore constituted a profound failure of leadership and solidarity. This failure is underscored in Bontekoe’s account by the actions of the deserters, who deliberately row into wind to prevent the ship pursuing them, and Bontekoe himself, who attempts to ram the boat but is interrupted by the explosion of the powder, which blows the ship “into a hundred thousand pieces.”Footnote ¹⁹

The next day the deserters, finding themselves lost and helpless without a navigator, search for Bontekoe in the ship’s floating wreckage. Finding him alive, they plead with him to lead them again. The boat journey that follows is long and arduous, with the men facing dangers from thirst, storms, and cannibalism, both among themselves and from natives they meet while seeking provisions on islands along their route. Nonetheless, through co-ordinated effort, strict discipline, and Bontekoe’s prowess in navigation and leadership, they eventually reach Batavia, the Company’s principal factory and fortress in the East.Footnote ²⁰

The Threat of the Indies

The idea of the sea as a dangerous and polluting medium was widespread in European maritime narratives long before the seventeenth century.Footnote ²¹ The sea was where one disposed of refuse as well as of those unpardonable criminals who did not merit trials on land: murderers and sodomites.Footnote ²² W. H. Scott records how Spanish sailors in the Philippines expressed horror at the natives’ legs trailing in the water as they rowed their canoes, so that they appeared uncannily to be themselves part of the ocean, challenging a separation that the Spaniards took for granted.Footnote ²³ European mariners in the seventeenth century saw the sea as the abode of sharks, which routinely trailed ocean-crossing ships, feeding off corpses thrown overboard.Footnote ²⁴

Through the event of shipwreck, the stories unite the hostile environment of the sea with the Indies in general, painting the latter as similarly dangerous and polluting. The deserters’ helplessness following the wreck represents the lowest point of Bontekoe’s account. The sea literally invades and submerges the ship, unravelling the resolve of the survivors, who find themselves confronted with the Indies as a blank, unknowable expanse: without Bontekoe’s navigational expertise they are paralysed. As in Blackmore’s Portuguese accounts, shipwreck disrupts the voyage’s forward impetus, allowing the disorderly reality of the Indies to take hold of the mariners, suspending them in “a kind of narrative bubble... in which further forward time stalls or becomes all but impossible.”Footnote ²⁵ Blackmore notes how plans, charts, and navigational practices helped Portuguese captains construct a discourse that gave an impetus and meaning to the ship’s course.Footnote ²⁶ Practices among VOC sailors show a similar concern for marking and recording progress in an otherwise featureless ocean, with religious rituals and festivals marking the crossing of dangerous boundaries en route from the Dutch Republic to Batavia.Footnote ²⁷ The foremost example was the “sea baptism,” which was apparently a common practice despite repeated attempts by the Company’s directors to ban it.Footnote ²⁸ This tradition marked the ship’s escape from the “narrow seas” between England and continental Europe, and its first entry onto the open ocean.Footnote ²⁹ Raw recruits were dropped into the sea from a high yard on the foremast, to be subsequently hauled back on board by their shipmates. The “baptism” gave novice sailors a taste of the experience of sinking and showed them the importance of the ship as a cohesive physical and social unit, and of co-ordinated communal action for the survival of all.Footnote ³⁰ Other rituals involved the successful passing of the two Abrolhos (“open your eyes” or “watch out”) reefs. The first reef marked the end of the equatorial doldrums and the successful entry into the Brazilian southerly current, which ensured progress through the south Atlantic. The second reef, the Houtman Abrolhos off western Australia, was first marked as a hazard in 1619 but acquired a fearsome reputation after the Batavia’s wreck: it threatened ships turning north after a rapid passage across the southern Indian ocean.Footnote ³¹ Its passing was celebrated when the ship approached the Sunda Strait, the sight of which heralded the end of the voyage at nearby Batavia.

In the Dutch stories, the Indies alternates between a blank void and a tiger-infested wilderness, populated by treacherous savages. During the boat journey that follows the Nieuw Hoorn’s wreck the crew faces physical threats from the weather, animals, and hordes of murderous islanders who prey on crewmen as they hunt for drinking water. The absence of European social constraints also threatens the mental or spiritual state of the mariners: the Indies acts as a theatre for men to reveal their most bestial natures, with tales of cannibalism and betrayal on the part both of savages and of men made savage by starvation, desperation, and the corrupting sea.Footnote ³² The stories emphasize the need for protective boundaries between Europeans and Indies people and places. Their happy endings come when their narrators win free of the Indies and return to a place of safety, either in the Republic or at one of the Company’s factories in the East.

