SYMHC Classics: The Wreck of the Batavia

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Some of the research that we talked about on on Earth related to the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia. We did a two part podcast on the Batavia, which included a mutiny, a shipwreck, and a massacre, as well as a lot of other violence, including sexual assault and rape. Those episodes came out in April of twenty fourteen. So one of the things that's wild about this two partner is if we were recording it today, based on the outline from twenty fourteen, it would have been one part. Like in terms of the word count, the outline is meaningfully shorter than a typical single, one part episode for me today, so we are running both parts of this as one episode today. That means if you get to something later on in the episode that says in part one that was part of today's episode. Also, if we were recording this episode today rather than almost a decade ago, there would be less casual use of words like crazy or insane. So, keeping all of that in mind and recognizing that this episode has some very rough elements to it, we hope you enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly front. So we have our second shipwreck story in as many weeks, and the Batavia was not just a shipwreck. It's a shipwreck and a mutiny and also a massacre. So this perfect storm of nautical carnage. Yeah, there's a lot going on. Yeah, as you were researching, Tracy would keep sending these instant messages of like this is crazy because everything knew she would uncover would add another layer of insanity to it. Yeah, it just escalates and escalates. And there are a couple of notes that we're going to just lay out in the beginning, and the first is the names in this episode. So the main cast of characters in the story came from what's now the Netherlands and Belgium. And at this point in history, the Dutch didn't generally use surnames the way most of us are used to today. Instead of established surnames that were passed down through the family and stayed the same, people had patronymic names which came from their father's first names. So Adrian Jakobs, who was our ship's skipper, was Jakob's son Adrian, and his father would have been Jakub somebody else's son. But then our ship's upper merchant, Francisco Pelser. He was from Antwerp, and he had a more typical family surname that we would expect to see today, which was Pelser. So for the sake of consistency, we're just gonna call everybody the equivalent of what they're saying their name was, because it gets a little confusing. Yeah. The other note is that you may notice, as you are listening to this episode and the next one, because the story is so big, it's in two parts, the number of passengers and crew on the boat. These numbers don't seem to quite add up all the time, and this is because as the voyage went on, people were born, other people died. Sometimes crew just went a wall. When the ship would stop to take on supplies somewhere, people would just decide they were done with this mess and they would go away. Even the starting number of people on board is not totally clear because there were some last minute no shows and people who just never reported for duty. So if you're if you're doing the math on this episode and you kind of go with these numbers. These don't these don't sink. That is why. So today's episode is going to be about the first part of the voyage, the shipwreck, and the rescue mission that happened afterward, and then our next episode will be about sort of happened to the survivors while their bosses were away trying to get help. Ready, yeah, okay, so this whole story starts with the Dutch East India Company or in Dutch the verenicda Ostendisa Company. I practiced that I probably still did not say it perfectly, So we're just going to call them the VOC, which is what that boils down to. So the VOC was dominating trade in the East Indies, which is basically Indonesia and the surrounding islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It became this political and commercial powerhouse, and it sent ships from the Netherlands to Asia to buy things like spices and silk and then to return to Europe to sell them. And the VOC was headquartered in Batavia, which is what's now Jakarta in Indonesia. One of the VOC's ships, which was also called the Batavia, left tessel Holland on its maiden voyage to Batavia in October of sixteen twenty eight, and its cargo included an enormous amount of silver and jewel. The ship also carried materials for a gatehouse which was to be built at VOC headquarters. In command of the Batavia was the upper Merchant, also called the Supercargo, and this was a man named Francisco Pelsert, and he was one of the most experienced merchants in the Dutch East India Company's fleet. He was also very fond of women in money, and at one point, sort of extraneous to this story, set himself up as a money lender, using company funds while charging people extremely steep interest. This was something that was discovered after the end of the Batavia's story, but it kind of clues you in to a little about this man's character. Willing to misappropriate company funds, that's no