Episode 606: The Tragedy of the Batavia Part II - Batavia's Graveyard

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This is the last podcast. On the left.
Fly up on your glade. That's when the cannibalism started.
Who's that? Oh, yeah! I don't drone on. I'm pretty succinct.
People have said that about my bits. People say, Henry, what a great self-editor.
Which is why today I'm going to start with... No, I'm not going to do the big song.
We're not starting with a sea shanty. Now, Gurney's requested it.
Yeah, of course. A sea shanty? I'm drawing a line in the water.
Yeah, Gurney's a big fan of sea shanties. Doesn't want to hear us butcher them.
Do you want to hear it? Rob, can you give me a taste? I like Show Me the Way to Go Home. Just show me that stuff, but that's fairly a shanty.
Show me the way to go home. I'm tired and I want to go to bed.
Yo, I remember. Is that a shanty? I had me a drink about an hour ago and it went straight to my head.

Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Marcus Parks.

I'm here with the self-editing Henry Zebrowski.

Well, make sure.

Wow, it's more annoying somehow.

Way more annoying. And here with the sick of it all Ed Larson I'm so sick of Henry's bullshit I'm so fucking sick I puked out my penis And I hope you die And I hope it fucking kills you I I hope my content kills you.

It will.

And we're here for the Batavia.

Yeah.

Part two.

Yeah, now we're really going to fucking get into it.

Yeah, I really like Batavia because it's a good artificial sweetener.

God damn it.

At the very top.

But to really make sure we're all on the same page here,

We're going to back up the story just a little to really examine the mood on the Batavia and the relationships between the crew that resulted in a mutiny planned by two VOC employees, Captain Ariana Jacobs and undermerchant Euronymous Cornelis. See, I know that it's Ariana or Arianne,

but then I just think Ariana Grande.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, so just don't imagine Ariana Grande as the captain of this ship.

Well, she fucking took over

and mutinied wicked, I'll tell you.

Yeah, that's right.

She mutinied and took over

that SpongeBob's dick and balls.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She better made her throat slimmer

so that she could make his penis feel bigger in her mouth. That's a pretty slim throat.
Yeah. Well, mutinies...
God! Is that a good way to start? Well, mutinies were actually quite rare on VOC ships, and in fact, it was entirely unheard of for a mutiny to be led by a VOC officer like Euronymous Cornelis, as most undermerchants in his position were vetted to ensure they had no mutinous qualities. We talked about this in the very beginning when we were talking about how they assembled the team for this, is that normally they hire from within.
Normally it's a guy who works his way up a certain amount, and normally these trips out to the Indies were reserved for people that either were, I guess, the best of the best of the best, or the worst of the worst of the worst. There seemed to be no in between.
He went in and said, like, he just got in, remember, because he was educated? Well, a captain vouched for him. Yes, so he got in, but the rest of them were, like, scared to death of their bosses.
Yeah. Because he knew what they would do.
What's a mutinous quality? Like, bestiality or? Well, if you'll. Only if you're on a ship of ducks.
Well, if you'll remember, the conditions for being an undermerchant required that they not be bankrupt. Because while the VOC did need an air of desperation in an employee in order for them to risk their life for a trip to the Indies,

a reek of desperation could lead to them getting ideas about the 500-pound chest full of treasure down in the hole. The trip has to be worth more than what's in the boat.

Yeah, very much does.

Because at this point, Henry was telling me the other day,

a tenth of the VOC's entire earnings were on board the Batavia. Yes.
So a tenth of their entire corp was sitting underneath their feet as they were floating out into the middle of the Indian Ocean. And they're the most successful corporation of all time.
Well, technically. Well, the most, I mean, not compared to what, you know, businesses today do.
They're not even close, but they were the first successful corporation and definitely the most successful corporation of their day. Okay.
Now, I wouldn't say that Euronymous Cornelis necessarily had the desperation reek. Rather, Euronymous was simply greedy and amoral with nothing to lose, as the only things waiting for him back in the Netherlands were a failed apothecary business, a sick wife, and his dead baby's grave.
And I'll tell you what, my sick wife just will not have sex with me on that grave no matter what poison I bring home. I try to be with my haunted wife, and I wish I could see my dead child.
But instead, I'll be a king of an island. Also, you can just say baby grave.
A dead baby's grave

is true. Well, it's better than just

a baby's grave because it just sounds like you just put

an infant in a hole. That's true.

You know, I had a lot of, I actually debated a lot about

that, about whether or not I should say

just baby's grave or dead baby's grave

and I thought like, well, you know, sometimes people buy graves

in advance, but you don't normally buy graves in advance

for children. I mean, that's a super

not confident person. And that's how you know if your parents think...
Just in case! I don't know. It would be so nice if first thing you get somebody for their child's christening.
And just in case, I bought a little plot. Right over here, as you can see, it's right by the restrooms.
So you can go and throw up out of grief first and then go look at the grave. And his casket, look how small it is.
Spider-Man themed, just like what he loves. But concerning the morality of fomenting a mutiny on a ship with women and children aboard, Euronymous had no qualms with the consequences of his actions, for he was a so-called heretic.
Yes, I care about nothing, and I like it. His personal philosophy, influenced by the famous Dutch Gnostic Johannes Terentius, held that he was incapable of sin, that no thought or deed, not even murder, could be described as evil or even wrong.
And then I got deep in the fucking up to the balls with Dan Carlin's Prophets of Doom, like all of the story about the Anabaptist rise in Munster and all this shit and I found out that essentially the same crew of Anabaptists, which we brought up last episode, were like kind of what Euronymous grew up in and it was a very specific sect of guys that were essentially the Protestant version of ISIS that decided to just start attacking a bunch of after the Lutheran break of all the Protestant reformation of the church. Basically, Martin Luther put a little tenant in there that says you're allowed to go interpret the Bible as you want, and it caused all this fucking chaos.
And so the Anabaptist one sect went so far that they were like, oh, we're now destroying churches and reliquaries and doing all this shit. Aren't you happy, Martin Luther? And Martin Luther says, no, please stop emailing me.
Because he didn't want anything to do with it. But then this Anabaptist crew took over Munster and did this whole fucking culling of all these people.
And so it's from those guys comes Euronymous. Yeah.
I'm glad we have this show for you to talk to me about this stuff, because if you do it outside of here, gonna have to beat you up. Hey! Hey! My deep, long info dumps on the historical slash horror movie thing.
It's a feature, not a bug. People like it.
Well, that's all to say that Euronymous felt no guilt over what he was about to do, and his only thought concerned the life of luxury and freedom that all the treasure on the Batavia would give him once it was in his grubby little hands. Euronymous, however, was in essence an apothecary who'd never been on a ship like the Batavia before this journey, so he didn't really have the cred necessary to organize a mutiny without someone who could speak the language of the sailors.
But Euronymous found a way around his lack of cred when he became friends with the Batavia's captain, Ariana Jacobs. Yes, we can be friends, can't we, Mr.
Grande? This guy's an old salty dog, dude. You remember when we came on here? Captain Jacobs? Yeah, Captain Jacobs is a salty-ass dog, and he's getting too old for this shit.
Yeah. It's the truth.
And we checked the pronunciation. We actually did.
That is the proper way to say, the proper 17th century Dutch way to say Jacobs. Jacobs.
Yeah. Yeah, there's lots of Jacobs and Euronymouses, and all the names are so close to the other one's name.
You're doing a wonderful job, Marcus. Thank you.
We're doing our best. I went to say Jacobs.
Yakobs. Yeah, there's lots of Yakobs and Euronymouses and all the names are

so close to the other one's name. You're doing

a wonderful job, Marcus. You are doing our best.

I went through hardcore history in that podcast

and there's four different Bernards.

There's two different yawns.

There's nothing you could do.

They just were lazy with the names. I don't

know why the Dutch people were lazy with the names.

They were complaining about how all the splinters in there

feed from the wooden shoes.

Also, whenever I hear Euronymous, I feel like it should be yelled like, Euronymous! Now, it was almost as rare for a captain to mutiny on a VOC ship as it was for an undermerchant to do the same. But Jakobs had a few reasons of his own for getting a mutiny together.
Firstly, Jakobs was a man in his mid-40s and therefore one of the ship's elders. He was the very definition of I'm getting too old for this shit.
Yeah, god damn it. It's just always him with the fucking cool hanging out of his mouth.
He's got one of those heavy welt, big wave belts all at all times. He's been like, God damn, what not? God fucking damn it.

Can I do one?

I'm getting too old for this shit. Yeah, it's even getting old to say it.

I hurt my back, too, yesterday at the gym,

so I'm actually kind of, I'm feeling Jakobs.

I hurt my back writing this script.

Wow!

Wow!