The topos of the Indies as a friendless, comfortless wasteland served a disciplinary agenda: desertion was one of the primary motives for mutiny from the VOC, and evidence shows that Europeans could in fact find alternative work in Indies labour markets.Footnote ³³ The Company faced severe challenges in recruiting and retaining sufficient numbers of European mariners, relying increasingly on Asian sailors through the eighteenth century and on coercive methods of recruitment in the Republic.Footnote ³⁴ Although the Company offered unusual employment stability it was also well known for low wages and high mortality.Footnote ³⁵ Batavia, the first port of call for most VOC seamen, was notoriously disease-ridden in the eighteenth century, killing more than half of all new recruits within six months of arrival.Footnote ³⁶ Marcus Rediker has shown how desertion functioned in the more open labour markets of North America as a means for workers to negotiate better wages and contracts, since shipping companies had to compete with one another in order to recruit and retain their sailors.Footnote ³⁷ The monopolistic VOC, with an eye perpetually on the bottom line, prevented its personnel from participating in such a competitive labour market through draconian laws, heavy financial and corporal punishments, and the withholding of half of their employees’ wages until the completion of their contracts, to be paid only in the Republic, to men who returned on VOC ships.Footnote ³⁸

Shipshape Society

In contrast with the sea and the Indies, the ship as a physical and social unit formed the proper, safe, and orderly home for Company servants. The ship of state and the barque of St. Peter were already well-known symbols for idealised social order.Footnote ³⁹ Portuguese narratives used the ship as a metaphor for the religious and political community, while the VOC used ship iconography on its publications to represent itself as an orderly, virtuous, religiously-guided institution.Footnote ⁴⁰

The preacher and prolific ethicist Godefridus Udemans explicitly linked ship symbolism with religious virtue in his magnum opus ’t Geestelyck Roer van ’t Coopmans Schip (“The Spiritual Rudder of the Merchant Ship”), intended for the ethical instruction of East and West India Company directors and shipmasters.Footnote ⁴¹ In this work Udemans tied the fate of the Republic and the ethical justification for the Companies’ enterprises to the image of the merchant ship as the vehicle and home for virtuous, patriotic seamen who were expanding the righteous Kingdom of Christ through commerce, missionary work and just war.Footnote ⁴² Together with Adam Westerman’s prayer book for mariners, De Groote Christelycke Zee-vaert (“The Great Christian Voyage”), the “Spiritual Rudder” was widely circulated in the Dutch Republic and placed on VOC ships by Company directors for the education of Company servants.Footnote ⁴³

Udemans and Westerman painted a picture of Indies trade that was as dangerous to merchants’ spiritual welfare as it was to mariners’ bodies. They denounced trading for profit, war, the taking of plunder, and, most tellingly for the Company, monopoly-holding, as snares leading men away from God and salvation.Footnote ⁴⁴ Westerman identified merchants with Judas Iscariot and warned them that they might expect “profit in the strongbox, damage in the conscience, reward in Hell.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The same writers also offered means by which all these practices might be justified and turned to pious ends, however. They proclaimed the Dutch to be God’s chosen people, seafaring and trade their special contribution to Creation, and their cause of freedom from Catholicism to be a manifestation of the righteous fight against the kingdom of the Antichrist, equated with Spain, the Republic’s enemy. Westerman stated baldly that “God is the author of the voyage, the finder of ships, and has ordained sea-trade,” and named the Dutch as His chosen instrument for spreading His kingdom over the seas, so that “through the Most High’s blessing their domain has become like a map of the whole earth.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Udemans averred that both the East and West India Companies were in fact doing God’s work as they waged war, plundered enemy ships, and profited from trade in Indies goods.Footnote ⁴⁷ The all-important distinction he drew between honourably warlike Company commanders and mere pirates arose from the special circumstance of their opposing Spain: “their aim is not in fact to commit piracy, but to trade peacefully: to cut off the nerve of war, that is, the treasures of the East and West Indies, from our public enemy, the Spaniard and his adherents: to secure for our state new alliances, towns and forts in those wealthy lands, to expand the borders of the Kingdom of Christ through the conversion of those poor, blind heathens: to deliver those same poor Indians from the Spaniard’s tyranny.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The VOC was the ideal vehicle for achieving godly commerce with its combination of warlike and mercantile, public and private interests. Udemans included the text of the VOC’s charter and a summary of its Articles in his treatise to demonstrate the Company’s credentials as the proper vessel for this holy work, concluding that its merchants were “pious patriots [working] at the behest of high authorities and with a righteous aim… preserving the freedom of our trade routes,” the latter point being linked to Hugo Grotius’ Freedom of the Seas. Footnote ⁴⁹ Once Spanish tyranny had been dealt with, the VOC’s holy and profitable mission would be to carry the gospel to all corners of the world, since “the riches of the Kingdom of Christ hang on the continuation of this commerce.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, the very richness of the commerce was evidence of its rightness, since it offered greater potential for profit than “any other trade under the sun” and, through the slave trade, brought Indies populations into the sphere of the Reformed Church who would otherwise be vulnerable to Spanish Papist falsehoods.Footnote ⁵¹ In Udemans’s hands the merchant’s ship became “a church at sea, guided (it was hoped) by a godly crew and ‘spiritual rudder,’” capable of carrying a heavy load of ideological freight.Footnote ⁵²

