Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny in Around the World in 80 Books

Sep 03, 2010 Kay rated it really liked it

Shelves: commodity_history, seafaring_tales, harrowing-tales, nonfiction

A School for Sociopaths

When the Dutch merchant ship Batavia ran aground on a barren coral atoll off the northwest coast of Australia in 16629, the passengers and crew found themselves in a near hopeless plight, with scant water and little hope of rescue. What sets this shipwreck tale apart is not the depiction of the harrowing conditions that followed, although harrowing they were, but of the survivors' "Lord of the Flies"-esque descent into savagery, led by a psychopathic Svengali figure, one J A School for Sociopaths

When the Dutch merchant ship Batavia ran aground on a barren coral atoll off the northwest coast of Australia in 16629, the passengers and crew found themselves in a near hopeless plight, with scant water and little hope of rescue. What sets this shipwreck tale apart is not the depiction of the harrowing conditions that followed, although harrowing they were, but of the survivors' "Lord of the Flies"-esque descent into savagery, led by a psychopathic Svengali figure, one Jeronimus Cornelisz, a failed apothecary and heretic.

Dash does a fine job of painting background -- not only of what impelled Cornelisz to accept a job as "under merchant" aboard the Batavia but also of describing life aboard the ship (unsanitary and gruesome in the extreme) and of the practices of the Dutch East India Company. A mutiny is already afoot when the shipwreck occurs, and the pacing quickens as Cornelisz seizes control of the band of sailor/soldier mutineers and bends others to his will, often making them kill others to gain entry into the group he forces to pledge fealty to him.

Reading this account of Cornelisz' "Heart of Darkness"-like sadism and madness, as he oversees the killing of 115 people, is nightmarish, almost hallucinogenic, despite (or perhaps because of?) the author's dispassionate tone. Perhaps even more disturbing was what happened when Cornelisz increased his ranks by means of a “kill or be killed” scenario -- almost all those he summoned unhesitatingly chose the former option. Once the killing began, I read compulsively on to find out what would ultimately happen to the dwindling number of sane and civilized people left on the chain of islands.

Two things marred the book for me, however. One was what seemed like a random usage of first and last names. In one sentence, the author would refer to "Jeronimus" but in the next "Cornelisz," for example. There were dozens of figures to keep track of throughout the narrative, and this random first- and last-naming only made the book that much harder to follow. I couldn't discern any reason why Dash would refer to the captain of the Batavia as “Ariaen” in one context but “Jacobsz” in another. Weren’t these names not difficult enough without essentially doubling their number? It felt almost as if I were being being randomly tested.

The other, perhaps more serious, objection has to do with the steady stream of conjecture that Dash employed to posit events, motives, and the fates of various persons. There obviously was scant documentation to support much of what he felt occurred, which led to a surfeit of expressions such as "It seems likely that..." or "One can conjecture...." or "So far as can be ascertained." This hedge-like language stands in stark contrast to the undeniably dramatic and undisputed events. Couldn’t Dash have let his footnotes explain his hypotheses in such cases?

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