problem right Next in command was the ship's skipper, Adrian Jacobs, who was a sea captain with more than twenty years of experience, and he was in a rather awkward leadership position because in any other nautical context he would be the one ultimately in char charge. However, on a VOC ship, he reported up to the upper merchant who was a merchant and not a seaman. This is pretty much how things worked in most of the big trading companies. You would have somebody who was ultimately in charge, whose job was to safeguard the financial interests of the company. Everyone ultimately reported to this person, even though this person did not necessarily know how to sail a ship. So that led to some headbutting in many contexts, not just this one. I imagine we have several listeners at the moment thinking that this is very similar to some corporate cultures. Yeah, not ours, I'm happy to report, but it does happen. I mean, I've certainly been in companies for the person in charge it doesn't really know how anything works. Yeah. I tempt one time for a company where there was somebody who was in charge of it who had a history degree and they had Yeah, he'd been hired because he was a people manager, but the people who were working in it found that very frustrating. Yep, Jacobs and Pelser had actually sailed together before, and they had never really gotten along, and their headbutting only got worse after this incident. On a voyage where Pelser was traveling as a guest, Jacobs had gotten extremely drunk and insulted him in a very loud way, and that ship's upper merchant had given Jacobs a really public reprimand, and Jacobs always blamed Pelser for having gotten him dressed down in front of everybody. Always a good relationship to start along voyage with. Always good to blame other people for your own behavior. Third in command was the under merchant, Uronymous Cornellis, who had very little experience at sea. And we'll talk a little bit more about his backstory as we go on, because it becomes really really relevant later on in the tale. Yeah, his story is really relevant to part two, So it's in part two of the episode. Gotcha. So, also on board the Batavia were about three hundred and forty other people, and about two thirds of them were officers and crew of the ship. There are also about one hundred soldiers along with some civilians seeking passage to the Indies, and some of these were women and children. These are mostly families of Voce employees or other people who were going to join their family in the Indies. And before we talk about the voyage itself, shall we take a moment and talk about a word from our sponsor Capital Idea. The Batavia left Teeshsel in a convoy of seven ships, but at the very start of the voyage they went through a huge storm in the North Sea and most of the ships lost sight of each other. Only three of them managed to find one another again. Once the weather had improved, the Batavia, Asindeft and the Burin sailed on together towards South Africa. These three ships made really good time. They got to the Cape of Good Hope an entire month ahead of schedule. But on board the Batavia, the under merchant Cornelis and the ship or Yakubs started to conspire to commit mutiny. They also drew the ship's high Bosin into their plot as well, and so as the ship departed from South Africa, in order to further their plan of mutiny, Jacobs deliberately steered the ship away from the two remaining ones in the convoy, and so the Batavia wounded up going on the rest of its journey alone. And then, during the last stretch of the Batavia's route northwards through the Indian Ocean, upper merchant Pelsert became seriously ill and had to be confined to his cabin under the care of the surgeon Franz Jan's. At this point, Jacobs and Cornellis put their plotting on hold. They were kind of enjoying Pelser's absence and binding their time and waiting to see if he would just die and leave the ship in their hands. Yes, they weren't sort of an interesting attitude to have about it. They weren't going to have to put the effort into staging a mutiny if the you know, the Upper Merchant was just going to die. Take some work. Yeah, So sadly thwarting their plans. Eventually, Pelser recovered, and when it became clear that he was going to live, Yacubs and Cornellis realized that they had wasted some time and getting their whole mutiny plan off the ground. They hadn't recruited enough men to physically take over the ship from the people who would be loyal to the Upper Merchant, so they decided to have another ploy. They conspired to have a wealthy female passenger named Lucretia Yans or you also see her name as Lucretia Vandermillion, which was her husband's last name. They conspired to have her sexually assaulted by masked members of the crew, and Jans was traveling to Batavia to join her husband, and her station was high enough that she had one of the best cabins on the ship and her own maid, And by attacking someone so prominent, they hoped to lure Pelser into punishing those responsible, which they hoped would trigger a revolt among the rest of the Skipper's team. It seemed like a sure thing after Yan said she recognized the voice of one of her attackers and it