Apart from the religious gloss offered by Udemans and Westerman, the ship also served as a useful metaphor for the Company as a whole because it represented the basic social unit of VOC operations, containing all the elements necessary for carrying out the Company’s functions. Shipboard social structures and hierarchies informed the VOC’s organization ashore as well, since the ruling councils of ships were carried intact onto land to form the basis for the colonial order of the Company’s factories.Footnote ⁵³ In this novel world of the ship/colony, domestic “Dutch standards of culture, freedom, and civility did not apply.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Instead the social rules were built around a quasi-military idiom of maritime discipline in which the VOC’s commanders and governors, as surrogate captains, enjoyed a degree of sovereign power unknown to corporate officers in the Republic. Philip Stern has described the English East India Company’s government on St. Helena acting with similar sovereign authority, presenting itself as Hobbes’ Leviathan: “that is, all that stood between its inhabitants and the anarchy of man in his natural state, particularly on the frontiers of empire.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Shipshape order could be invoked anywhere at need, in its most basic form through the reading of the Company’s Articles of Employment, to call the Company’s servants to a commonly understood standard of behaviour.

Shipwreck as Test

Carl Thompson has observed that shipwrecks could be “deeply problematic events at an ideological level, disasters that bring into question key aspects of the nation’s self-image.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This was clearly true for the VOC ship, which represented both the colonial social order and, according to Udemans, the holy work of expansive commerce, all justified by continued success and profitability. The wreck of the “church at sea” might signify the loss of divine favour, if the voyage failed entirely and definitively. Writers of wreck narratives and religious treatises, as well as contemporary Dutch painters, avoided such a conclusion by casting the wrecks as divine tests, making them what Steve Mentz has called “symbolic performances” of seafarers’ resolve and prowess.Footnote ⁵⁷

Lawrence Goedde has observed that tempest and wreck paintings of the Dutch “Golden Age” offer “images of warning rather than accomplished disaster,” depicting scenes not of pathos or chaos but of struggle and perseverance, in which men and ships are challenged by nature and through which mariners show their control and fortitude, the challenges of the voyage offering metaphors for those of the Christian life.Footnote ⁵⁸ The effect is at once universal and specifically related to the maritime, mercantile project.

The events of shipwreck and mutiny tested the ideological constructs of the ship, its company of mariners, and the VOC as a whole by breaking hulls, scattering crews, and disordering the social hierarchy of officers and men. In all four narratives, these constructs ultimately pass their trials: the Company’s order ends up being restored and the authors reach a place of security from which they can thank God for the accomplished fact of their salvation. Success comes at a price; like Blackmore’s stories, these are “deeds of survival” in which the narrator asserts his resilience while recalling all those who were less fortunate than himself.Footnote ⁵⁹ The critical difference between the Portuguese and Dutch accounts is one of authorial gloss: the latter contain plentiful tragedy and pity, but their meanings are strongly coloured by survivor bias and an undented optimism. Deaths along the way serve not to call the imperial project into question, but to illustrate lessons learned by the surviving narrators.

Where tempest paintings show struggle in a frozen moment, the stories dramatise it through narrative time, passing through phases where control is lost and recovered, just as the sea baptism passes through successive phases of falling, abandonment, and rescue. Thompson has observed that shipwreck narratives tend to express the anxieties of seafaring nations regarding their national projects.Footnote ⁶⁰ The four stories address certain anxieties faced by VOC mariners, which are given free rein in the disorder phase, while the normal rules of shipboard conduct are suspended, before being overcome by the stories’ resolutions. The accounts are selective, however, in the anxieties they air. The tempest paintings do not show ships entirely at the mercy of the waves, nor lost to incompetence.Footnote ⁶¹ Instead, the threat of wrecking always comes from features of the environment—frequently from rocky, forbidding, foreign coasts, adorned with wild beasts to associate them with “the unknown, vast world that the great voyages of exploration had opened up to the European imagination.”Footnote ⁶² The struggle to escape such shores emblematises the patience, strength, and trust in Providence that are required of the righteous man.Footnote ⁶³ The challenges faced by the crews in the four Dutch stories are also presented as external to the physical body of the ship and the social body of the crew, sometimes through narrative sleight-of-hand. Where the threat comes from mutiny, the mutineers are externalised as spitsboeven (“rascals” or “brigands,”), schelmen (“scoundrels”) or duyvels (“devils”) who prey on the main body of the crew.Footnote ⁶⁴ When the overall social cohesion of the crew appears in doubt, there are always exemplary characters (often the narrators themselves) who retain their self-identity and sense of purpose, so that in the narrative the threat remains always concrete, identifiable, and, for the virtuous seaman, avoidable.