From chortling at our imagined responses? No? So what were you doing? I was crouching for nine hours straight. Why were you crouching? He's hunched over his computer.
I hunch when I write. I hunch.
I haven't seen him. He's like a little gargoyle in there.
Yeah, I try to stand up straight. I even tried using one of those back things.
Doesn't work. You know what Natalie does sometimes? Tries to touch my butthole.
While you're working, sometimes you come up and stick you straight up. I'll see if Carolina can add that to her schedule.
Hey, tell her to pencil it in! You pay me, I'll do it. Noted.
Noted, noted. Well, to give you an idea of who Captain Jacobs was, he'd been working at sea for two decades and had taken several trips back and forth to the Indies on behalf of the VOC.
Which is like, you're 195 in sailor years. Yeah, to survive that.
He should not be alive. No, no, to survive that many trips, you got to be a hardy motherfucker.
But by the time the Batavia reached the Cape of Good Hope six months into their journey, Jacobs was absolutely exhausted with the lifestyle. God damn it, I'm sick of going to these capes of good hopes.
I'm a fucking one of these cape of good asses or something. We need some kind of something else.
Save this fucking shit, I'm sick of waves. In fact, Captain Jacobs, in talking about his lot, was known to repeat one phrase over and over.
If only I was younger, I'd do something different. Yeah.
That was it. That was just it.
He would say that to Euronymous over and over and over again. Maybe if I just got one shot, I'd dance.
Such a sad catchphrase. Well, I, yeah.
Right? If only I was younger, I'd been saying this since I was four You suddenly turned to Tom Waits Yeah Talking to teacups And I had a relationship with an elevator Yeah, I'm Tom Waits Jason But the thing that really spurred Captain Jacobs into mutiny Was good old-fashioned hatred, which was directed at upper merchant Francisco Pelsart. Hello! And I realized before, he's not Paul Rudd.
He's Mel Gibson. He's very much a Mel Gibson type in this story.
So let's get a little recap on upper merchant Pelsart, who, if you'll remember, was the man in charge of the entire journey, and basically the only guy above Captain Jacobs. He was the captain's supervisor.
See, Upper Merchant Pelsart had done some good turns for the VOC during his career. He'd established the route for the Dutch indigo trade, and he was a skilled diplomat who'd opened up a lot of profit lines in India.
But in the time leading up to the launch of the Batavia, Pelsart was going through a rough patch professionally. His last diplomatic mission to India had been an utter failure.
So he had convinced the VOC's big bosses, the Gentleman 17, to let him take $7.8 million in silver on the Batavia so he could transport it to India, where he would bribe a second Indian court to make up for his losses at the first. Got it? Yes.
Yes. So legitimately, again, this whole trip for Pelsart is to get him back to zero.
It's not even to get him, like, to make him money. This is just so that he can start showing his face around town again.
Yeah. Was there silver on the other ships in the fleet or just the Batavia? So the way it seems is that the Batavia held all of the treasure.
The reason why part of the safety, the safety measuring things that they did was by going in large groups, because what we said is it helps you immediately. You are not immediately alone in the water.
Yeah. You are surrounded by all these of essentially messenger ships and various things that help the main boat do other things.
And certain other, like you have the main, Pelsarts on the main ship, but there are captains on the other smaller ships that all kind of run various aspects, but mostly secure the Batavia. Yeah.
So it's all there. To keep the Portuguese away.
Yes. Yeah, partly.
Yeah, keep the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English, and also to protect against mutinies. And regular-ass pirates.
Yes, and regular pirates. And then when you arrive at the place, and then those people, let's say you are trying to bridge a new trading gap with a new crew of people, you don't know who they are either.
Yeah. Like when the Batavia left, like the Batavia was supposed to be in a fleet of 14 ships.
But it had a lot of problems getting off. It left late.
And so it was now, at this point in the story, it's in a flotilla of seven ships. But the maiden voyage of the Batavia, that had to go well for upper merchant Pelsart if he was going to get taken seriously in the VOC ever again.
Did you know the flotilla's back at Taco Bell? The first ever taco that also hydrates. But unbeknownst to the Gentleman 17, they had introduced an X-factor into the Batavia's journey when they assigned Ariana Jacobs as the captain.
See, just after upper merchant Pelsart had fucked up his last deal in India, he'd clashed badly with the captain of the boat that had taken him home, to the point where that captain and Pelsart had gotten into a physical altercation. The captain that upper merchant Pelsart had fought with was none other than Ariana Jacobs, the very same man who was now in charge of the crew and navigation on the Batavia.
Hey, how you doing, Pelfart? Good to see ya. Remember the last time you fucked up in India? You should really just treat me a little more respectful.
Yeah? Oh yeah, Pelfart? Okay, well, the crew's watching. Yeah, I bet they are laughing because I'm a funny guy.
I can't argue there. Pell Fart! Dumb shit! Wish I could kick your ass again and I'll do it! I mean, I think I won the fight.
I'm gonna beat the fucking shit out of you, buddy! The Captain Jacobs had nursed a grudgeudge against upper merchant Pelsart after their tussle on the boat out of India. But while he had resolved to put that aside for Patavia's maiden voyage, the resentment was still bubbling under the surface, just waiting for someone to come along and stir it up.
Because you got this guy. All Pelsart is is a reminder that they really don't care if any of you die.
No. They don't want you to die, but they don't mind if you die.
Couldn't care less. Pelsart's the only one that matters, and Pelsart doesn't even matter.
He just needs to bring the stuff. As long as he has the stuff and he gets it safely and sells it, then he's fine.
Or if he brings the money back safely, he's fine. But otherwise, all Pelsart is a reminder of like, oh, I'm an expendable piece of shit, and he has no skills, and he depends on me, but he's my boss.
He's the ultimate company man. Yeah.
And as you may have already guessed, the man who was about to stir up Captain Jacobs' resentment real fucking nicely was Euronymous Cornelis. Together, Jacobs and Cornelis would create the conditions that turn the maiden voyage of the Batavia into a blood-soaked, murderous nightmare for almost all who survived the ship's eventual destruction.
Now, as I said earlier, we're going to back up the story a bit from where we left it last episode. Thank you, Edward.
Thank you very much. So let's begin today's tale right before the crew put in at the Cape of Good Hope, prior to the conversation that would lead Euronymous and Captain Yakovs into mutiny.
Now, by April of 1628, the Batavia was still in a flotilla of six other VOC ships and had been at sea for six months. In truth, things were going about average for a VOC ship of this size, which is to say that it was a horror show by modern standards.
Yeah, it sucked on there, man. I even don't like boats now.
You know, cruise ships aren't really nice now, except for you weren't going to join.

Oh, yeah. Side stories.
On our true crime cruise. Which is true.
The crime wave, November 3rd to 7th. Yep.
We are going to be hosting our own mutiny. Yes.
On board a cruise ship. We cannot wait to be there.
Yeah. All right.
You got your tickets next week. All right.
We'll keep moving. Well, by this point in the Batavia's journey, almost a dozen men had died from that most particular

horrific Yeah, all right. You got your tickets next week.
All right, we'll keep moving. Well, by this point in the Batavia's journey, almost a dozen men had died from that most particular, horrific, and stereotypical of all sea deaths, scurvy.
Now, when a sailor has an extreme deficiency of vitamin C and scurvy sets in, a sailor's legs would swell and his breath would become rancid. Soon after, his gums would begin to bleed and his mouth would become so swollen and rotten with gangrene that his teeth would fall out one by one before he mercifully died.
Thank you. Why is as soon as I see it, for some reason, maybe I'm just, I should have jerked off or something.
The idea of like a sailor's legs and butt getting all swollen and big and then looking at him. And the first thing you think of is like, he puts the curvy and scurvy.
I didn't say anything about his butt getting big. I just assumed.
Just imagining his butt slowly expanding and you're just looking at it. And, you know, all of a sudden his pockmarked, rotten face is slowly but surely

turning to Alexander Daddario, and you just don't know, you know, because you're out in the water

in any port in a storm. That literally is the story of the first time a guy ever had sex with

another guy's butt on a boat. Is it? It's where that term came from.
Which term? Any port in a storm.

Because the guy's name was Port. So scurvy sets in port johnson what do we know about scurvy like once it sets in like can you get better from it or you fucked like rabies you know i'm not sure i think you can get better from scurvy there's depth i'm i'd imagine there's a point of no return but i i think you.
Yeah, if I remember from a medical drama that I watched where a homeless man showed up to the hospital with scurvy, I think they said, he's got scurvy. Just give him some vitamin C and he'll be fine.
People still get scurvy. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. It's actually a very bad problem with homeless people.
Man, gotta get the vitamin C pills for everybody. Honestly, this is why, I mean, a lot of people have really been angry with me, but a part of my big reach out that I've been doing in Los Angeles is just throwing oranges at them.
Yeah. And people get really upset with me.
And I'm like, I'm fighting scurvy. But while nearly a dozen men dead of scurvy in six months, sounds like things were going exceptionally badly.
This actually put the Batavia ahead of the curve. You're like, that's pretty good.
The dozen? Wow. We needed some good news.
On an average eight-month journey, the VOC expected to lose 30 men to scurvy. Damn.
And in extreme cases, half the crew might die, resulting in triple-digit body counts. Think about being one of the anonymous men on this boat who are all like, you know, I don't know my name.
Me neither. I don't care.
Neither do I. But these guys on this boat, they know that it's packed to beyond capacity for the planned murder, for their planned death.
They know that this ship is overly filled because by the time we get to where we're supposed to be, it will be at just the right amount of people. In like a weird way, like it's almost good if people die because then they don't have to pay them.
I mean, I think that might be a little bit of part of it. Yeah.
But that's also, I think what it is, I mean, it's kind of a checks and balances type thing. I mean, they're looking at the balance sheet where, you know, we're paying a lot of guys less than living wage.
Yeah. So I think in the end, it just kind of all balances out for them.
And the Brits, they would like bring citrus with them, but for some reason the Dutch didn't. Sometimes, like every once in a while, they might have, like, lemons.
Like, they might be

able to, like, squeeze a lemon or something like that.

Like, they didn't know that vitamin C was

what, you know, cured it. They didn't know that

fruit was what you kind of needed, what you

could do to get, like, a big, like, boost of it.

But they did kind of happen upon it

by accident. Every once in a while, I'd be like,

oh, yeah, I remember the last time I had scurvy, I

squeezed a lemon in it, and I drank some, you know,

wine, and it was fine. Cool.

Yeah, you just gotta, hopefully you're on

the right boat. I mean, this is very much the era of

Thank you. Oh, yeah, I remember the last time I had scurvy, I squeezed a lemon in it, and I drank some, you know, wine, and it was fine.
Cool. Yeah, you just got to, hopefully you're on the right boat.
I mean, this is very much the era of trial and error. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and not really. They're all of humankind.
Yeah, and not really knowing why things work, just knowing that they work. Yeah, and, like, the surgeons were, like, poor.
Yeah, the surgeons, you know, a surgeon was like a tradesman. He's like a carpenter, you know.
It's so bizarre to me. Yeah, and they were, at this point, they this point, they were called barbers.
You can get your hair cut, set a bone, pull out a couple of teeth. Good to go.
All the same guy. Good with scissors.
Yeah, very good with scissors. I just can't wait to go to my Amazon dentist surgeon gun store.
It is going to be so much fun to have it all happen again. Because that's what it's going to be.
Yeah, it is. All one place, one-stop shop.
Yep. Live from your grave.
Your next family crime saga obsession is now streaming on Paramount+. Mobland, an explosive new series from the underworld of Guy Ritchie.
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And so now we get to the point where the Batavia is six months into its journey,

and they're putting in at the Cape of Good Hope. But when I say that the Batavia put in at the Cape of Good Hope, I don't mean that they stopped off at a rough-and-tumble port town for two weeks of booze and women.
Instead, VOC policy called for camping in tents on the beach, so the sick could be given a chance to recover, and so the upper merchant could trade with the local South African tribes to beef up their food supplies. You've got to put it in the VOC's terminology, Marcus.
It's like, each one of our incredible, intrepid members of our VOC family get to experience a luxurious beachside accommodation in the beautiful, beautiful skies of Southern Africa. Not South Africa, Southern Africa.
Southern Africa. Because the whole thing was cheap, right? Yeah.
And they wanted to make sure that they didn't stop for long. Yeah.
And so everybody else had to stay on the boat. All the captains got to stay on the boat.
Yeah. And you also don't want to have to spend a lot of time gathering up all your guys from all the bars and taverns around the port town.

You don't want to give them a whole lot to do.

Yeah, because they disappear, I imagine.

Yeah, it's wild.

Just sitting in that beach, the whole thing, it's very dangerous.

In fact, it's intense.

I'll give you that one.

That was good.

That was good.

I really liked that one.

That I really enjoyed.

