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Batavia: Australia's darkest tale

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Matt Smith:

Welcome to a La Trobe University podcast. I would be your host Matt Smith and today we will be looking into the darkest and earliest chapter of white Europeans in Australian history. Mark Staniforth is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Monash University and he's here today to talk about the Dutch trading vessel, the Batavia, and the terrible events that befell it.

Mark Staniforth:

Batavia was the flagship of the fleet for 1628-1629 and it was travelling from Holland, from The Netherlands, to what were called the Dutch East Indies at that time. They are now called Indonesia. It was carrying several hundred people and it was going out there to bring back all the goods from the East which couldn't be obtained in Europe at the time – spices, porcelain and silk, all that sort of material. So it made the long voyage out from The Netherlands and had made its way into the Indian Ocean and was heading up towards the Dutch East Indies when it ran ashore on a coral reef off the coast of what is now Western Australia, in 1629. The lookouts who were on the vessel reported that they'd seen moonlight on the water. Unfortunately, that was actually waves breaking on the coral reef and the ship when on to the coral but most people survived and they managed to get ashore over a period of hours and days after the shipwreck, and they made their way onto a small coral sand island that's now called Beacon Island but was called Batavia's Graveyard at the time. And there were a couple of hundred people trapped on this desolate, waterless island off the coast of Western Australia. It was really difficult for them at that stage, so the commander of the Fleet, a man called Pelsaert and the captain of the ship, a man called Jacobsz, took off in a small boat with a number of the crew, ostensibly to look for water, but they looked for water on some of the other islands, they got further and further away, they tried the mainland, and eventually decided that they were going to try and sail their open boat to Batavia, which was the capital of the Dutch East Indies – it's now the city of Jakarta in Indonesia. Now that's a massive open boat voyage across thousands of kilometres of open ocean, so it took them quite a long time. They had to organise a rescue vessel and get back to the shipwreck, and the people who were on the island. And they thought that this would be all fine. The problem was that what had happened on the island was that there had been a mutiny brewing among the crew and that had been happening before the ship had been wrecked. And when the ship was wrecked, this was the opportunity for these people, led by the apothecary, or the chemist, a man called Cornelisz, to actually have a mutiny and take over. What they had done was that they had sent off the soldiers who were on board the vessel under the command of a man called Wiebbe Hayes, to some of the other islands to look for water. And effectively they marooned them – they left them on those other islands so they couldn't come back and defend the people who were stuck on Batavia's Graveyard.

And so, over a period of weeks, the mutineers murdered 125 men, women and children on the island. They buried some of the bodies and they threw many of them into the water. And so this is the first great slaughter of Europeans in Australia.

When eventually Pelsaert comes back with the rescue vessel, he's astonished to hear that there's no longer a couple of hundred people there waiting for him – there's a few mutineers, some soldiers and a very small number left of the passengers and crew, who had been on the Batavia and had successfully got ashore. At that stage they held a trial on the island, that was the first European trial in Australia. They sentenced a number of the mutineers to death, and before they executed them, they cut off one of their hands and then they hung them. A couple of the mutineers who were deemed to be less guilty than all of the other mutineers were then taken to the mainland and stranded, and they were the first European settlers and they were probably at least as unwilling to be settlers as the first convicts were who were sent out 150 years later by the British. So, that's our first European settlement.

In Western Australia, this particular story is well-known. It's widely appreciated, it's part of the school curriculum, I would say it's well known in other parts of Australia. Many people don't realise the extent of Dutch exploration and the number of shipwrecks that happened of Dutch East India ships on the West Australian coast in those days.

In the 1960s the shipwreck was found by an expedition led by an author and journalist called Hugh Edwards.

Matt Smith:

Did they know where the wreck was at that time, or was the place lost in history?

Mark Staniforth:

There was various evidence for there being a shipwreck in a couple of places in the Abrolhos. On Beacon Island, things had been turning up for many years but they didn't really know where the shipwreck was in terms of its relationship to the island. But there were also Dutch material from one of the other islands of the Pelsaert Abrolhos group, Gun Island, which is twenty or thirty kilometres south, but that's from a later period Dutch shipwreck. So it wasn't clear exactly where it was and there was certainly no clear evidence of exactly where the shipwreck was until the 1960s, when Hugh Edwards went there and basically went looking for the shipwreck site.

Matt Smith:

What did he find of the shipwreck and how well was it preserved?