In all cases the key to passing the tests is to maintain both institutionally-mandated discipline and solid Dutch virtues, particularly endurance, “the only way open to a man to arm himself against the inescapable blows of Fate,” according to Lipsius.Footnote ⁶⁵ Margarette Lincoln has observed how British wreck narratives tend to express a “nationalistic ethos” of gender and class discipline by concentrating on the self-sacrifice of exemplary manly heroes who “corroborate the contemporary mythology of British maritime prowess and Providential favour.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The moral of the Nieuw Hoorn and Batavia wreck stories is that triumph over adversity depends on calm endurance and collective action in obedience to the officers, reaffirming both a stoicism recommended by Dutch Reformed writers and the specific regulations of the VOC.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Company’s Articles of Employment enjoin all those aboard a vessel threatened by wrecking to work together for their collective salvation, rather than thinking of their own individual survival and abandoning the sinking ship.Footnote ⁶⁸ Bontekoe’s account shows directly how failing to obey this injunction leads to collective ruin. It also shows, in the manner of a moral fable, using Biblical language, how ruin can be undone through the reaffirmation of social order. Bontekoe’s story has long been interpreted as a religious allegory in which the author plays a latter-day Moses, leading his errant but faithful men through the Indies wilderness to the safe haven of Batavia.Footnote ⁶⁹ The boat journey parallels the Biblical desert crossing, with manna-like rains of flying fish and a mountain ascent by the prophetic Bontekoe, which affords him a first glimpse of the Sunda Strait and safety.Footnote ⁷⁰

Providence, Justification, and Punishment: The Batavia

The moral fable aspect of the disaster narrative is given full rein in the account of the wreck and mutiny of the ship Batavia, published as the Ongeluckige Voyagie in 1647, a rescension of the 1630 Journal of Francois Pelsaert, the Batavia’s senior merchant and commanding officer.Footnote ⁷¹ Pelsaert’s account lays blame for the whole disaster on his immediate subordinate, under-merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz who led a group of at least 30 officers and men in rebellion and massacred more that 120 VOC servants and passengers in one of the most traumatic episodes in the Company’s history.Footnote ⁷²

The threat posed by rogue Company officers in the Batavia disaster presents a challenge to the narrative form described above, which shows officers holding the keys to the crew’s salvation. Dangerous officers required explanation in a way that the dangerous Indies or even rebellious sailors did not. Pelsaert’s Journal is principally concerned with constructing a frame to explain his subordinates’ actions while exculpating Pelsaert himself and justifying the sentences he carried out upon the mutineers before returning to the Company’s factory.

The title page of the Ongeluckige Voyagie’s first printing offers its own narrative frame by presenting the disaster “as a caution to all who would sail to the Indies,” partnering it with stories of VOC servants endangered by the king of Siam and “acts of extreme tyranny” by the king of Persia, the whole emphasising the perils and barbarity of Indies life.Footnote ⁷³ In this context the mutineers’ violence appears the result of some contagion or affliction of the spirit given expression by the circumstance of separation from European civilisation. Pelsaert encourages this diagnosis in his sentencing remarks; Cornelisz appears a “mad heretic,” who used the disaster and isolation to indulge his perversely murderous nature.Footnote ⁷⁴ Madness aside, however, Pelsaert’s narrative structure closely mirrors that of Bontekoe, with phases of disorder and salvation, predicated on the leadership of faithful officers.

In Pelsaert’s account, disorder begins weeks before the ship’s grounding on the Abrolhos reef, with Cornelisz, the ship’s master, and several other crew members plotting mutiny. This construction enables Pelsaert to separate the mutinous officers from the rest of the crew as schelmen (“scoundrels”), who seize opportunistically on the misfortune of wreck to commit evil acts.Footnote ⁷⁵ The mutineers’ plot involves an anonymous attack on a female passenger who had spurned the master’s sexual advances. This attack was to force Pelsaert to punish the crew collectively, causing resentment and rallying the crew behind the mutineers, who could consequently throw the merchant overboard and turn pirate as soon as they saw Australia—a fixed navigational point from which they could set a new course.Footnote ⁷⁶ Providentially, however, shipwreck interrupts the mutineers’ plans.