Even though upper merchant Pelsart was talented with languages, he had a difficult time communicating with the local tribe when they put in at the Cape of Good Hope. And since it took him a while to negotiate, mischief began to brew back on the water in the Batavia 7 ship flotilla.
See, Captain Jacobs and Euronymous Cornelius had become friendly during their six months at sea. And while Upper Merchant Pelsart was on land bartering for sheep...
I need two sheep! Look at my mouth! Fluffy! White! White! White! White sheep! I need a sheep! You know what I'm saying! That is actually how they ended up having to communicate with miming and yelling. Well, Captain Jacobs and Euronymous had commandeered one of the Batavia's rowboats, and they started hopping from ship to ship to enjoy the hospitality of every ship in the flotilla.
Hey, let's go over there. One guy's gonna feed the smells like oranges.
Hey, let's go check out the other fucking boat, dude, or they got a thing called a tortilla chip. But much like a man who hits half a dozen holiday parties in one night and goes hard at each and every one, Captain Yakup soon became drunk and belligerent, starting fights, talking shit, and acting in a manner, quote, most beastly, as upper merchant Pelsart put it in his journals.
Well, and I was joking about this with Marcus, about how beastly do you have to be to be kicked out of a party on a boat that's tied up waiting to go to the Indies? Like, imagining how rough that party must already be because they all go into the wine stores because they bring wine and booze with them, so they allow them to have extra rations like during this time period. Only the upper class though.
The soldiers and the sailors get nothing. They get nothing.
So like that party was crazy to begin with. You know, it's that whole lesson where it's like never get too drunk at an open bar you're not paying for.
Yeah, that's actually a really good, that's a very good rule. Nothing will always remind me we used to do that one show at a place called Sound Fix and the producers of that show thought it was such a good idea to have a 6 to 7 p.m.
open bar before the show, and it was impossible. Yes.
It was literally an impossible show to be on. Yeah, we were performers slash bouncers.
Yes. Well, as such, by the time upper merchant Pelsart was back on the Batavia with supplies after securing a deal with the locals, the other six ships had already lodged several complaints about the behavior of Captain Jacobs and his little pleasure crews.
Now the actions of Captain Jacobs were bad for upper merchant Pelsart on a couple of levels

Yes, having a drunk and violent captain in charge of the flagship was not a good look

But the more serious offense here was taking a boat without Pelsart's permission. Stealing the boat broke the chain of command set up by the VOC that ensured nothing happened on a ship without the say-so of a representative, so Captain Jacobs had to be punished.
Borrowing the boat. Borrowing, sure.
Borrowing the boat. But the more I get into this story, the more I'm realizing that Pelsart was kind of running the Batavia in a candy-ass fashion by VOC standards.

We talked a little about this, and I think it's because he leadership revolves around social contracts that quickly dissolve when you move away from the center of powers that hold those like contracts in their hands, right? So when you go out in the middle of the ocean, if you can't rule with an iron fist, you better be well liked, right? But a lot of times, you'll find that fear is a lot more effective out in the open water than love. If you're too nice, people will try and kill you.
For the crime of stealing a boat and physically fighting crews on other ships, Jacobs got away with just getting chewed out thoroughly in Upper Merchant Pelsart's cabins, where Jacobs was basically told that he was getting too big for his britches. Do I have to make your britches bigger? Do I have to go and get bigger britches for you, sir? All right, because right now it seems that your belly button is extending past your britches so far that I'm going to have to spank your belly.
Oh, you spank me, you big fucking bitch. I feel like I'm just using metaphors and I shouldn't.
You're in trouble, is what I'm saying. Okay? You need to listen to me.
Cartoon mouse stuck in a whiskey bottle. You! I need you to focus! Focus! I mean, he basically gave him a listen here, mister.
He just, I mean, he chewed him out very thoroughly, but in these sorts of situations, a verbal reprimand was actually far less than what VOC policy called for. While swearing, blasphemy, and drunkenness earned an employee a fine, insubordination, violent threats, or violent acts were met with more violence or on-ship imprisonment.
imprisonment. For a simple fight, a sailor on a VOC ship could be shackled by the hands and feet,

then thrown into a cell too small to stand or lie down. or on-ship imprisonment.
For a simple fight, a sailor on a VOC ship could be shackled by the hands and feet,

then thrown into a cell too small to stand or lie down.

This cell was on the bow of the gun deck,

and the constant sound of the wind

whistling through the cell slats

for weeks on end

was known to drive men

to the brink of insanity.

Meanwhile, during the Santa Ana winds,

I'm sleeping like a babe.

Yeah.

The winds, like, knock me out. I don't know what happened.
I was just, I was so relaxed. But if a sailor took his fight to the next level and pulled out a knife, the VOC policy escalated as well.
Their written guidelines said that a knife happy sailor should be nailed to the mast with his knife stabbed through his hand. And the sailor could only leave once he pulled his own hand off without removing the knife first.

See, it's stern, but fair.

So he can't wiggle the knife off? Well, yeah, that's actually what he's expected to do. Yeah, you have to go like, oh, it hurts.

With his other hand tied behind his back, the sailor had the choice to either wiggle the knife.

I mean, that's the thing.

The knife is in so deep that you can't wiggle the knife off.

You have to wiggle your hand to make the wound bigger so you can fit the knife through the wound. Handle and all? Handle and all.
That's a big hole. Yeah, it's a very, very large hole.
Or you could also just rip your hand down in one swift motion and basically cut it in half. Oh, I see.
Either way, you're never working as a sailor ever again. Yeah, it seems like counterintuitive.
Yeah, but he could be a pirate. Yeah, I mean, he could be a pirate, but that's the thing.
To be a pirate, you still got to be a pretty good seaman. Yeah, but they're missing limbs.
But that's actually more in pop culture representation. Oh, really? That wasn't reality? A lot of them were pretty, like, well, it was a career.
Like, it's funny. Like, you think about it.
We always think about it kind of Pirates of the Caribbean style. But it was also, like, weirdly like a job, too.
I watched Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man's Chest to, like, get ready for this episode. And it had nothing to do with it.
No. It was across the other side of the world.
It's kind of in the name. Pirates of the...
I know, but I googled what movies have the Dutch West Indies company in it. They're like Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man's Chest.
I was like, all right, I'll watch that. That seems like fun.
I like Johnny Depp. And then I put it on.
It's fucking British. It's pretty bad.
The British. It's a bad movie.
Yeah, Google's broken. Yeah, but the Kraken's fucking rock and roll.
It's very cool, yeah. I love the Kraken.
We should do an episode on the Kraken. Should we stop? Yeah.
How dare you? But that's all to say that when you consider what Palisar was given permission to do, Captainub should have been thankful for getting off with just a verbal warning. Because from what it seems like to me, Pelsart probably didn't want to deal with the logistical pain in the ass of punishing the captain.
Because punishing him would naturally slow down the journey. And Pelsart's trying to get his fucking nut in.
He's trying to fucking make it. This has to get done.
And it needs to be done efficiently. And quickly.
Yes. And it needs to be, by the book, he is like, he is under a lot of fucking pressure.
They're going to put him in a horrible place if he doesn't get this right. So I feel like it's also, you're in the middle of the ocean.
You just got fought. You just fought with this guy the last time.
Yeah. Like at this point, you're like, I just don't want to, I don't want to fight with you, bro.

Yeah.

I just need to get your shit together

so we can get this done with.

Also,

this might be a stupid question,

but who takes over

if he has to kill the captain?

Probably the boatswain.

Okay, yes.

We'll get to him in a bit.

All right, great.

But word soon spread amongst the crew

that upper merchant Pelsart

had ripped Captain Jacobs

a new asshole

in the upper merchant's quarters,

which may have been more humiliating for Captain Jacobs than if he'd just taken his lumps physically. I had bent in front of him, and I told him, you be a man, and you spank the hell out of me.
Take me. You take me.
You master me. I say in there, you treat me like a dog.
I'll be my father. And he didn't have the guts.

Did that usually happen on ships you've been on?

Yeah.

Treated like a little boy.

Yeah.

Being trained to be a man.

The opposite way.

You ever been canoed on a canoe?

You ever been pegged by a peg leg?

Well, because Jacobs was humiliated, he naturally started talking shit about his supervisor. And who else would be there with a sympathetic ear but the captain's new buddy, under merchant Euronymous Cornelis.
These zoomers think they know everything. We used to fight boats ourselves.
I used to just hit a boat with my hands if I wanted to. Now, without the influence of Euronymous, Captain Jacobs would have probably just grumbled a bit before putting on his big boy pants to finish out his last voyage at sea.
God damn it, all right, this boat ain't gonna sail itself. Let's go, boys.
Get somebody else to spring me. But when Jacobs told Euronymous during a conversation on the upper deck that he had half a mind to kill upper merchant Pelsart and make himself master of Batavia, Euronymous paused for a long while and asked how one would go about doing such a thing.
It's such a cinematic moment in history. Because it's real.
This is lifted right from the witness recollection. It's great.
Yeah. And so, Geronimus and Captain Jacobs began selling each other a fantasy where they would take the Batavia and its riches for themselves.
Yeah, I'm going to be doing the spanking. I'm going to be doing the bridge building.
Bridge buying. Telling people how big they should be And how big the bridges are And how they fit And what legs they go in first Yeah, the plan is just to get bridges that are a lot larger So then you can grow into them The idea is to create room for Grothliebenstrom Anditches.
Well, before long,

Euronymous and Captain Jacobs had sketched out a plan

where they'd use the might

and riches of the Batavia

to become pirates

operating out of Madagascar.

This is like two guys on Coke

talking about opening a restaurant.

This whole thing is like,

because it's such a far-flung,

it's just like,

I have an idea,

we'll take all the money,

and then we,

we're pirates. Yeah.
It's like a couple of kids, you know? But the plan was about after a year or two of plundering and such, they, along with their mutinous crew, would all retire as wealthy men somewhere out of the VOC's reach. You heard every single...
You remember when you used to deal weed? You heard all those guys' fantasies, but they're gonna get out and they're gonna go and they're gonna turn into a DJ or gonna turn into a mandala

designer. They were all DJs.

Yeah, they were gonna take that weed

money and they're gonna flip it to a sword

store, you know?

As far as everyone else on the ship

went, Euronymous and Captain

Jacobs figured, fuck them,

we'll figure it out. Now, it's

hard to tell if Euronymous was plotting a

mutiny all along or if it

was an idle thought that was given opportunity. But it's clear that once a mutiny became a real possibility, Euronymous was going to do everything in his power to stoke the fires of Jacobs' resentment.
There's a little part of me that wonders if in the back of his head, if he remembered where he came from in a way. And he's like...
Euronymous? Yes. Like, my people, the legacy of my people and my religion...
The Anabaptists. Yes, is to go and to form our own home.
Make Zion where we stand, right? Like, bring people to us. Create a home for Anabaptists.
I think he's got a little Elron maybe he's got a little LRH in his head oh you just say that because he likes boats well yeah it's close to that way but he doesn't like boats LRH doesn't like boats that much he was forced to live on a boat he chose the boat lifestyle the boat lifestyle chose Hieronymus where it's like I think that this guy, there's a little part of me that wonders, he's like, out here, I can be the Pope. Sure.
And Euronymous is, just to remind me, is a merchant, right? Yeah, he's an under merchant. Under merchant.
On the boat, but in real life, he was a pharmacist, but bad one. Yeah, drug dealer.
Yeah. So, yeah, basically, he's going to the indies so he can make some deals with somebody to you know get put set up some trade to you know bring money back to like bring it set up like profit lines yeah uh for the voc but as far as his mutiny went getting a high-ranking sailor on your side was the hard part the lower ranking sailors and the soldiers on the soldiers on a VOC ship, they were always primed for mutiny, especially near the end of the journey, because as bad as conditions were at the outset, they only got worse the longer the ship was at sea.
See, even though the Batavia was one of the largest and most advanced ships of its age, it still only had four latrines for its 341 passengers and crew. But as it usually goes, two of those latrines were reserved for the relatively small number of upper-class passengers and higher-ranking officials, maybe a few dozen people.
The rest of the ship, numbering in the hundreds, had to share the other two latrines, which latrines, in this case, were pretty much holes in the deck

that had to be used in full view of everyone.