was the high Bozen. What a horrible plan. It was not a good plan in every possible respect. It was not good to plan to do that in the first place, and also on top of that being a terrible thing to do. It didn't work. Pelser investigated the incident. You know, he accepted her assessment of who had attacked her. He didn't punish anybody. Part of this is because he was still pretty sick, even though he was now recovering, and he also was starting to suspect that maybe there was something bigger going on and that he should not get involved in it quite yet until he had a better sense of exactly what was happening. Yeah, so he was kind of keeping his cards close to his vest, so to speak. Yeah, he didn't want to. I didn't want to incite the riot that he thought might becoming now. But before they could come up with some other ploy to bring the up merchant down, the mutineer's plan was spectacularly derailed because the ship was wrecked yes on June fourth, sixteen twenty nine, a couple of hours before dawn. Pelsert, who at this point was still not well, He was in his bunk but awake. He felt a quote rough, terrible movement, the bumping of the ship's rudder, and then he felt the ship strike rocks so hard that he was knocked out of his bunk. Because they were not really anticipating that they were suddenly going to run into land, they were traveling at full speed when they struck this reef, and huge waves and a bit really heavy wind continued to just pound on the ship and push it harder and harder against the rock. Pelser ran on deck to see that there were breakers all around them, and according to his journal, he said to Yakub's skipper, what have you done that, through your reckless carelessness, you have run this noose around our necks. The crew really scrambled to try to lighten the ship. They threw cannons overboard, they felled the masts, and they started sounding the depths to try to find a way that they might be able to work the ship back into deeper water. But it was no use. The ship was stuck, and on top of that, they really didn't know where they were. This part of the sea was virtually uncharted by Europeans at this point, And on top of all that, when they felled the main mast of the ship, it came down in a different direction than they were expecting, and it crushed everything in its path all the way down. So their effort to lighten the ship just broke it worse. It was only after some discussion that Pelser and Yakubs decided they must be in the Houtman of Brolos Islands, which is a long chain of islands about forty kilometers off the western coast of Australia. Their name comes from Portuguese abro Ojos, or open eyes, and it got its name after the Dutch East India company vessel Doordrecht stumbled upon them about ten years earlier, and the crew believed that they were in open ocean, and then suddenly reef and islands were everywhere. And these islands are as, you can imagine, treacherous for ships. More than sixty vessels are known to have been lost among them, And at this point in history, Europeans had not explored or charted all of this, and they're so far off the coast that they were likely completely unexplored by Australia's Aboriginal peoples as well. So kind of just a big mystery danger sitting out there in the ocean. Yeah, that's why they got that name about keeping your eyes open. Yeah, there's another collection of islands off the coast of South America with the same name for the same reason, like people venturing into them believing they were in totally open ocean and then whoa, not so much islands everywhere. So after the wreck, about one hundred and eighty people were removed from the ship and taken away in boats. Was included about thirty women and children, and about seventy men stayed on board, including under merchant Cornellis. Most of the survivors made their way to an island which was later named Beacon Island, while the commander of the captain and about forty other men went to an island that was nearer the shipwreck, and that later came to be known as Trader's Island. With the party split up this way, the majority of the survivors at this point, very panicked and in poor health from the length of their journey, were on an island by themselves, and no one was really in charge. Yeah, you had basically civilians and the rank and file crew off on an island by themselves, with no leadership, no leadership, and on top of that, no supplies. So the men who stayed on board the Batavia, who were overall the seediest and most disreputable of everyone on board, largely amused themselves by drinking, plundering the ship's stores, looting things for themselves, and attacking anybody who came to the ship to try to salvage supplies from it. A delightful bunch. The crew did manage to get some provisions off the ship, but it was not enough to sustain them for very long, and these islands were basically barren. There were some birds, there were some fish, and there were some sea lions that they could eat. Almost nothing in the way of water, shelter, so it was more like they were stuck on a big chunk of coral and rock just sticking out of the ocean. And because this larger group of survivors just became more and more desperate as