During the shipwreck, social order breaks down entirely. The crew is evacuated by boat and divided among several nearby islands, where suspicion immediately grows between the groups of evacuees, each fearing the others would seize the remaining supplies for themselves, including the boats used to salvage goods from the wreck. Pelsaert eventually discovers that this suspicion springs from mistrust between the mutineers, each of whom fears being betrayed by his co-conspirators. In particular the master, fearing exposure, prevents the unwitting merchant from communicating his plans to the bulk of the crew, physically restraining Pelsaert from visiting their islands “for his own protection.” When Pelsaert undertakes a boat journey to the factory at Batavia to fetch help, he therefore does so without informing those left behind, who remain stranded for over three months, not knowing what has become of their leader.Footnote ⁷⁷

Pelsaert’s boat journey, like Bontekoe’s, provides both social reintegration and clarity for the participants. Even though several of the boat’s crew had previously planned mutiny, they all co-operate to reach the Company’s fleet, where the master and boatswain are punished for their “outrageous behaviour.”Footnote ⁷⁸ On the islands, however, in Pelsaert’s absence, disorder reigns as the mutineers adapt their plans. Cornelisz’s new plan involves attacking the first rescue ship that might come and escaping with the Company’s silver, after having reduced the crew to a manageable number of loyal men through a series of murderous raids between islands.

Only one group successfully resists the mutineers’ predations: the soldiers, led by one Wiebbe Hayes, who withdraw to a separate “high” island, maintain discipline, and are notably healthier and more capable than the mutineers.Footnote ⁷⁹ These soldiers fight off two attacks, capture Cornelisz, and finally (providentially) beat the mutineers in a race to meet Pelsaert on his return, enabling Hayes to give a full account of the mutineers’ perfidy. Properly warned and with the soldiers’ assistance, Pelsaert rapidly imprisons and tries the remaining mutineers.

Pelsaert’s account veers into moral fable where he explains why the mutineers ultimately failed while the merchant and soldiers succeeded in their endeavours. Pelsaert repeatedly states that God took an active hand in thwarting the mutineers and assisting their opponents, echoing an English Puritan tradition of using shipwrecks “as a means of illustrating the workings of Providence, and God’s active intervention in the world on behalf of the Godly.”Footnote ⁸⁰ What displeases God is not merely the mutineers’ violence and cruelty, but their breaking of boundaries—of Christian behaviour by murdering innocents; of family and sexual mores by raping married women; of property by stealing the Company’s goods; and of class and decorum by misappropriating extravagant clothes. This last point particularly offends Pelsaert, who interrupts his account of Cornelisz’s murders to observe: “he gave free rein to the utmost to his pride and devilish arrogance on these poor miserable islands... by changing daily into different clothes, silk stockings, garters with gold laces... believing that such evil vain pleasure as this could last forever.Footnote ⁸¹

The result of all this boundary trampling is an orgy of murder and treachery that constantly threatens the mutineers themselves, who cannot establish any regular social order to replace that of the ship. Instead Cornelisz rules through terror, regularly murdering mutineers and innocents alike, following each massacre with a patently false contract of amity and peace that he betrays within days through further violence. In Pelsaert’s description, the society of the mutineers lacks any trust, reciprocity or safety, while their actions are motivated by “lusts” rather than thought. In contrast, Pelsaert and Hayes remain faithful to their tasks and bound by virtue. The result of their fidelity is the trust and unified action of their followers and the help of God, who frustrates their enemies. Pelsaert concludes that the mutineers would have continued in their “strangling, hacking, and throat-cutting” indefinitely “if the almighty God had not been aggrieved and thwarted their plan and all their intentions... submitting them to their well-earned punishment.”Footnote ⁸² Pelsaert correspondingly casts himself as God’s agent in the trials, executing the mutineers “to turn from us the wrath of God and to cleanse the name of Christianity from such unheard of villainry,” a role for which God had “purposely spared” him, in the boat and the rescue ship.Footnote ⁸³ The punishment of the mutineers and the safe arrival of the remaining crew at Batavia conclude Pelsaert’s account, demonstrating that both order and God’s favour have been restored. The Journal neglects to mention that only 68 survivors were recovered out of nearly 350 souls.Footnote ⁸⁴

While the Ongeluckige Voyagie presents a neat, providential narrative that has subsequently largely been accepted by historians, the court at Batavia, it seems, was not entirely convinced. It punished five crewmen whom Pelsaert had spared, found Pelsaert himself to be delinquent in his exercise of authority, and relieved him of command. Pelsaert did not live to see the reaction at the Company’s headquarters to his account: he died a few months after the court hearings.Footnote ⁸⁵