Hey, hey, sometimes we close our eyes.

Because when it's a big, fat guy,

sometimes I close my eyes and I imagine me father.

But sometimes when it's a skinny lady,

sometimes I close me eyes and I think of my mother. Whose name was also Latrine.
Yeah, it used to be Shit Out. Good change.
Good change. Good change.
Now, also the thing about the latrines were they couldn't use them whenever they wanted. No.
So they only had like a half hour a day to go fucking shit and piss. The soldiers at least, yeah.
They were kept underneath in the oar lop until they were brought up twice a day for, you know, a long line of men shitting and pissing in the same hole. Speaking of that, do you gotta go to the bathroom? I have to go to the bathroom.
Use your hole. We'll be back after a word from our sponsors.
Fly from your grave. Can I go on the ship, Marcus? No, get out of here, mouse.
No. Get out of here, little mouse.
We're going to get to the rack. I won't be on the ship.
No, little mouse. No, stay home.
Get a cookie. Okay, so now that you've shit, let's get back to the shits.
Thank you. Each latrine had one long rope supposedly sanitized by the ocean dangling from the hole.
That's what we do. Yeah.
Yeah. My ocean rope.
Yeah. Here at LPN.
Yeah. The salt rope.
I just, we just have one wet rope. I run between our cheeks and then we all check each other.
You guys do that with, with, yeah. I talk, I check Gurney.
Ed checks Rob to make sure we're clean. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Rob is fucking spotless.
That's why he's our producer. Well, hundreds of people would use this salt rope to floss their butts before handing it to the next guy.
Ooh, thanks. Well, I guess you dip it down and kind of swish it a little bit.
Hey, hey, I washed it for you. So, things got a little messy.
Who didn't wash the rope? Who didn't wash the room? I'm just gonna say I might have had a legume too many last night. Anyways, better go deal with the sales.
Arr, I hate that guy. I hate loose stool, Tim.
But when it was too dangerous to use the latrines during bad weather, the soldiers and seamen relieved themselves in corners, or even worse, crouched over ladders that led down to the holds where they lived. That I didn't get.
I read that passage over and over again in Batavia's graveyard, trying to figure out what the function of perching on a ladder so the Duke could splat down harder, what the logic was in that. There's a little thing about being human.
And just, like... Taking the little pleasures where you can get them? Yeah, it's boredom.
You gotta see a plop. Yeah.
Also, if you're a sailor, I imagine you're shitting on the soldiers. No, the soldiers are in their own hold.
The soldiers are down in the Orlop. The sailors are up in the gun deck.
That's what I'm saying. They probably made a hold from the gun deck to the Orlop.
I wouldn't be shitting on the guys with the guns. No.
Well, this was particularly a problem, you know, shitting off of the ladders and going in corners. This became a big problem when the Batavious pumps got going during the same bad weather.
The pumps would bring all the urine, liquid shits, and rainwater that had leaked down into the bilges. But instead of pushing all that directly out to sea, the men who designed the Batavia had the disgusting mixture slosh through the sailors' sleeping quarters first until it found an open port or sluice.
Now, I only sluice. Yeah.
The term sluice. Almost every word in this episode, including Euronymous, is hard to deal with.
Yeah. Now I can only imagine what sort of horrible shits these sailors and soldiers would take because their diet was not what you'd call balance.
It's just all salt. Tell me, do you guys have acai? Does anybody, where's the motherfucker supposed to get a poke bowl? You know? While the highest rank ate only the best food, sailors and soldiers ate cask meat, legumes, and hardtack.
But I do feel like even the good food that the guys, the officers got to eat couldn't have been that

good by the end. It's like, but they had to

bring them like, they used to bake them turkeys

and do all this like big extravagant

meals. Yeah, for the first week.
Yes.

And then it's just whatever fish you can catch.

Probably. Yeah, but the fish never made it to

the men. You know, the fish never made it to

like the men down at the bottom. The fish were all reserved

for the people up top. The used

fish made it down to the men. That's what I call my shit as well.
Used fish. Well, as far as what the sailors and soldiers ate, cask meat was heavily cured and dried meat pickled by boiling it in brine or vinegar.
While hardtack, a cracker-like food used by armies and sailors throughout history, that had to be soaked in seawater before eating. Otherwise, it could crack a sailor's already fragile teeth.
Wouldn't that just make them crazy? What? Having all that seawater? It wasn't good for them. No, it's not good for you, and it kills you.
Yeah. It's very bad for you.
Yeah. Well, the heart attack on the Batavia was also teeming with insects.
And while some sailors would tap the rations on the side of the ship to dislodge bugs before eating, some came to like the added ingredient, and could even tell which bug was which by taste and texture. Hey man, you gotta do something on that boat.
Yeah, and the scurvy made them blind, so that's the only way they couldn't tell the difference between the bugs. Arr, I think I got a good one.
It's a ladybug. Arr, taste.
Bad ladybug. Oh, hold on, don't clean that.
What's that matter? Yeah, here. Take my bottle.
Ah, yes. It's good.
It's my used ladybug. Oh, yes.
Whatever we don't eat, we'll use this lube. Yes.
Spur your fucking. That's what you mean.
For when we're having sex. I didn't realize that lube is such a pirate word.
Lube. Make sure before we set out to fill up the lube cast.
We've got to keep it a full to the very brim. Fifteen barrels of lube on this ship.
My favorite flavor, strawberry kiwi. It really helps me take the oar.
Well, concerning the tastes and textures of bugs, weevils were bitter, while maggots were spongy and cold. But big, juicy cockroaches were considered a treat, because they were described as vaguely resembling sausage.
Vaguely. The word vaguely is doing a lot of work on that thing.

Yeah, because you're just crazy and you haven't seen a sausage for months.

It's kind of dark.

Sausage.

And it's full of juice.

Yeah, yeah, little poppers.

Yeah.

But while this sounds awful,

the Batavia was actually considered pretty high class by 17th century standards,

but only because the crew always ate something three times a day. Now, besides meals at eight, noon, and six, the only thing that broke up the mind-numbing boredom for the sailors on board was the entertainment they created themselves.
While they did engage in stereotypically manly pursuits like fistfights for sport, they were also vicious gossips and even put on theatrical performances if they were so inclined. That's the only thing I like about Lou Stool, Tim.
He knows a lot of songs that make me cry. Then I get angry, being sad.
Then I get happy, thinking I had the ability to be angry in the first place. And that means I'm alive.
Thank you, Luke Stool, Tim. Oh, he's dead.
It was a lot of fun, but the late show guests just kept repeating. Oh, yes.
Very. Oh, God.
You think your Rogan has the same four guys in it. The sailors also played games, the most interesting of which being the execution game.
Now what we can tell this was a sailored up version of an innocent 17th century parlor game called forfeits in forfeits all participants began the game by putting a personal object in a box and once the objects are collected one person is selected as a judge once the judge sits down an object is taken out of the box and held above the judge's head. So the judge can't see what it is.
The person who owns the object is then told to come forward, where they would basically be engaged in a game of truth or dare with the judge so they could get their object back. Like the judge would say, like, yeah, if you want your thing back, you're gonna need to do dance me a jig.
Come on,

loose stool, Tim, dance the jig.

This is our new Twitch show.

This is our new, we have to use

forfeits.

Yeah, because you could see loose stool, Tim,

being like, finally.

I knew I'd be able to

perform on this boat.

He's having too much fun. Let's run him through.
And so after the player has done or not done what the judge has asked, the judge decides whether the person deserves to reobtain what they'd put in the box in the first place. But to make it more interesting, sailors gave the judge the option to also tar the player if he wasn't satisfied.
Well, as such, forfeits became so dangerous in the hands of sailors that it could only be played with the express permission of the captain. I suppose if the voyage was going so well that he felt the men all deserved a little treat.
Yeah, I guess you guys can all beat the shit out of each other. I know you like it.
I love to see it.

Oh, good quail.

Oh, I'm so glad. can all beat the shit out of each other.
I know you like it.

I love to see it.

Oh, good quail.

Oh, I'm so glad I could eat this six-month-old quail.

Truth or dare on a fucking...

Between sailors

on this horrible ship.

What secrets could they possibly

have? Okay.

They're all like raping each other in front of each other.

Truth or dare. Truth.
Okay. They're all like raping each other in front of each other.
Arr. Truth or dare.
Truth. Okay.
Do you have a crush on Steven? No. Let's stab his head.
Cut off his butt. He's forfeited.
No, I don't! No, Stephen, it's true! Now, obviously, the sailors on the Batavia played fast and loose with their own lives, but that was partly because they all knew they could die any day in dozens of equally horrible ways. Most, however, died by disease brought on board by rats and insects.
Author Mike Dash described the hold of the Batavia as an empire of rats, hundreds, if not thousands of them, that only multiplied as the voyage went on. Knowing that food could sometimes be found on the other side of the wall, rats would chew through the hull not knowing there was only water waiting, and the leaks the rats caused had to constantly be filled by the ship's caulkers.
Dude, rats can chew through anything. When I was working at the poorhouse in a restaurant in New York City they would literally chew through the brick walls and through like you know like kitchens are lined with metal you know they would chew through that and then we would have to like fill it with like those like metal like scrubbies.
Yeah. We used to call them space pussies because you open them up and it's like a metal little vagina.
Yeah. That's fun.
That's real fun. Catch your talk.
Yeah. We'd stick those in the wall and then we'd cock that up and then eat through that fucking shit.
Yeah. I did.
Now, rats are incredible because it's just like if one rat breaks all his teeth, the next rat comes up and takes the job. Yes, I love to eat your teeth.
Thank you so much. Meanwhile, like, I was just thinking of ship cockers.
Yeah. You're just thinking about a guy fucking a bunch of guys on a boat.
Calkers. Calkers.
I fill the hole with me. It's not helping.
You're just fucking old Davies Lock locker I'm almost done I can't do it while you talk But with rats come lice And with lice, especially in the 17th century One had to contend with the Black Plague Which could kill dozens On one of these ships, if not hundreds To make matters just that much worse The sleeping the sleeping quarters were also infested with bedbugs. And that was just the vermin that the Batavia had left the Netherlands with.
That was baseline. Ships could also pick up native insects anytime they stopped in a port.
Within days, those insects would rapidly multiply and spread typhus. Sometimes captains would offer brandy as a reward to the best bug killers, so an endless army of several tens of thousands of insects would be crushed every few days.
Oh, that's nice. That works.
Yeah, no, someone's got to do it. Yeah, but that's all to say that this was the life a sailor or soldier had to look forward to for less than a living wage.
So the men of the Batavia had little to lose by participating in a mutiny. All they needed was someone to give them permission.
It's important to remember that there's more of you than them. You can win.
The biggest moral quandary of a mutiny, however, was presented by the other people on board the ship, the passengers. The Batavia had plenty of civilians aboard who were just trying to make their way to the Indies, including numerous children and 22 women.
These women and children were either the families of men aboard or they were traveling to meet their husbands in the Indies. Now, for a while, wife delivery was a pretty good side business for the VOC, who usually capped the number of women at 20 because they only sprung for one single company chaperone per ship to look after them.
It's bad luck to have ladies on a boat. Well, it's not really bad luck as much as you can't trust the men.
Is it because of the menstruations? Yeah. No, no, no.
They bring a fish and a fish or a monster. No, I know.
Because that's what happened. I'm being silly.
Yeah, yeah. But after the repeated rape of many women by hundreds of sailors during these types of voyages, the company ended the service with few exceptions like the Batavia.