time went on, the officers started to balk at the idea of trying to get supplies from the ship to the island where most of the survivors were. It started to become really risky, like there was a genuine risk that panicked survivors were going to mob the boat and capsize it and possibly destroy the cargo or the boat itself or kill the crew. So after a while it was sort of like we're just we're just not going to mess with them on that island because we're scared of them. This is see, this keeps getting worse. I know, it's awful. There are so many just callous and horrible moves made along the way that it's it's hard to Yeah, you don't there's not really a lot of people to root for. The officers debated at this point what to do, because saying where they were seemed completely hopeless. Once the storms that had driven them into the islands cleared, they didn't have a source of fresh water unless it started raining again and they would need just enough to provide water without threatening their lives, or an equally unlikely scenario, if the hull of the ship broke apart and the current happened to carry all of the ship's stores directly to the islands, they might get some relief. So what they did was they decided to start scouting the islands and the mainland for sources of water. So Pelsert, most of the officers, and some crew and passengers, including two women and a baby, went searching for water. This wasn't really Pelsert's idea. He was sort of feeling like at this point it was his job to stay with the survivors and to die with them if that was what happened. His job as upper merchant also involved the responsibility for making sure the cargo stayed safe, and so he was really reluctant to leave it behind, like his priority was definitely more on the cargo than the people in terms of his job description. But some of the sailors were pretty set on trying to save themselves at whatever cost, and so ultimately he went with them in the ship's longboat forty eight total people went to look for water while the rest stayed behind. Pretty much the only senior officer that was not among the scouting party was Uronymous Cornelis Back aboard the Batavia, their four day search for water was fruitless, and finally Pelser decided that the only possible way that they were going to get out of this mess was to go to Batavia for help. So they took their longboat, which was about thirty feet long, and they crossed nine hundred nautical miles of the open Indian Ocean. Imagine Australia on a map, so the Houtman Abroljos Islands are about halfway down the straightish part of the western coast of Australia. Batavia is in Indonesia, and in between them is just this long expanse of the Indian Ocean, and that is what they were crossing. Yes, and a long boat, and a longboat that had like ten pairs of oars. I mean there are some shipwreck and mutiny survival stories that are that involve longer ocean crossings and remarkably small craft in this, but still the fact that there were just these all these people packed in the boat, including two women and a baby is astounding to me. Yeah. Uh So, to cuttle this part of the long story short, they made it. It took them thirty three days to get there. When they did get there, after thirty three days across the ocean open, they had less than two pints of fresh water left. And once they got to Batavia, Pelser charged the ship's high bowson for outrageous behavior before the wreck, because remember he was implicated in the sexual assault of a passenger and he was executed and skipper Yakubs was arrested for negligence in causing the wreck. Pelser gathered supplies and bordered the yachts Artem and they headed back to find the survivors. It took the sixty three days to find them again, so basically twice as long, just months and months of misery. Yeah. So a whole lot happened on the island in this three month period between when Pelser left and when he got back with help, and probably survivors didn't even know they were heading out across the Indian Ocean to begin with. They had no idea, so they were just there three months not knowing what was going on, believing they had been abandoned, and that is the story that we were going to talk about in the next episode because as I discovered as I was researching this crazy story. But they get long and involved, they do when you're taking a long boat across the Indian Ocean and when there is a shipwreck and a mutiny and a massacre. Yeah, so we're going to continue the mutiny and massacre part of this story in our next episode. So nobody on the islands, as we talked about at the end of the last episode, knew that Pelser had decided to go to Batavia for help. They had no way of finding out about his progress. They just knew that they hadn't seen anything of him or the skipper for days. But about a week after the search party left in their longboat, the survivors finally got an authority figure. The Batavia finally broke apart, forcing Cornellis to join the survivors that were on these islands. So, just for context, about forty people died when the Batavia broke apart. The survivors clung to rafts that they had made on board as it became clear that the time of the ship was drying to a