Spatial Order and Security: the Blydorp

The breaking of social and spatial boundaries lies at the heart of the “calamitous voyage” of the Blydorp, which ran aground on the West African coast, roughly 70 miles from the French slaving outpost of Gorée, on August 7th, 1733, during an outward-bound voyage to Batavia.Footnote ⁸⁶ The wreck was initially reported in three anonymous pamphlets, which told a lurid story of abjection, suffering, and humiliation in which the Dutch crew faced the threat of enslavement at the hands of rapacious “Moors.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The authoritative eyewitness accounts by the ship’s master, Haye Blaauwhuysen, and a soldier, Nicolaas Camstrup, were published in 1735 partly to set the record straight. In doing so, they fitted it to the familiar structure of disorder, consequent disaster, and reintegration.Footnote ⁸⁸

In Camstrup’s account the event of wrecking itself does not cost a single life, the men being ferried to shore in the ship’s boats.Footnote ⁸⁹ Neither does shipwreck provoke immediate disorder: the crew replicates something of the shipboard order on shore, erecting a tent and defensive earthwork to serve as the centre of a camp for the whole ship’s company.Footnote ⁹⁰ This tent replicates the functions of the ship’s quarterdeck, serving as the seat of authority, the residence of the officers, and the refuge for everything that is valuable and vulnerable, including three female passengers, the salvaged supplies, and the Company’s money chests.Footnote ⁹¹ The Blydorp was carrying a fortune in silver, intended to pay the Company’s wages and the cost of a return cargo of spices and tea.

The main threat in the account comes from a large and growing crowd of what Camstrup describes only as neegers (“blacks”), without specifying anything about their origins or interests.Footnote ⁹² These “blacks” form a menacing but vague backdrop for the crew’s actions. Like clouds presaging a storm, they appear an environmental danger: looming, uncountable, distant. During the crew’s stay on the beach their numbers increase steadily, and they become increasingly threatening: supplies are stolen and shots exchanged at night.Footnote ⁹³ The storm only breaks, however, through indiscipline on the part of the crew. First the captain discovers that two of the Company’s money chests have been looted aboard the ship. He orders the remaining chests to be placed in the tent. The “blacks” hear of the money from the increasingly disorderly crew and consequently demand payment in exchange for safe passage. As the chests are transferred to the tent, the clinking of silver attracts large numbers of “greedy mates” from among the crew. These mates make a noisy scene in the space immediately in front of the tent, then invade it, shouting so alarmingly that the officers and female passengers flee in disarray.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is this disorder among the crew that triggers the attack by the “blacks,” resulting in the massacre of 50 crewmen, the wounding of 60 more, and the capture of the survivors.

After the attack the “blacks” withdraw, leaving the officers to reassert control over the survivors and to organize a group to parley for a guarantee of safe passage. Only after several days, when the officers are seen to have fully reasserted control, can the king of the “blacks” be persuaded to grant this passage, together with help from local guides, at the cost of all the ship’s goods. The subsequent arduous journey across a barren desert tests the crew with heat and thirst but no further disasters ensue while discipline holds.

Camstrup’s and Blaauwhuysen’s accounts are less upbeat than the other stories discussed here. In particular, Camstrup does not shy away from relating that roughly two thirds of the ship’s 225 crewmen died from violence, disease, starvation, and thirst before they reached safety, nor does Blaauwhuysen restrain his condemnation of the French who, he states, treated the refugee crewmen under their “protection” no better than slaves, allowing many to starve.Footnote ⁹⁵ The cautionary aspect is nonetheless clear in both accounts. Camstrup describes the “blacks” as numberless and placeless: they fill the strand on which the crew makes camp, forming a general threat much like the Indies itself. Although he describes the “blacks” as “murderous,” “barbarous,” “thieving,” and “bloodthirsty,” he still blames the actions of the “greedy mates” for provoking the attack. Specifically the breaking of the boundary of the officers’ tent invites the “blacks” to rush in like a second shipwreck, as if enacting a punishment for the mates’ mutinous act.

Bringing it all together: the mutiny on the Nijenburg

Providence, the orientation of shipboard space, and the disorientating Indies combine in the anonymous Echt relaas (“True Account”) of the Nijenburg mutiny.Footnote ⁹⁶ This mutiny was almost unique among VOC rebellions in that the mutineers came close to achieving their goal of deserting with the Company’s money: they managed to seize their ship and maintain control over it for several weeks, steering the vessel from Cape Verde to Brazil. The published narrative of the mutiny accordingly does not quite follow the pattern of disorder and reintegration set by Bontekoe. Instead it offers something like an extended commentary on it, showing the mutineers’ rule as a doomed mockery of proper shipboard order and their failure to reintegrate themselves with the rest of the crew as the key to their eventual downfall, imprisonment, and punishment. In the “True Account” the whole period of the mutineers’ misrule therefore constitutes a condition of disorder, which is only resolved through the capture and punishment of the mutineers.