Can't they just put them, they should put little penis locks on them.

Yeah.

You know?

Or get an old lady, an all-lady fleet.

That wouldn't happen.

Honestly, sisters are selling it for their same hands.

I can see that.

Okay. All-lady VOC trap.
Alright. I smell Kristen Wiig vehicle.
Yeah, you're fucking laughing until next year you're going to see Lady Pirates on HBO Max. I'm fine with it.
At least it's not IP. We're going to make the Batavia the labia.
Whoa, yeah! Yes!

Now prevent rape on the Batavia.

The women were kept segregated. I don't know, there's no way to fucking come out of that.
There's no way to come

back into that. I know, it's really

hard. It's like joking, joking, joking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like there's just no way.

That's why I put it in the middle of a paragraph

instead of in the beginning of one. But now you've got to start over.
Yeah. No, no, no.
Well, to prevent... Do you want me to say it? Well, the women were kept segregated from the majority of the sailors and soldiers.
But that segregation did not extend to VOC officers. As such, one woman in particular on this voyage, a woman who would play an involuntary role in the mutiny to come, she caught the eye of the famously horny upper merchant, Francisco Pelsar.
Because you remember, his Achilles heel was in his balls. Yes.
That woman was the unusually beautiful Crecia Jansdoctor, 27 years old when the Batavia set sail. Yeah, I know I shouldn't.
I am too pretty to be on this boat. Honestly, it is like the worst place to be hot.
Yeah, honestly, I blame myself for just being here. I should not be here.
I am too hot. Now, it's thought that Krecia had stayed behind in the Netherlands to raise her three children when her husband joined the VOC.
But after all her kids died before the age of six, she decided to roll the dice and join her husband in the Indies. It's sort of like, kind of like the angel of death gave me my groove back.
And you just allow me to go live my best life in the Indies. She's too hot to be a mom.
I just, yeah, that's what it was saying. My heart just killed all of my kids.
Oh my God. Oh God, he was just telling me you're ruining your body with all of this.
So I'm just going to go out there and I guess get railed in Indies. Now Captain Jacobs had repeatedly tried to seduce Kreysia even though he was a married man.
You're prettier than the last whore I had sex with. I'm sorry.
I'm just angry. I'm an awful man.
I'm a bad, I'm bad at this. He would have been great, the guy, the coach from Major League.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, even better than Nick Nolte.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. But when Kre guy.
Yeah. Yeah.
But when Krecia rebuffed Captain Jakob's advances, the captain turned his attentions to Krecia's servant. As it turned out, the servant was fully game to be the captain's on-ship girlfriend.
And in private, they gossiped about how much they both hated the high-born Krecia Jans doctor. And it got even worse after Krecia started gravitating towards upper merchant Francisco Pelsart.
Oh, yeah, dude. Because, well, she also definitely needed protection because something was going on.
Like, when she started watching her nursemaid fall in, like... So, I guess...
It wasn't a nursemaid because you didn't have any kids. It's whatever she was.
She was a servant, yeah. They called her the nurse.
That was like one of those Shakespearean titles that they have or whatever. But there's just something to like, there's boat mansus.
Sure. Boat mansus happen.
Yeah, sea wife. Yeah, people have sea wives.
But the thing about this one is that it kind of gets out of control. They say he, for some reason, this lady, she was doing something something.
Well, they said she

was unusually beautiful for the

time. Whoa, no, I'm talking about the nurse.

Oh. The servant.

Let's not get the names mixed up. I'm sorry.

The servant, she essentially

remember I said during their Fred

and Rosemary West series that sometimes

you're only as hot as what you're willing to

do? Mm-hmm. That's this lady.

This lady knows, oh, I've got, oh, if I want to get a special cut, I've got to gargle the balls. You know, be like, this is a lady doing it, a special.
Now, the relationship between the servant and Captain Jacobs only fueled the fires when it came to the captain getting more comfortable with the idea of a mutiny. But if he and Euronymous were to fail, the punishments were the most severe the VOC had to offer.
See, despite the VOC's harsh treatment of their employees, full mutinies were incredibly rare in company history. Between 1602 and 1628, there had been just six serious mutinies, none of which were successful.
Usually, general unrest amongst the crew resulted in small protests met with brief compromise. But once the VOC regained control, they would execute the leaders or punish them in a variety of increasingly brutal ways that would discourage further complaint.
They really tried to stop any thought of mutinies. Or any thought of organization in any way whatsoever.
Like, if anyone, if they started complaining and they started getting together, it's like, you know, like unions weren't even, were hundreds of years away. But this is like the beginning of that.
And also a time when, you know, the companies, these corporations, like when you tried to organize, you'd be murdered. Yeah.
I mean, they just straight up killing people and stabbing their hands to the mast. Like, what could the torture for this be that everyone's scared of it? Aha! The most common punishment for a mutineer was 200 lashes, punctuated by splashes of seawater that would both disinfect the wound and burn like hell.
For many sailors, having their backs turned into a bleeding gummy mush was eventually fatal. The VOC wanted to get more dramatic, though.
Mutineers, while still at sea, were sometimes dropped from the yardarm, which is the crossbar on the mast that holds up the ship's sails. After lead weights were tied to the mutineer's feet, he was taken up the yardarm, where his arms would be tied with the rope, and the other end of the rope would be tied to the post.
He would then be dropped 40 feet, and when the rope reached its end, the weights would dislocate the mutineer's shoulders and usually break his arms and wrists in the process. Bit of a crack in the back! Like, you could see it feeling really good for half a second.
Maybe. Yeah, but then you just become useless.
Why not kill him? Well, it's because you want to see, you want to show everyone else what sort of horrible death you're gonna die if you do this. And that's the thing.
It's like, or not even what sort of horrible death, but because that guy would be left there to scream and scream and scream for a very long time. For months! Yeah.
Yep. Yeah.
But that's what it was really about showing everyone else, making an example of you. Man, I bet like an afterwards, like, you know, some guy screaming for days.
I imagine they just beat the shit out of him at some point. Oh, of course.
They probably just do the whole thing where, you know, they put the hand over the mouth and they pinch the nose and just slowly suffocate them to death. Yeah, kill them in the night.
Yeah. But being thrown off the yard on was not the worst punishment.
Above them all was keelhauling. Yeah, keelhauling! Yeah, my favorite! Which, not surprisingly, was a Dutch invention.
When a man was keelhauled, his arms were first tied together above his head and his legs were bound. One end of a very long rope was passed under the keel, while the other end of the rope was tied to the mutineer's arms.
The mutineer was then tossed overboard, and by using the rope tied to his arms, he was pulled from one side of the ship to the other over and over again as the ship continued its forward momentum. So under the boat? Under the boat.
Yes. Now, in theory, keel hauling was supposed to just be a terrifying and deeply unpleasant experience.

Because at this point in history, only one man in seven on a VOC ship actually knew how to swim.

Think about that for a second.

You're on the ship.

All these sailors, one in seven knows how to swim.

Six out of seven of them, if they fall in the water, they're fucking dead.

It's because the waters work.

I don't.

When I'm not working, I'm walking.

Yeah.

And if I'm not rolling on the waves, I'm sitting. I hate the water.
It's my enemy, but it's also my love. But I'm afraid of it, but it's also giving me everything I've ever got.
I'm too poor to learn how to swim. But in practice, once the mutineer was dragged from side to side underneath the ship, he would either be cut to pieces by barnacles on the ship's hull, or his head would actually fall off after being smashed into the side of the ship over and over again.
And you know, they're like, now I hope you have learned your lesson. Oh, no.
Oh, is his head supposed to collapse? Can we get some sort of inflatable? Is that inflatable to fix this man's head? Because we take off 45 minutes from now. Also, barnacle are fucking crazy sharp.
Yeah. I remember one time I saw a guy fall off a pier type of thing.
Everyone was out there fishing and shit. And then when he tried to get back on, he scraped his hand on the barnacle and it fucking sliced it open.
You could see the bone and shit. It was fucking wild.
Yeah, man. It'll kill you.
Oh, yeah. Now, the VOC didn't necessarily want their employees dead.
So, to prevent death by keelhauling, VOC ships were equipped with special leather harnesses, actual company torture devices that were designed to keep the mutineer alive for three full rounds of keelhauling before the punishment was deemed complete. Now this time, don't die! Yes.
All right. All right, here's your leather strap, and don't forget to snorkel.
Okay. And remember, this is unpleasant, but we don't want it to be entirely so.
What? So enjoy. Yeah.
Actually, they would do that. They'd give him a little sponge that he could bite down on for the pain.
This will help you. Okay? Now, just remember, this hurts us more than it hurts you.
All right? Kill him, please! Now, these punishments would have been well known to Captain Jacobs and the entire crew. So Jacobs and Euronymous had to be very careful about who they brought into this plot.
But one by one, they began collecting all the right men to pull it off, and their plan was put into motion the moment they set sail for the final leg of their journey to the Indies. Now, before they did anything, they first had to separate the Batavia from the rest of the VOC flotilla, because if shit went down on the Batavia, the other six ships would quickly come to its aid.
So, as soon as the Batavia left the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, Captain Jacobs very simply allowed the ship to drift away from the rest of the convoy. Now, nobody really paid any attention to this, because ships got separated all the time due to differences in quality and sailing speed.
So once the Batavia was out of the rest of the fleet's range, Euronymous and Captain Jacobs began gathering men for the mutiny to come. So at this point, the Batavia has started with 14 ships, like it and 13 others.
Then it gets taken down to the Batavia and six other ships. And now, after leaving the Cape of Good Hope, the Batavia is all alone.
Yeah, and the Batavia, it's easy for it to become alone because it's fast as hell, right? Yeah. Yeah.
And what they say is because it's so common for them to drift in and out, like for a while, they probably don't even think about it. Yeah.
Well, amongst the first mutineers recruited was the ship's boatswain, who was in charge of the ship's sails, rigging, and anchors. The boatswain was more or less the second highest ranking sailor on the ship, a master seaman who'd worked his way from the bottom and had in the progress become one of the toughest customers on board.
In his normal day-to-day, the boatswain would lash at his men with a tarred rope called a starter, so the men were conditioned to follow his orders. Once the boatswain was recruited, Euronymous now had the two most senior seamen on the Batavia on his side, and the numbers grew exponentially from there.
But while the boatswain and the captain were good at recruiting the sailors, Euronymous was able to expand their numbers to include the other classes on the ship. Most important, however, were the soldiers, easily the most dangerous men aboard the ship.
I say, when I was listening to the Dan Carlin Hardcore History episode about the Monster Revolution, there was a thing that he said that I thought was fascinating, that this is kind of how it works, where you gotta remember, before mass information, things and people getting new ideas was so like it was kind of this amazing new thing at the time for an idea to spread virally. Right.
Because of the printing press, all this stuff coming out, like it's spread ideas. So the way like Dan Carlin puts it is that you can watch by sermon by sermon how Anabaptism got spread by like two people at a time.
So, Euronymous is using the same exact ability, slowly but surely, preaching at people one at a time to slowly, like, and so he'll be talking to six people, one of them will get it. No, he's not talking to six people at a time at all.
No, they're going by one by one. There's no talking about in public at all.
Not the mutiny aspect. The ideas aspect.
Because then you see who picks up on the, there's no such thing as sin. There's no such thing as that.
He starts saying these things, seeing who says like, yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, yeah.
And then it's next level. It's cult leadership.
Yeah. It's months that they really get to like dissect each other's psyche.
Yeah. But starting with a couple of easily influenced cadets, Euronymous worked his way to the corporal who was in charge of disciplining the soldiers, a man who played much the same role as the boatswain.
Later, Euronymous would be called a seducer of men, who used his uncanny powers of persuasion to draw men to his cause. And indeed, his silver tongue would eventually convince the men of the Batavia to commit all manner of evil.
Now, once the recruitment reached the soldiers, the mutineers had a team of somewhere between 8 and 18 men on their side. We're not really sure exactly how many people were on board with this, but, you know, that's the estimate.
Honestly, I'm surprised we know what we know. Yeah.
It's because of how much witness testimony came from the survivors and Pelsart's journal. Yeah.
But that's the thing. 8 to 18, that was more than enough to put them in a position where they could overthrow upper merchant Pelsart once and for all.
Because they just needed choke points. But unexpectedly, upper merchant Pelsart got seriously ill, quite possibly from malaria contracted in Africa.
Was it bitch disease? Yes. Yes.
Unfortunately, yes. With the recent rollbacks in our health departments, bitch disease is on the rise.
There's really not much we have to fight it.