close. Cornellis in particular survived by climbing the bowsprit at the four of the ship and then clinging to it when it broke off and using it to float to land. And for the backstory we promised on him earlier, Cornellis was an educated, literate man from an affluent family. He had trained and apprenticed as an apothecary, and he started his own apothecary practice. He had been married and had a child, but the baby unfortunately died in its infancy. And first a deranged and incompetent midwife had handled the delivery and she failed to deliver part of the placenta, so his wife got a life threatening infection as a result, and then they had to hire a wet nurse while she recovered, and the wet nurse unfortunately gave the baby syphilis. It was just the worst possible series of events for a birth. It's also kind of unclear exactly how he was such a poor judge of character to have hired both an incompetent midwife and, as we are about to tell you, a clearly unwell wet nurse for the baby. So in spite of Cornellis getting sworn statements from basically everybody attesting to the fact that he was completely clean and the wet nurse was an abominable character and obviously poor health. Everyone still assumed that the baby had gotten syphilis from his mother, and this was a huge stigma and a very tear arrible reflection on Cornellis and his family and his practice. Like, obviously, if the baby had gotten syphilis, it had gotten syphilts from his mother, and that meant that his mother or his father, somebody had been unfaithful in this situation, Like there was a whole boatload of social expectation and rules for behavior. Yeah, and that's violated, And that meant that as an apothecary, there was sickness introduced into that as well. Yeah, So his business seriously suffered as a result, and it had already been on shaky footing even before this scandal happened. All of this combined with demands for reparation from a merchant who had loaned Cornellis money to put him completely under and otherwise he'd not really have had any reason to code, to see, and he had also developed sort of a strange personal, religious and moral code. It was a hodgepodge of influences from throughout his life. It combined Anabaptist and Mennonite teachings with the blasphemous and heretical philosophies of a Dutch named Johannes Simons Vanderbeek who also was known as Tarentius, and somewhere along the line he picked up ideas from Epicurus as well, along with the Antinomian idea that you only need faith to attain salvation. So reason number two that Cornellus had taken to a life at sea. Tarantius wound up on trial for his heretical beliefs and other stuff, and Cornellis realized that he was extremely lucky not to have been named in the proceedings, which would have resulted in him being prosecuted as well. So all of this together made it seem really prudent that he get as far away as possible. I'm again lack of judgment. Maybe on top of prompting him to abandon his wife and his home. These philosophical and religious influences led Cornellis to hold some troubling beliefs of his own. He deeply believed that every action that he personally undertook was divinely inspired, and this also meant that nothing he could do, no matter what it was, could be considered sinful or evil because it had all been inspired by God. So when the Batavia broke up, this became the highest ranking man on the islands. The people who were left on the islands really felt like Pelser had abandoned them when they really really needed him, and so Cornelis was really, without a whole lot of effort, able to recruit about forty men to continue in his original plan to commit mutiny, even though the ship they were going to originally use for this plan was now destroyed. Instead, what he and his mutineers planned to do was to commandeer whatever ship came to their rescue and then to use it to become pirates. It's hard not to giggle. I feel like this is a plan that like a ten year old put together. The plans of this story are not good plans, but the results are horribly tragic. Yeah. To make sure he would face no opposition, he started systematically removing people who might not be down with his mutiny plan from the island. This also gave him fewer mouths to feed, even though the current really had delivered a bunch of supplies from the Batavia to the islands. It still wasn't enough to sustain everyone there, and everybody he got rid of that was not on his team, so to speak, would make it all last a little bit longer. Yeah, everybody had sort of felt like it was a huge long shot to think that the Batavia would break apart and the current would bring supplies to them. That did actually happen. The one thing that worked out. Yeah, And it sounds like a lot of supplies because it was like hundreds of barrels of things, but that it was not when you looked at how many mouths there were to feed, that did not actually equate many days of sustenance for anybody. So Cornelis started sending people off to the other nearby islands, and he would tell them that there was water there, or he would send them there to search for water or some other ploy. And he basically sent them off to these islands and didn't expect them to survive. He