The “True Account” was the first publication to attempt a detailed report of the mutiny. It was released before the official records of the mutineers’ trials, with which it agrees in almost all respects, except that it supplements the trial documents’ information with anecdotes and commentary.Footnote ⁹⁷ Presented as a diary kept by an unnamed officer during the mutiny, the account interleaves its reportage with frequent imprecations by the author against the mutineers, describing them as devils and giving prayers and thanks to God for preserving the officers against their malice.

At midnight on June 14^th, 1763, shortly after the Nijenburg had passed the Cape Verde islands en route to Batavia, a band of 14 men rushed up the stairways of the quarterdeck and seized control.Footnote ⁹⁸ The uprising was remarkably bloodless: only eight persons were wounded, the sole killing being the result of a personal vendetta.Footnote ⁹⁹

The mutineers faced little opposition; almost all of the ship’s crew hid from them or meekly submitted to their orders when confronted. The “True Account” describes the captain and first mate offering no resistance, instead fleeing at the first sight of the mutineers on the quarterdeck, the first mate casting down his pistol in his haste to escape. The account comically describes the captain and mate climbing out of the window of the gallery (over the officers’ privy) and hiding under the chain wales mounted on the exterior of the hull, buffeted by wind and waves until they could be coaxed back inboard, some hours later, by the mutineers’ promises that no harm would come to them.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Having gained control, and under the threat that they would kill the officers or blow up the ship if their wishes were not met, the mutineers demanded to be taken to Brazil, where they hoped to escape the VOC’s authority with the Company’s bullion in hand, to sell the ship, and to live off the combined proceeds. None of the mutineers was capable of sailing the ship or navigating to Brazil, however.Footnote ¹⁰¹ They were therefore forced to rely on the ship’s officers, the only persons aboard skilled in navigation, to direct the ship and crew on their behalf.

The “True Account” describes the ship drifting slowly and anxiously across the windless equatorial region known as the doldrums over the next seven weeks. The mutineers, unnerved by their apparent lack of progress, quarrel among themselves and threaten the captive officers. Far from land in the middle of the Atlantic, without wind or any clear evidence that the ship is making way, they accuse the captain of attempting to trick them, either by preventing the ship from moving forward or by steering for some secret destination. Eventually they threaten to execute him and the officers unless land is sighted within two weeks. Dramatically and providentially, at the last possible moment, the captain’s life is spared when Brazil is sighted. Deliverance from the blank ocean does not end the mutineers’ tribulations; even as they are celebrating, the Nijenburg runs aground on a sandbank within sight of Cape São Roque. At this point most of the mutineers scramble to abandon ship in the two boats, together with a little of the Company’s money, believing the ship itself to be hopelessly stranded and in imminent danger of sinking. The mutineers force two officers into the boats with them because, the account states, they themselves do not know how to row.Footnote ¹⁰² Shortly thereafter the ship floats off the sandbank. The few mutineers left aboard fire the signal gun, intending to recall those in the boats, but their signal is misinterpreted as an attack: the boats row hurriedly to shore, never to return.

The few mutineers left aboard offer the captain his command back. Unlike Bontekoe, however, he refuses to take it. After this blow the ship limps uncertainly northward up the coast in the direction of French Cayenne, on the word of one sailor who claims that the French will accept willing labourers. The ship, having lost its boats and one anchor, can no longer land the crew safely nor stand off the coast indefinitely. Rafts sent to scout the shore disappear or return without news of civilization. Faced with a deserted coast, dwindling supplies, and the loss of the boats, the remaining mutineers eventually surrender the ship to the French colonial governor at Cayenne in exchange for a guarantee of safe conduct.Footnote ¹⁰³ This proves to be a fatal mistake: by stratagem the governor separates the mutineers from their ship and guns, then promptly imprisons them, later handing them over to Dutch colonial authorities in Suriname. The “true account” concludes with the restoration of order through the trial and punishment of the core group of mutineers by the Suriname court, with the help of VOC advisors.

Trial records show that the group that had left in the boats fared no better. While they were occupied with quarrelling among themselves, the officers they had taken with them briefly escaped and reported the mutineers to a Dutch-speaking doctor who informed the Portuguese governor at Pernambuco. All were promptly imprisoned by Portuguese authorities and returned to the Dutch Republic. Thus, courts friendly to the VOC tried almost all of the core mutineers in 1764, either aboard warships in the Texel roadstead or at the colonial court of Fort Zeelandia in Suriname.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Shortly after the publication of the “True Account,” the mutineers tried in the Republic were executed and displayed in specially-commissioned gibbets on Kijkduin, beside the Texel roadstead where Indies-bound ships would be sure to see them. Their punishment was commemorated in songs, the lyrics of which were printed by the Company, to inform Dutch seamen of the costs of mutiny.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

