Episode 605: The Tragedy of the Batavia Part I - Spice World

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there's no place to escape to this is the last

on the left

that's when the cannibalism started

who's that? You're ruining your son's attractiveness. I don't see why you're here all these years with this woman Darcy, that you're ruining his best years of attractiveness.
I will tell you, Henry, if you were to lose weight, you might be attracted. That is my Dutch.
We're trying to really wrap our brains around a Dutch accent. Yeah, trying to wrap our brains around not just the Dutch accent, but the Dutch language, which is a very difficult language.
But one thing that Dutch doesn't seem to have words for, which is being completely fucked on an island. They learn that later on, though, don't they? Don't they, my friend? They can't stick up on anybody.
Yeah, they also don't have any words for compassion or friendliness. Welcome to the last podcast on the left.
Yeah! My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Henry Zabruski.
Henry Zabruski. Henry Zabruski.
That's as far as I'm going to go. I'm going to try.
You know what? The only problem is with the Dutch accents, specifically, Dutch accents specifically, is the fact that I get into it when I listen to somebody speak with a Dutch accent for long enough, and I can do it while the video is playing, but I cannot do it afterwards. No, no, no, no.
I don't care anything about it, but I did prepare for the show by farting under the sheets and holding Julie there. Thank you.
Yes. That's, of course, the Dutch oven at Larson.
How you doing? What's going on? That's my name. Don't wear it out.
I'm like, it's been a long time since I've been this excited. This is a really fun episode.
This is a, I cannot wait. This whole series comes from a topic, I have no idea how I had not heard about this topic before.
I have my theories which we'll get to, but my god this story is massive. I massive.
I mean, it's almost the story of the birth of the modern world with a lot of murder involved. And that's why we begin our 25-episode series now.
At the dawn of man. Well, this today is a naval tale.
The story of the Batavia. Let's fuck some dudes.
Yeah, dude. So in 1628, a massive merchant ship called the Batavia wrecked on a reef on the western coast of Australia.
340 souls, including a fair amount of women and children, were aboard. 240 people survived the initial wreck, but their only escape from the seas was a mostly barren chain of islands that were individually no larger than a mid-sized city park.
What occurred in the weeks that followed on those barren islands is quite possibly the most horrific, bloody, and downright disturbing survival story in modern history murder by the dozen because if there was ever a tale where the adage hell is other people applies it's this one what i love about this whole story too is it all starts with somebody sitting in the middle of england going man i wish i had an orange you know like that's everything everything begins it's just somebody just sit there and be like wait for an orange why can i have one right now hey hey tell me clark do you like eggnog yeah you know that brown dust yeah on top of it that nutmeg right yeah yeah it's all right right yeah it's all right let's go kill a bunch of Villages full of babies to nutmeg, right? Yeah. It's alright, right? Yeah, it's alright.
Let's go

kill a bunch of villagers full of babies

to get some, right?

I think it's worth it.

And then we set up the entire

civilization around getting nutmeg.

And we might get enslaved,

man, and we'll get all the nuts

from it. That's amazing!

I don't even like it!

It doesn't even get you high! Except I did hear that, you know, nutmeg gets you high as fuck, dude. Really? It's illegal, man.
So if you smoke it... No, eat it, dude.
You eat like fucking... Barely if you eat like half a pound of nutmeg, you get crazy high, dude.
I think if you eat half a pound of almost anything, you feel differently. Yeah, but not with nutmeg, man.
You get crazy, dude. You get n you get knocked out dude but the story of the batavia is not a well-known survival tale as to why i think it's because people usually like survival stories to be inspiring and the tragedy of the batavia is quite the opposite yeah yeah yeah there's the survive part that's missing yeah some do survive, but it's definitely not alive.
You know, it's not one of those where it's a tale of, you know, the human spirit persevering over nature and over each other. This is a tale of the human spirit giving in to its worst impulses at every turn.
Yeah, you don't band together to get out of it. You kill your sister to get out of it.
See, that's what we learned from 9-11 and what we now need to learn from this story. We don't need to be inspired by every story.
Yeah. When was 9-11? Oh, it was...
Well, this is a tale of greed, mass murder, manipulation, and savagery. An example of how just one man can create a band of demonic brutes with just the slightest nudge.
A man with the unlikely name of Euronymous Cornelius. Yeah, you'd be surprised what you could make a bunch of people do when there's nothing but sanity.
It's easy. He's the Paul Dano of our story.
We'll get here. You'll see.
I'm going to cast everybody. I disagree wholeheartedly with the Paul Dano here.
Really? Yes, because Paul Dano is not in any way charismatic and Euronymous was a very charismatic man. I think Paul Dano's incredibly charismatic.
See, he's Paul Dano from There Will Be Blood. That's what I'm putting him in.
Sure, sure. Yeah, not Brian Wilson.
No. Well, this story is also highly complex because the conditions that made the tragedy of the Batavia possible were created by one of the most evil corporations in history, the corp that served as the mold for exploitation and profit above all other concerns.
CNN. That corporation was the Dutch East India Company, commonly known as the VOC.
It's kind of interesting. It's like Make America Great Again really kind of wants to make America Dutch again.
Now, the VOC was a shipping company with enough power to be almost a country unto themselves, complete with colonies and a private army. And from what I can tell, it wasn't until modern times that businesses were able to again wield so much power and influence.
Tell me if this sounds familiar, but the VOC were able to get away with a list of atrocities a mile long because they did shipping better and faster than anyone else. I kind of want an orange.
And if there's one thing that modern humans value above everything, the sin that we all contribute to in one way or another, it's the concept of convenience at any cost. I want my packaging.
That is what it is. I want a pair of scissors in one package, and I want tape in the other package.