Mark Staniforth:

The shipwreck was remarkably well preserved, and it's a very interesting case because in the early days of maritime archaeology, many people thought that shipwrecks that got wrecked in coral areas would be broken up, smashed to pieces, nothing coherent would be left. Batavia really was the first site to be archaeologically examined, in the 1970s, and it showed quite clearly that you could get very good survival of material, even in shallow, waved, tossed areas, because basically what had happened with Batavia is the hull had sat in the coral and had ground back and forth and it had dug itself a hole and then sand had come over the top of it and part of the cargo of the vessel had held that part of the hull down. And in fact one third of one side survived, which, considering it's timber, is quite remarkable. And a lot of the cannons, the big anchors and a lot of very small material including very fragile material, we found lace for example from people's clothing, on the wreck site, after three hundred and fifty years under water.

Matt Smith:

So the 1970s – this is where you come to the site, isn't it?

Mark Staniforth:

Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly not the first archaeologist on the site, nor the most senior.

Matt Smith:

You're the best one in this podcast, if it helps.

Mark Staniforth:

Sure. I came to it in fact as a seventeen year old schoolboy and the story behind that was by 1971, the Western Australian government had decided that they desperately needed to do something about Batavia, because there was a lot of treasure. There were a lot of coins …

Matt Smith:

Because the ship was carrying it to go and buy …

Mark Staniforth:

It was carrying it to buy things in the East. So the coins were spread across the seabed, and that of course brings in treasure hunters etc. So the government decided that they needed to do something about it, they needed to go somewhere and find somebody to help them out. So they brought in Jeremy Green, who'd been working on shipwrecks in the Mediterranean for some years at that stage, in the early 1970s. And he set up a project to excavate the Batavia. And they excavated Batavia from 1972 through to 1975. And right at the end of it, I was just out of school and they were calling for volunteers, and I went along as a volunteer on the expedition in 1975, and it was a fantastic experience, to be in a place that is pristine coral reef, with a shipwreck which is extremely important, not just in Australian terms, but in world terms, and to work with a bunch of people who were among the leading underwater archaeologists of their day. And I got completely inspired by this and decided that being an underwater archaeologist would be a really good idea, but of course there was no training at that stage, there was no way to become an underwater archaeologist, so it took me quite some years to get into the business. But Batavia in fact was my inspiration for getting involved. I mean, it is a wonderful sensation to be the first person in 350 years to see something. So when you're excavating on site, and you find something, it's a wonderful experience to do that.

Matt Smith:

What sort of things did you find, and were you only excavating in the wreck itself, in the water, or did you go up onto Batavia's Graveyard as well?

Mark Staniforth:

While I was there we didn't do any excavation on the land, but we were working underwater and we were excavating part of the hull, so we were effectively removing that one third of one side that I mentioned before, for treatment in the conservation lab in Fremantle. And that's now on display in the Western Australian Museum in Fremantle. And it's a fantastic and most impressive piece of ship. But it's all the small things that you find while you're digging large pieces of timber up. My memories of coins of course, but things like really nice glassware, tiny broken pieces of gilded glassware with lions' faces on the glass. That sort of stuff was again 17th century material wasn't something that you found much of in Western Australia.

Matt Smith:

And what is there now, of the Batavia wreck? Is there any of it still there that's been left behind.

Mark Staniforth:

Very much so. Although we've raised the hull itself, they didn't actually raise a lot of the anchors or a lot of the cannon, so there's still quite a number of the iron cannon and a number of the anchors on site. They've tended to pick up most of the small material because unfortunately divers will pick that up and take it home as souvenirs. But certainly there's still a wreck site there. There's still some very large things which people can go and see. I'd have to say it's not an easy place to get to. The Abrolhos is very remote, diving is difficult there. We only used to get in on site about one day in three on average. So it's a fairly physically challenging place to try and do this kind of work.

Matt Smith:

I seem to remember that the soldier Wiebbe Hayes built some forts up there. They're still standing and those are the first structures on Australian soil …

Mark Staniforth:

Built by Europeans, very much. Wiebbe Hayes and the soldiers built a number of small forts out of the local coral rock. They're on the Wallaby Islands, and they're still there. And yes, they are the earliest European buildings in Australia. They're fascinating.

Matt Smith:

So is the entire thing a protected site now?

Mark Staniforth:

The Abrolhos themselves, you're not allowed to land without permission on the islands. And that's mainly for nature conservation reasons. But the wreck is protected, the various sites on land are protected. So, yes, it's protected these days.

Matt Smith:

Mark Staniforth, thanks for your time today.

Mark Staniforth:

OK, thanks Matt.