was expecting them to die of hunger and thirst. A horrible man. I'm edaitorializing, but I don't know how you can't come to that conclusion at that point, he also started sending people out in boats, presumably as scouts, but he'd also put men that were loyal to him on those boats and they would throw his targets overboard and leave them to drown. Really systematic. Yeah. He also straight up had his cronies murder people who were sick or hurt, and they left most of the women alive when so that he and his crew could use them for sexual purposes. He also claimed Lucretia Yn's as his own sexual toy. So on top of all these murders, there were many many rapes happening on the island. When he saw survivors on one island continuing to wander around the shore when he thought they should be dead and that his little I'll just get rid of them this way plan had not worked out, he sent men in boats to kill them as well. So as a result of all of this, Beacon Island later came to be known as Batavia's Graveyard. This strategy of removing threats from the island became Cornellis's downfall. He sent a group of soldiers led by Wibby Hayes to two large islands where they which they were calling the High Islands. Pelser and company had already searched these islands and reported that they had no water, but that was not widespread knowledge. Cornellis confiscated the soldier's weapons and sent them there, assuming that they would just die of thirst. Yeah. He was like, you guys go search these big islands to water over there, you guys go find it. Yeah. Wibby Hayes, on the other hand, was a good leader, and you know his soldiers under his direction were very industrious. They built a shelter. They conducted this methodical search for water. They would like they would nourish themselves from water that had been collected in little pits in the rock. As they systematically conducted this widespread search, they eventually found two cisterns. On top of that, the two islands, which they were right next to each other, they could get between them. They were later named East and West Wallaby Island. They were home to wallabies and lots of birds, which gave them a pretty ample supply of food. Apparently, the fishing near these islands was also pretty awesome, so they were also In addition to the fact that they found water, they found food. They made a shelter and they started making simple weapons with which to defend themselves. And when Hayes' men found the cisterns, they sent up a smoke signal. This was their pre arranged method of letting Cornellis know that there was water. And while water was awesome and all, Cornellis immediately saw the soldiers, their water supply, their vantage point, and their smoke signals as a threat. How dare you be more industrious and successful than me? Well, so, how dare you now have things to eat and water to drink and weapons to defend yourself with? Because they were industrious, and a little shelter that they built out of rocks. Ye. So first he tried to persuade them to join his mutineers, and they refused, after which a big fight followed, and so Hayes and his men drove Cornellis and his men off. So after that, Cornellis sent an attack party to try to kill them. And by this point hayes men, who had named themselves the Defenders, had really organized themselves. They had tried to rescue other survivors. They fought back, and after a really bloody battle, the soldiers executed five of Cornellis's men and they captured Cornellis himself and held him prisoner as they continued to wait for rescue. Cornelis's cronies, who had not been part of this failed overthrow of Webby Hayes, were smart enough to stay away from the Wallaby Islands. From that point they recognized that they were not going to win against the people. They were outmatched. Yeah by perhaps the man who should have in charge from the beginning beginning. That is my editorializing of this situation. So finally, after a month spent getting back to Australia from Indonesia, and then another month spent in a frustrating search to try to figure out where they had left that shipwreck, Pelser and his yacht wound up back at Batavia's graveyard. It sounds maybe a little ridiculous that they got back to Australia and they could not find the shipwreck, but at this point the ship had been destroyed and the area was not charted in the first place, because they didn't know where they were when they wrecked to begin with. So yeah, so he wound up back in the area. He disembarked on an island that was about a mile away from the Wallaby Islands, and they had water and wine and bread for the survivors with them. Soon Webby Hayes and three other men rode up and told them to get back aboard the yacht because there were two parties of Cornellis's men on the loose and they meant to commandeer the yacht, and they did in fact try to do that. The remaining mutineers found the yacht, they tried to board it, but Pelsert and the screw, having now advanced knowledge of what was going on, captured them, and while questioning his newfound prisoners, Pelser learned that Jacobs and cornellis original plan to mutiny had started way way back before the ship was even shipwrecked in the first place. After