A Spatial Reading

Out of all the stories, the “True Account” of the Nijenburg mutiny shows the strongest connection between space and authority. First, the manner in which the mutineers seize control of the ship emphasizes the importance of the quarterdeck as the locus of authority: its abandonment by the captain and first mate, and its subsequent claiming by the mutineers, signals the latter’s complete victory. The captain’s literal suspension under the chain wales and return to the deck in a subservient position resembles a rite of passage, which transfers authority to the mutineers.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Following the ignominious subjugation of the captain, the crew of the Nijenburg face a perverted form of reintegration in which the officers are regularly humiliated in front of the men, while also being used by the mutineers to maintain order. The “True Account” presents this inversion as a sort of regime of misrule or Saturnalia and the mutineers as the polar opposites of the ideal virtuous, sober, and persevering Dutch officer, prone to binges in which they squander the ship’s stores and vent their passions on crewmen and officers alike. The mutineers signal this inverted order by turning the quarterdeck into a stage for displaying their authority and largesse, which they distribute from the ship’s stores and the Company’s money chests. The officers, who previously ruled from this deck, are kept captive and sequestered from the general crew in their cabins behind it. Lacking legitimacy and faced by a crew that neither resists nor joins them, the mutineers rely on bribes of money and bullion to turn crew members to their side: they accordingly keep the money chests guarded but in plain sight of the crew in the kerk (“church”): a space directly below the quarterdeck normally used for announcements and religious services.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Those crewmen who accept bribes are invited to join the continuous feasting on the quarterdeck.

These spatial signs reinforce the “True Account’s” message that the apparent reintegration of the ship’s company under the mutineers is false. Its falseness is also made manifest by the mutineers’ lack of confidence and seafaring prowess. During the period of misrule the directionless environment of the doldrums compounds the mutineers’ sense of drifting purposelessness common to disaster stories. The doldrums posed a well-known challenge in the East India voyage with a formal solution: the captain merely needed to follow the wagenspoor (“cart track”) marked on VOC charts in order to guarantee a safe crossing.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The mutineers are apparently ignorant of this basic fact of navigation, however, and their consequent anxiety generates a crisis of command: it reveals the extent to which they depend on the officers they have deposed. It also returns them frequently to something like their pre-mutiny position as supplicants at the captain’s chart table, to be tutored (or, they suspected, tricked) by him in navigation.

Providence and Endurance

Finally, the mutineers confirm their unfitness for rule with a lack of perseverance, restraint, and good fortune. Like the Batavia’s mutineers, the Nijenburg’s new muiterofficiers adopt extravagant titles and rich, gold-trimmed clothes, which the account’s author mocks as ridiculously inappropriate, showing a shameful lack of propriety. The mutineers appear hapless, comical figures, lacking the steadfastness or experience of proper officers. They are easily panicked by the standard hazards of the sea, in one interlude taking fright at whales and trying—and failing—to drive them off with handguns.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Details unique to the “True Account” show the hand of Providence working together with the mutineers’ own incompetence and lack of virtue to bring about their downfall. The mutineers’ misfortunes begin two nights after the uprising when a storm destroys part of the foremast and kills the lookout, leaving broken rigging strewn about the deck. Failing to clear the wreckage away, the mutineers are later hampered by it during their attempts to execute a sailor whom they accuse of plotting a counter-mutiny.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Finding themselves unable either to throw the sailor overboard or to shoot him as he clings to the broken rigging, the mutineers conclude that the sailor’s good fortune must show that Providence is on his side. They therefore pardon him, allowing the injured man back on board.Footnote ¹¹¹ The captain’s last-minute reprieve and the interruption of mutinous celebrations by the ship’s grounding on the sandbank are explicitly attributed to Providence. When the ship floats off the sandbank, just after the departure of most of the mutineers in the boats, it is as though the ship had been lightened of its load of ill fortune. The incident of the signal gun being mistaken for an attack shows a more immediately practical failing: the mutineers are never able to generate any dependable or disciplined social cohesion: having abandoned their fellows on the ship, they expect an attack from their quondam comrades. The trial papers show that the mutineers’ flight in the boats, moreover, doomed those left aboard, who could no longer reach shore safely.Footnote ¹¹² The ship became a floating prison: one that its inmates would only exchange for a French prison at Cayenne. Finally, neither French nor Portuguese colonial society is willing to accept the rebels. On the way to Cayenne the remaining mutineers construct two rafts to scout the coast. The first raft is apprehended and its crew imprisoned by French colonial authorities. Its master, realising that the French would not cooperate with the mutineers, attempts to send a message to his shipmates, telling them to blow themselves up rather than submit to French protection. This letter is (providentially) intercepted and used by the French commander as evidence of the villainy of those still aboard.