THE WRECK OF THE BATAVIA

The journey to Batavia took thirty-three days and it took another sixty-three days for Pelsaert to return with a ship after having spent some time in Batavia.

When Commander Pelsaert returned in the yacht Sardam to rescue the shipwrecked passengers of the Batavia, three months after the ship foundered, he found only 116 survivors out 306 people he had left behind.

A man called Jacobs Cornelius, who was one of those who had planned mutiny while still on the high seas, and his followers had taken over after a furious and murderous battle with other survivors. Many of the men had been killed and the women and children had been divided as booty amongst the mutineers. Most of the women and children had subsequently also been killed.

Three hundred people marooned on small barren islands in an unknown place, with little food or water brought out the worst in human nature in a small group of men who had already been planning mutiny and piracy.

Commander Pelsaert condemned Cornelius and his men to death and they were hanged immediately. Pelsaert himself died a year later.

It was not until the 1960s that the wreck of the Batavia and some of the bodies were discovered, though there had been searches for it for hundreds of years. More bodies and a suspected mass grave have recently been found.

Historians and archaeologists, both Dutch and Australian, are still piecing together the story of one of the worst massacres in marine history.

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