And because he was so sick,

he was confined to his bunk

for weeks on end.

Captain Jacobs was therefore

put in total control of the ship,

but instead of taking advantage

immediately,

he wasted the opportunity

on piddling things,

like when he proudly announced

to everyone

that he had officially taken Krecia's servant

as his girlfriend. He's my girlfriend.

Yes, all right.

We are going steady.

I am in

way like with her.

I sent her a note saying

would she go steady with me, and she checked yes.

And if I find one

herpy that did not come from

me, and I know mine, I know mine. Because they all got names.
Here's herpy one, herpy two, herpy three, here's Ted. Now, the plan for some reason was to wait until upper merchant Pelsart died before taking over the ship.
Sure. And Euronymous was so confident in Pelsart's impending death that he'd stop recruiting people for a violent mutiny.

I don't think he was wrong.

He was dying.

They were going in there and Pelsart's like, you fucking piece of fucking shit.

He's sitting there dying being like, I'm going to fuck it.

I'm going to feel better.

And I'm going to take over this little fucking ship.

And they all like, all they had to do was wait.

Yeah.

But why not do the suffocate thing that we were talking about earlier? Because that's what I'm saying. Because that's I'm saying.
No one would have thought any different. They weren't ready.
They were pussies because there still was a bunch of soldiers in the way. There were still, if open war happened, if open war on the water happened, that would also be really bad for them.
Because the soldiers would outnumber them. And right now, yes, they have some of the sailors on, but they did not get to get to the soldiers

because you didn't really know who they were going to be loyal to.

Now, the reason why there wasn't much hope for Pelsart, the reason why Euronymous thought like,

sure, we can just wait around for him to die. You get sick on a ship, you're fucked.

That was because he was in the hands of the ship's surgeon and the surgeon's assistant, the underbarber. Underbarber, yeah, just sounds like the guy from Pubic Hair Barbershop.
So the VOC had a hard time getting surgeons for their voyages because of the surgeon's extremely high at-sea mortality rate, which had been earned by being constantly stuck in small cabins with sick men. Most likely, if you were treating a guy with a plague, you were going to get the plague.
If you were treating a guy with malaria, you were going to get malaria. Yeah.
And there would only be one surgeon. One surgeon.
Well, and the undersurgeon. Yeah.
So yeah, him and his assistant. Yeah, and his boy.
Yeah, because you could barely get like one guy to say yes. And even then, you were scraping the bottom of the barrel.
You were getting the guy who had fucked up enough over in his town where he was looking to leave real fast.

Yeah, he's the one with the big, like, thick glasses where you could see eyes and his hair shaking up and going,

Oh, boy, I just hope I don't have to do surgery today.

Yahoo Serious, he's a fucking surgeon.

Tommy!

Yeah, he makes Yahoo Serious with Goofy, and that's the ship's surgeon.

Yeah, I just wanted to see what Papo looked like in its natural state.

All right, get ready for the keel, Holly.

That's fun to do. Did he die?

Well, mostly, surgeons were there to set bones and treat burns, dislocations, concussions, gunshot wounds, gangrene,

or any other physical malady that might befall a man on a 17th century ship. A broken heart.
Really though, the primary requirement for being a ship surgeon was not knowledge, but stamina, because they had to be strong enough to hold down a conscious screaming man while amputating a limb without anesthetic. And the waves.
Yes. Can't you just borrow a soldier for that shit? Nah, you gotta do it yourself.
Concerning the treatment of disease, though, the ship's surgeon was also equipped with an apothecary's chest, and after the surgeon used every treatment he could think of to treat the ailing upper merchant, Pelsart miraculously recovered. Now, once upper merchant Pelsart was back on his feet, Euronymous and Captain Jacobs resumed planning a violent mutiny, but decided the small crew they'd gathered wasn't enough.
So they put together a convoluted plan to turn all the ship's crew members against Pelsart by using the object of his affection, Krecia Jansdoctor. Yeah, it's very interesting they decided to play some weird, esoteric, political game instead of just killing him.
Yeah. Because I also love the scene that they set by how, like, it really was this, like, long night and they were kind of, like, pretty certain that he was gonna be dead.
Yeah. And then all of a sudden they looked up and they saw him standing at the railing.
Yeah. Like, and he was like sucking in air,

like literally like I'm not dead yet.

I'm gonna get this shit to fucking Jakarta.

If it kills me or not.

It's crazy because like,

we all know that Pelsart's a bitch,

but like these guys are like scared to kill him somehow so much that even

when he gets better,

they attack the woman. Yes.
Now Pelsartart and Krecia weren't together like Captain Jacobs and Krecia's servant were, but Pelsart did have enough affection towards his high-born crush where an attack on her might provoke an overreaction in Pelsart. So an assault was planned where the attackers would be disguised.
It was hoped that Pelsart would punish every member of the crew. I don't know who did it, so you're all getting a bit of this.
Because it seems to be a common way amongst captains in the upper emergency. Yeah, that would sow discord, and it would make it far easier when Captain Jakob stood up and said, this is a bunch of bullshit.
Let's kill Pelsart and become pirates. And so, in the middle of the night, a team of eight men, led by the Boatswain, invaded Gracia's cabin.
And bizarrely, in a move that almost sounds like a prank if it wasn't so fucking aggressive, they smeared Gracia's face and genitals with tar and feces in an attack that lasted seconds. Alright, so what should we do here? There's the thing, right? I think what we do is we take her down.
We'll cut off her her head. We'll cut off her face and show the whole world her stupid little skull.
Yeah. What I say we do, we can lift her up.
We can chop up her arms. We can cut off her feet.
We can play with her titties on her. We can do all sorts of crazy stuff with it.
And that's what will get them. Yeah.
Can I put doo-doo on her? My God.

Farty Fred, that's the best idea I've heard all night.

Thank you.

That's amazing.

Wow.

Yeah.

Doo-doo.

Yeah.

Our weapon of choice, of course.

Word of the attack spread quickly, but it seems like upper merchant Pelsart was either again reluctant to mete out punishment or he was one step ahead of the mutineers. So even after Krasia said she recognized the boat swain as one of her attackers, I know who did it.
Pelsart took no action. It's because he knew.
As soon as she said who it was, he was like, oh, fuck. Yeah.
Oh, no, this has gotten real out of hand already, hasn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's like the one dude he's supposed to trust.
Yeah, one of them. He's the guy that's in charge of disciplining everybody else.
If the boat swains involved, you're fucked. Shrewdly, it seems like Pelsart saw through the mutineer's plot and was simply waiting until the Batavia reached Java before he made his move.
Or at least that's what Euronymous and Captain Jacobs believed. So, they decided, since they're already fucked, to take a more direct mute to mutiny before they reach Java, because if they reach Java, they would likely both be tried and executed.
The next plan was far more straightforward than the first. Basically, it's fucking grab Pelsart while he's asleep and toss him over the boat.
Yeah, like he took a plan. You should have done that months ago.
You just planned and it'd be done. Yeah, grab him, throw him off the boat.
That's it. Meanwhile, the rest of the mutineers would grab weapons and nail the hatches of the Orlop deck shut so the soldiers not involved in the mutiny couldn't interfere.
But just as the plan was about to go into

effect, the ship entered a

wind current called the Roaring 40s,

and no one aboard the

Batavia had any idea

just how incredibly dangerous

this part of the sea could be.

It seems that the wind's

picking up.

Why was it called the Roaring 40s?

Because of the latitude? Yeah, exactly.

Good job. Way to go.

I know maps.

We use them.

Because remember, the whole thing with the very

special, highly proprietary

Dutch way of getting to

Jakarta and the Indies was that

they are to go towards Australia

and make a left. Because if not,

you ain't going to make it.

Now, the Roaring 40s were part of a relatively new route to the Indies discovered by the Dutch. Partly, the Roaring Forties were a boon because it avoided lanes patrolled by the Portuguese and any subsequent sea battle that might spring from such an encounter.
The Roaring Forties also cut 2,000 miles off the journey to Java, but only if you turned north before you hit the western coast of Australia. Left, if you're going west.
Yeah, I mean, if you, really the ship from, like the trail from the Netherlands to Indonesia to Java, the island of Java where they're going, it was like three lefts. Yep.
You know, it's like you leave. To left at Great Britain? Yeah, left at Great Britain.
Left at Cape Town? Yeah, left at Africa. Left, middle of the ocean.
Yeah. You're at Jakarta.
It is wild how, like, close did we get to Brazil. Yeah.
They're just fucking dink, dink, dink, and that's it. Well, if the ship missed the turn, a low-lying chain of 122 coral reefs and barren islands lay directly in their path.
This chain, called Houtman's Abrolos, was discovered by a Dutch upper merchant named Houtman, who'd sketched them from afar. I always want to call it like, Houtman's Abrolos! It should be like, Houtman's grand fuck-up.
It's him just drawing, it's him being like, no, I've created an incredible route. That's what I've done.
And they're like, no, it's just him standing on a barren reef, drawing pictures of it. Remember this place.
He'd sketched them from afar and noted their location on the navigational chart because there really wasn't much in the sea that could rip a ship apart like a coral reef. But Hauptmann had only discovered the chain a few years before the Batavia set sail.
Remember, information travels very slowly. So this very important information about what was in your path if you missed the turn to the Indies, this had not yet made it into the VOC's latest navigational charts.
As a result, the Batavia had no idea that these incredibly dangerous reefs existed. Now, the Roaring Forties were the home stretch for VOC ships headed to Java.
By the time the Batavia reached this point, the turn left up north, they'd been at sea for seven months and had only 2,000 more miles to go in their 15,000-mile journey. But perhaps because Captain Jacobs was wrapped up in a mutiny plot and the possibility of execution if it failed, not to mention a new girlfriend.
She's my fun new girlfriend. And we talk about all sorts of things about our favorite colors.
We talk about what we'd name our dogs when we get them. I love you, Daddy.
All right, well, let's just. Oh, please, I've got something cute on for you.
Honestly, I do prefer it when you're silent. Do you like my titties? Yes, I do.
Do you like my titties? They're like two seagulls with no feathers. Oh, but come.
Oh, man, now don't you get me horny in front of the boys. Well, Captain Jacobs missed the turn north.
That's the thing. He also was partying on the boat when he was sick.
When Pelsart was sick, they were all acting like he was going to die anyway. So they were all like partying and hanging out.
They just blew right past him. We know Jacobs loves getting hammered.
He does. No, he really does.
And he soon found himself arriving at the reefs of Hauptmann's Abrolhos in the dead of night.