Hayes handed Cornellis over, Pelser questioned him, then went to round up the rest of his co conspirators, and while a few seem to have evaded capture, most surrendered on the spot. Pelser interrogated all of the accomplices and found out that their crimes included, in addition to mutiny and murder, rape, looting, and treason, their trials, which were really torture and interrogation and their executions were carried out on Seal's Island. All of the primary mutineers had their right hands cut off, Cornellis had both of his hands cut off, and then all of them were hanged on October second of sixteen twenty nine, roughly a year after the Batavia set sail from Holland, and those hanged on Seal's Island were left dangling from the gallows. Pelsert also marooned two of the youngest members of the crew in Australia. The rest of them were keeled, hauled and dropped from yard arms and flogged on the way back to Batavia, where they were ultimately executed. Before leaving the islands, Pelsert led a pretty successful salvage mission, loading up the Sardam with as much as they could find before returning to Batavia, and they arrived Areund December fifth of sixteen twenty nine. Even though he had done his ultimate job of protecting the cargo, eventually, after a fashion, his career never really recovered from this whole incident, and he died not long after, probably of the same illness that had brought him down on board, and it was after he died that they discovered his illicit money lending business, which he was funding with company money. Yeah, so again, it's hard to root for many people in the story. Even though he seems kind of stand up in many ways he compared to the other people on board, there were still some there were issues, And then the voc didn't actually make a lot of money, even though he did salvage a lot of the stuff, because the person they had been planning to sell all of this stuff too. By the time it was all said and done was no longer in power, and the person who had taken his place did not really care about the stuff that had been brought over. It was a failure in a lot of ways. The last living mutineers who had come all the way back to Batavia were eventually executed there, and in the end, out of the three hundred and sixteen people who were aboard the Batavia when it wrecked, only about one hundred and sixteen survived. Webbie Hayes was commissioned as an officer on arrival in Batavia, and all his soldiers were promoted from privates to cadets. Lucretia Yans, who at one point during the trials was accused by her rapists of having tempted them into it, arrived in Batavia to learn that her husband had been dead for at least five months. We don't really know whether Cornellis's wife ever learned of his treacherream. Her story sort of fades away after a prolonged and public back and forth with the syphilitic wet nurse that they had hired. So Lobster fishermen found the Batavia's wreckage in nineteen sixty three and part of the hull was raised from the ocean floor and it's now displayed in the Western Australian Maritime Museum, and there are also other artifacts from the wreck that are on displayed there and in other museums. There has also been an extensive study of bodies from Batavia's graveyard and surrounding islands. It's basically super horrifying. Yeah, lots of evidence of how people were brutally bludgeoned to death and had multiple broken bones and skull fractures, and it's pretty terrible. In a weird way. The Batavia and its shipwreck wound up being the source of a whole lot of firsts, slash other notable historical things like it was the first Dutch ship lost off the coast of Australia. Webby Hayes's shelters were the first European structures on the continent of Australia, and the ruins of those shelters still stand today. The two marooned Mutineers were the first European residents of Australia, and the Batavia is the only VOC ship to have been archaeologically raised and conserved. And this whole incident also inspired the VOC to methodically map the coastline of US Australia so that perhaps such a disaster would never happen again. Yeah, that'll make you not want to get on a boat. It's that the whole story has so many layers of just awful star awfulness that keeps getting worse and more awful. I think this is one I don't remember who. I think this is one that someone suggested on Twitter and I was kind of like, sound good, and then I took one look at it and went, wait, this is more than just a mutiny. There's a whole lot more than mutiny going on here. Yeah. It's kind of like a portrait of like the worst of humanity in many ways. Yeah, that troubling. Yeah, I like Webby Hayes. He kind of fades away from history. We don't really know what happened to him. It's kind of assumed that perhaps he died of some sort of tropical illness. We just don't have a lot of historical record on him after the end of the Batavia story. But yeah, while everybody else was having some Lord of Flies action, he was keeping things in order civil as ducks were in a row. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is hissed podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuffy Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.