A little after 3 a.m. on June 4th, the ship's lookout saw white water and a massive spray.

Surefire signs of a reef.

He called out his sightings to Captain Jacobs, but Jacobs brushed him off,

saying that the white spray was just moonbeams dancing on the waves.

Yeah, you're full of shit, buddy, all right?

Fuck you, man.

I'm trying to watch Great British Baking Show with my girlfriend.

They only got 15 minutes left.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I know. Thank you.
the best baker. Their heart attack sucks! Within moments, though, Captain

Jacobs discovered just how wrong he

was when the Batavia slammed into

the reef at full speed.

Immediately, the ship became

impaled on an outcropping 15

feet below the surface, which

tore the rudder away. Seconds

later, the ship's bow hit the body

of the massive reef itself,

which threw everyone on the deck against the railings of the ship. Being the middle of the night, most people were in bed and were jolted out of sleep when they were thrown forward by the force of the impact.
Upon waking, the first thing they heard was the coral gouging its way into the ship's first hull, which cracked with the sound of a forest falling. Now, upper merchant Palsart awoke with everyone else and found his ship in total chaos.
It was a pitch black night, and passengers and crew alike were panicking on the deck. Immediately, Pelsart ran to Captain Jacobs and shouted, What have you done that through your reckless carelessness you have run this noose around our necks? Undeterred by Pelsart's reproach, Captain Jacobs shouted orders to pull down the Batavia's 8,900 square foot sails because the continued wind was pinning the ship further into the reef like a man pulling a knife deeper into his own stomach.
For the time being, however, there were no serious leaks because ships like the Batavia were built with double hulls to keep something like a reef from being immediately fatal. So at this point, there's still a chance.
Yeah, you're like, we can maybe do this because you remember they already had landed on a bank once and got off of it. So they're like, this can happen.
Maybe we could figure out. But the main issue is they have no idea where the fuck they are.
Yes, they have no idea where they are because hitting a reef meant they were reasonably close to a shore. But the Batavia was not supposed to be close to any shore prior to reaching the island of Java.
So they have no fucking clue where in the ocean they actually are. They didn't hang that loosey.
No, they didn't, man. And at that point, like Australia wasn't even really on maps.
Like it was just called like Astralis, like like no man's land of Australis. Like, basically, don't go past this point.

There's nothing there.

And then when they do go there, sometimes they get killed by the people that live there. Yes.
Now, once the sun came up a few hours later, upper merchant Pelsar called for a sounding lead to test the depths of the water around them and to see how badly they were fucked. If they'd crashed at low tide, the rising waters, once the tide came in,

would lift the ship off the reef enough to make repairs and limp to Java. If they'd crashed in high tide, though, they were fucked.
And sure enough, at 6 a.m., the tide slowly began to fall. As the water around the ship lowered, the passengers and crew saw the jagged tips of the emerging from the waves.
Before long, the Batavia was surrounded on three sides by coral and the ocean's waves violently bumped the ship against its tool of demise, making walking or standing on the deck all but impossible. It has to be so surreal to be stuck like that when there's thousands of miles of water around you in all places, when you're looking and then all of a sudden it all slides away.
Because there's like just kind of these little islands kind of around them, sort of. Well, they can't really, at this point, they can't see any of them.
Yeah. Now, it was clear when the tide fell that the ship wouldn't be able to support its 15-ton main mast once the water dropped to a certain level.
Sure enough, when the water receded, the mainmast began grinding itself through the bottom of the ship. So in a last-ditch attempt at saving the Batavia, Captain Jacobs ordered his men to cut down the mainmast, but he did not give them instructions on how to do it safely.
Because you can save the main mast. You can actually take it.
That's what they do.

You can literally chop it off, and

then if you fall it off correctly, these are

things you learn that are crazy. They can save it

and reattach it. Yeah.

But they couldn't. No.
When the main

mast fell, it crushed gear and railings

before becoming completely

entangled on the deck. It fell forward

instead of falling the way it was supposed to fall.

Not to mention all the coral that damaged. And that to me is one of the biggest.
Where's Nemo in this? And with that, the Batavia was dead in the water. And the only course the passengers and crew had was to flee on the ship's two lifeboats and hope there was land nearby.
But before loading people onto the boats, upper merchant Pelsart got got as high as he could, and he used his spyglass to spot some islands about six miles away. He sent a crew out through the dangerous maze of reefs, a maze that could sink a rowboat as easily as the ship.
And two hours later, they returned with news that all passengers and crew could reach the island safely. Now, Upper Merchant Pelsart's first duty as a VOC representative was to his company and the property on board the Batavia, especially the 500-pound chest full of treasure.
Imagine them glowing and beating like giant evil hearts. Like, that's all he can think about, is that the bottom of this whole ship has his whole life in it.
But in a rare moment of humanity for a VOC company man... This is where he had a heart.
Yeah. Pelsart put the people ahead of the loot in order that they be taken to land first.
This is, of course, a temporary change. Yeah.
But while this is admirable, Pelsart probably should have assigned a few of his men to rescue supplies at the same time. Because at 10 a.m., the hull burst.
The cargo holds were flooded flooded and the majority of the supplies they could have used to survive were lost well definitely the first layer which i was in his journals are really interesting because you really he started writing the journals right after the shipwreck because what he had to do was create a chain of events and a timeline for his bosses back home for every single thing that happened because that's the only way he was going to get out of it and the way he was talking about it is interesting because even in the that's kind of why I got to like him almost as I'm reading his journals and it's the way he's talking about the fact that like he rushed to get the people off Pelsar yes he rushed to get all the people off and he knew he did know that the supplies were going to be fucked. But he chose human life.
But then it's like, well, what's really the point if you're going to starve to death anyway? Yeah. And then the whole thing where he, like, loaded the whole boat full of rats before the shoot.
It's crazy. He's crazy.
He's right. I love rats.
I love them. I love them.
Just one big boat filled with rats being like... Thank you, Mr.
Pasha. Yes, go, my nieces.
The bursting of the hull made the evacuation of the ship a little more urgent, but the Batavia's crew did not subscribe to the women and children first principle. Good! Once...
They've been easy for too long! Once shit got real, the sailors and soldiers pushed their way past the more vulnerable passengers and made the women and children wait for the second shuttle to the islands. Now, incredibly, no one had died when the ship crashed or in the chaos that followed.
But when the hull burst, about a dozen men panicked and jumped into the sea, where they quickly drowned. Arr! Arr! Arr! I'm an anonymous man, no one will remember me.

No one. Bunched at sea and then jumped up.
It happens sometimes. In a moment of panic, everything that you've done in your life up until that point means jack shit.
It's true. Because you just panic and make the wrong decision.
Well, these dozen men were the first of well over 100 people set to die on the islands of Houtman's Abrolhos. And you might even say that considering the fresh hell Geronimus Cornelis was about to create, the men who drowned were the lucky ones.
Now, the nearest landmass was a mushroom-shaped island that was only 525 feet across from one end to the other. By that afternoon, 180 survivors were dumped there on land that was hard, flat, and sterile, with no food or water and nothing to use as shelter.
And I truly do mean it's just flat. It is a piece of dirt.
Just sticking out of the ocean. Yeah.
Hard, flat, sterile, like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Eddie!

Whoa! Come and follow her!

Yeah!

Hell yeah!

Yeah!

That's what I'm talking about!

All right!

Now the new...

She actually has a fairly large bosom.

Does she?

I never looked at it, because I hate her so much.

Yeah.

I always check them out.

Yeah!

Even on men.

You might be thinking of Lauren Boebert.

Lauren Boebert, though, she has my heart.

No, does she?

She's the real firecracker.

Yeah.

She just needs somebody to treat her right. Is it because she got finger blasted in Beetlejuice?

Yeah.

The musical?

Approachable politician.

Children around?

Yeah.

She put the juice in Beetlejuice.

She wasn't wrong. Now, for reference as that.
I wish I could be knuckle deep in a house of representatives Now for reference as to how small this island was and how many people were on it take a football field Okay, where a mid-sized marching band is in the middle of a routine Then suddenly for whatever reason transport that field with the band still on it to the middle of the ocean. Add a couple of end zones, remove all the grass, shape the field into a mushroom, and you get some idea of the situation.
Was that too far to go? You got some idea of the situation in which the survivors of the Batavia found themselves immediately after the shipwreck. Yeah, but we're in Australia, though, so it could be a footy field.
That's right. That is a circle, so it kind of works.
Yeah, that's nice. Yeah.
Well, I don't really know the dimensions of that, but that's cool. Now fuck.
Now fuck. Yeah, yeah.
Now fuck. Now you've made me into an idiot.
Thank you. I just went, when we went to Australia, I went to a footy game.
I know. You're trying to absorb culture.
I took it some gross culture. Well, the only supplies they've been able to save were 150 pints of drinking water and a dozen barrels of hardtack.
But that had been against the orders of upper merchant Pelsart, who quickly seemed to be settling back into his role as a VOC company man. He had insisted that his men save a chest of valuable trading goods.
That silver that was worth $7.8 million. Yes.
Pelsart made sure they got that off the ship. I mean, that's his fucking job.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
And he had ordered Captain Jacobs to immediately start shuttling 12 chests to the islands. Jacobs, however, took the food and water instead with a plan to institute rationing immediately.
But also, he had a little plan in the back of his head. Yeah.
But isn't the captain supposed to be the last one on the ship? Not this time. Not in a VOC ship.
I believe if it's going down, but his job is to get that stuff. Yeah, and I guess it wasn't necessarily going down yet.
It was, like, perched like Noah's Ark. Yeah, exactly.
Now, at this point, there were still 120 men on the Batavia, and some of the sailors had decided to break into storage for the alcohol. Oh, yeah.
See, most of the seamen hadn't had a proper drink for the entire ship, and on empty stomachs, they became very drunk very quickly. Fueled with alcohol, the men on the Batavia began looting for all the good it would do them on the open sea.
Dude, it's crazy, right? Humans are weird. Humans are crazy.
We covered the USS Indianapolis. Yeah.
It's that thing of like, because what good would it do? Like, you're going to sit in an island filled with jewels and all this shit. Like, it doesn't matter.
Yeah. One group smashed open the VOC chest, which caused thousands of guilders to burst onto the deck.
So many guilders that the men began playfully throwing handfuls of the treasure at one another. I mean, that is fun.
It's really fun. It's a fun, you know, it's a very fun image.
It's a fun nihilistic afternoon. Money fight! One man, however, went for the knives and built a small arsenal hidden about his person, perhaps knowing that if things went south on the islands as they were likely to do, weapons would be far more valuable than gold.
The Danny Trejo of the group. Oh, he's correct.
Yeah. Now, by the next evening, day two, a priority had become the movement of the majority of the survivors to a bigger island, but not for the good of the survivors at large.
See, the crew had discovered a womb-shaped island about 1,000 feet across, just a mile from the Batavia. What's a womb-shaped?

Vagina?

No, no, no, a womb.

Like a pussy hole?

No, like a womb.

Like a womb is shaped.

Like a woman's womb is shaped.

Womb?

I thought a womb was just like a circle.

You talking about a ute?

It's like an oval-ish.

You talking about uterus?

I'm talking about a womb.

All these guys, they're on this womb-shaped island.

There's going to be, you know, too many womb-mates.

That's what I'm saying. There's going to be no womb for them to hang out.
It's pear-shaped. Why didn't you say pear-shaped? Because that was the descriptor that the people on the Batavia used.
They didn't know what a fucking pear was. Yeah, they never saw a pear, but they have torn the womb out of a woman.
That is true. That is true.
They do have that. They serve three white men.
Yeah. My last three wives' wombs fell out of their butts.
I'll never forget it. Except my favorite days.
Well, this womb-shaped island was a barren strip of... Pear-shaped, for those of you that don't know what that is.
Yeah. Womb with a few.
It was a barren strip of coral rubble with no shelter or fresh water. Soon, the survivors would come to know this island as Batavia's Graveyard.
Cool. But to save himself and those of his class, Pelsart sent 180 survivors to Batavia's Graveyard by boat, while he and 40 of the better seamen and favored passengers stayed on the mushroom-shaped island with most of the food and water.
The Batavia, meanwhile, still hadn't gone under, and 70 men remained hanging out on the top deck, still drinking and tacitly following Pelsart's orders to salvage as much company property as possible. Now, Pelsart ordered the men on the shipwreck to construct rafts and save themselves the day after the shipwrecked.
But perhaps because the Batavia promised the only shelter around as long as it stayed together, they refused to leave. Which makes total sense.
Yeah. Because it's actually way more coverage than the island and we got all this shit in here and there's beds and stuff and whatever.
Yeah. Zero coverage in the island.
And they're drunk. You get lazy when you're drunk.
That's true. It's easier to sleep on a boat when you're drunk.
Yeah. Well, amongst the men who stayed behind on the Batavia, perhaps directing the rescue of company property, was Euronymous Cornelius, who was no doubt trying to figure out how he could turn this disaster to his advantage.
His day, however, would not come just yet, although it would very soon. Yeah, Euronymous hid on the boat, essentially.
Yeah. It's like he hid back because he was like, because at first, I do feel like it was like he was in a cocoon of evil, where he's sitting there being like, I don't know, because he's very weak.
Yeah. You know, like, this isn't some rugged guy.
No, he's a pharmacist. Yeah.
Now, after four days on the islands, trying to find fresh water and coming up empty, upper merchant Pelsart decided that it would probably be best if he left on one of the boats to go get help in Java. Listen, I'll be right back.
I promise. Yeah, I was going to go to Indonesia real quick.
Someone's got to go. Might as well be me.
Put right here. And I'm going to gonna be right back.
I'm gonna get some smokes. Yeah.
But perhaps going off the principle of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, Pelsart ordered Captain Jacobs to come with him. Because he was certain he was in charge of the mutiny.
Yeah. Like, that's what Pelsart thought it was Jacobs.
Yeah. Not Euronymous.
Yeah. I mean, it was both of them.
Yeah. But he did not, Palsart assumed that it was Captain Jacobs who was doing it.
So he was like, you're coming with me, super friendly-like. But then in the journal, he's watching his every move and writing all this stuff, basically building evidence against Jacobs while they're traveling around.
Yeah. Now, most likely, Jacobs knew at this point that he was utterly fucked because Palsart had, of course, pegged him as a mutineer.
But with Jacobs' compatriots scattered across islands, shipwrecks, and what have you, he had no choice but to go along. So on June 8th, Pelsart, Captain Jacobs, and 46 other survivors from the Batavia's crew and passenger list loaded up on one of their two boats for an extended ocean voyage to Java.
It was their longboat they had a big one and a small one they took the big one just keep the graveyard warm for me as for the survivors they were told that if all went well and the rescue party didn't die on the open sea upper merchant pelsart would return within a month or two with a full support of the voc behind them and don't worry coming's companies coming to save you. But there is like a, apparently there is like a, there's a, what's it called? There's a precedent for this.
They've had, this happened, this has happened before. Yeah.
Not here, but there have been shipwrecks and the VOC and survivors have gotten to where they're supposed to go. And the VOC has come and gotten it, because the thing is, they got all their

stuff. So the VOC

will come and get

their property.

Yeah, and it is in their best interest

to not kill passengers either.

It's the passengers they care about. They don't care

about the sailors. Yeah, y'all play it cool,

I'll be back in a month, and if I'm not back

by then, rape and eat each other.

Yeah, you can roll that anyway, Phil.

Well, in all, Palsart was leaving behind 270 survivors, including his supposed sweetheart, Krecia Jan's doctor. He did take two women and some children, but he still left several of both behind to an almost certain death by starvation or dehydration, because the freshwater salvage from the Batavia was nearly gone by the time he left.
No one had any idea when it was going to rain again. Yeah.
And that water wasn't great to begin with. No.
It's all algae and fucking. At this point, I think it said that the water was full of worms.
Yeah. Yeah.
But you could eat. Yeah, you could eat worms.
Yeah, you could eat the worms. That's nice, actually.
I think you Pelsart with the little boy that he might have met somewhere on the thing. He's like, all right.

All right, there.

Little Steve and I.

You just stay right here and you just have fun.

Can you do that for me?

Can you do that for me?

You're like Sandcastles, right?

All right.

I'll be right back.

All right.

All right.

See ya.

Bye-bye.

Have fun.

Hold on. One more kiss.
We'll stay for like five more minutes. How have I never kissed a boy before today? How have I let such unknown pleasures go unknown? Ah, truly the rare of fragrances.
These conditions, however, would not be how the majority of the people on Batavia's graveyard met their doom. Rather, many would die at the hands of, quote, several dozen of the worst cutthroats and drunkards who had sailed for Amsterdam.
That was how author Mike Dash put it. And one man would set it all into motion.
See, most of the senior VOC officers had lit out on the longboat with Pelsart and Jacobs, but someone from the VOC had to be left in charge while they were all gone. At this point, Pelsart didn't know every person who was involved in planning the mutiny, because in a grave mistake, he chose Euronymous Cornelis as leader in his stead, effectively given the amoral undermerchant permission to turn the islands into his own dictatorial syphilitic nightmare.
Cool! And that's where we'll pick back up for part three of the Batavia, where the murders and mayhem will officially begin, disguised as murderous mayhem often is, as law and order. Marcus, when do I get my own dictatorial syphilitis nightmare? I want one! Henry, here's a secret.
You can have one anytime. Oh, the secret's in me! Well, you gotta get syphilis first.
Oh, okay. Will do.
The longboat, I want to ask a question about the longboat before me. It's just like a giant, there's no shelter elements.
I actually don't know. I actually don't know, but I do believe it might just be a really big rowboat.
Yeah, that's what I'm picturing. Yeah, like a Viking longboat.
Yes, I'm pretty certain in the rest of the journal... There's definitely no, like, cabins or anything like that.
Yeah. I mean, as you read the journal, it does kind of talk about that.
I'm pretty certain it is just a giant rowboat, and they just... It gets real boring real fast.
Yeah. I could only imagine.
And frightening. You know what else I find to be very cool about this whole story is that the Batavia itself crashes into the coral, and then inevitably will sink into the coral, and then become coral itself.
Whoa, it's a circle of life! Actually, they did save a lot of it. And actually, the Batavia is currently in a museum.
I forget where it is. Oh, really? I think it's in Australia.
I think it's in a maritime museum in Australia. Oh, fuck.
We missed it. I watched a YouTube video of it, so I basically watched it.
Is it the Maritime Museum in Sydney? No. No.
Good. Because I almost went and I didn't.
I would have been mad. Yeah, I think it's somewhere like really obscure and weird.
Yeah, I saw it though. but I look, but there's a YouTube video.
You walk through the whole ship.

It's cool.

I'm looking at the map the whole time Marcus says, thank you for the map, Rob.

I'm looking at the map the whole time you're telling the story.

And so like, it looks like the reef is like around Perth, right?

Like close.

Yes, it is on the Western side of Australia.

Yeah. On the Western side.

It's not the great barrier reef.

Cause that's on the other side.

No, it's on the shit fuck barrier. Yes.
Yeah. It's on the barren side of Australia.
There's nothing there but Perth. And Perthlings.
And Perthlings are enough. Also, I want to give a quick congratulations to Henry and I for not making one semen joke, not one tarred rope.
Not one. Not one.
I've actually been kind of wondering when you guys were going to jump on that.

It was too easy.

Yeah.

You know what it was?

I mean, I didn't really set you up for anything.

There weren't any obvious ends.

You know what it is?

You were too proud of your use of the word semen.

Because I knew what you were doing.

And I knew you were trying to goad me.

I wasn't trying to do anything.

But I knew what you were trying to do.

It's the word that is used for men at sea. I do believe that semen, in this case, is more appropriate than sailors.
Yeah. Because I just feel that these semen, well, they're bunching up.
Yeah, and if they would have studied harder, they would have been beaming. Yeah.
It's the cream of the blood. It's the cream of the goddamn blood.
Check out our Patreon.com slash last podcast on the left, and you will see the cream of our blood, which is our podcast. Dallas, baby.
We're coming to Dallas, February 22nd. That's going to be amazing at the CU Theater.
I can't wait. It's actually in Grand Prairie, Texas.
But yeah, we're going to do that. And then we've got a whole other bunch of shows coming down the pipe.
We're going to be Nashville, Toronto. We're doing Detroit.
Come on. There are going to be some other announcements coming soon.
We're about to release a bunch of other shows. We cannot wait.
Go to LastPodcastOnTheLeft.com to buy those tickets for us. We are good at eat.
Come see. Yes, and if you watch us on Patreon, you can see the wonderful map that's behind Marcus when you watch the show that you're listening to.
And you can also follow us on all the socials at TikTok and Instagram. TikTok's still around, right? Yeah.
At LP on the left. And don't forget to go watch all of our wonderful streams over at twitch.tv slash LPNTV and everything VOD on our YouTube channel afterwards.
Thank y'all so much. Thank you.
Have a seat, 10. On Hell Game.
God, all these guys

suck. Hail the

reef. You know what? The reef.
Hail

Joel and Shaw for fucking working

overtime on this motherfucker.

Our researchers are really

killing it and really helping out on this one.

This is unbelievable. Hail them.

Hail them. And make sure

turn left.

Don't miss that left.

Turn left. Now.
Now. Now.
And make sure. Turn left.
Don't miss that left. Turn left.

Now.

Now.

Now.

Now, now.

Now.

Now.

Nah, it's just moonlight.