I never choose Amazon name.

I always say, extra plastic, please.

Thank you.

And make sure that the box is way too big for what I order.

Oh, yes.

But, you know, on one way, see, as the resident capitalist slash Satanist, what I will say

is that, see, we're burdened with consciousness.

And we're goinged with consciousness. And what consciousness forces us to do more.
You can start talking like a douchebag when you say that. No, no, no, no.
See, we're burdened with consciousness. And what consciousness forces us humans to do is to consider time.
You know, a dog doesn't know when its kibble will arrive. It knows by a lick in your eye.
It knows by the setting of the sun. But it doesn't know that it can go to our little squares we have, go down to Petco, and get it at any time that they want, right? Dogs can't understand that.
They don't understand time. They don't understand capitalism.
They don't get the apps. They don't have thumbs.
The rest of us, though, as humans, we're forced to understand time. So, yes, we want to fill time quickly, Marcus, because there's nothing but time, Marcus, is the most precious commodity of all.
Let go of me. Well, the obvious analog to the VOC, the one that puts convenience and profits over people at every turn, is, of course, Amazon.
Through thousands of different chains of exploitation,

Amazon has created a world where we can have our heart's desire delivered to our doorstep within just a day or two

from any one of Amazon's 185 distribution warehouses.

So before we begin the story of the Batavia,

I'd like everyone to take a little trip with me

to one of those 185 Amazon distribution centers. I've always wanted go i love trips it's like seeing santa's workshop this is so we may transpose the tragedy of the batavia to a modern location get it straight in everyone's heads yeah it's like if santa's workshop was run by skynet doesn't seem like a kind of fun it's a fun idea the largest amazon distribution warehouse in the world is in ontario out in orange county it has 7 000 robots working there wow but i but marcus don't you love it when they do the social media promos where they like set it to music and you see the robots kind of dancing in unison sort of like a giant like lockstep army of thousand-pound unstoppable machines.

Yeah, and they make sure to cut out the part where the robot knocks over the piss bottle that the fucking employee had to use because they don't get bathroom breaks. Yeah.
I thought they're fueled by the piss bottles. Well, they're just inspired.
So let's take a trip, everyone. Imagine an Amazon warehouse aflutter with orders

Where the bosses, the middle management, and the floor workers

Are going about their jobs day after day

Ensuring that millions of dollars worth of merchandise gets to its destination on time. Everyone is a cog in a machine within the biggest machine of all, the Amazon Corporation.
And just as long as everyone in the warehouse does their job, no matter how difficult it might get, everything goes smoothly and the shareholder stock keeps going up. One night, though, a particularly charismatic middle manager from a wealthy family who's failed at every job he's had before this one.
Hey, my name's Aaron. You can call me Thor.
Yeah, I'm a swinger. Me and my wife, 25 years older than I.
We like to swing on the weekends when I'm not busy here, obviously, managing the Amazon warehouse. Well, he's just in the middle.
He's not one of the guys at the top, He gets drunk with his work buddies, and they hatch a plot to take over the warehouse by force and sell everything contained within on the black market, all while they keep the warehouse itself as a base of operations. And no, no one will be the wiser.
I will sell as many, oh, we got all the, we got five trampolines. I know a guy who will buy five trampolines.
I got some bullets over here. We can sell that across the street.
There's a lot of young people looking for them. This is gonna be an amazing time for us, boys, and then y'all can share my wife.
Now, the warehouse is staffed with some good people and some very bad people, but most are somewhere in between. Wait a second, Dimetria, where'd you get that shimitar? I found it.
A man ordered it. I use it to defend and take.
I'm sorry, that's one of the customer shimitars, Demetria. But no matter their morals, most of these people, excepting those at the top, are quite unhappy working for Amazon because of the shit conditions and the shit pay, especially when they consider how much the shareholders at the top are making.
In other words, this warehouse is filled with desperate people. And as we've seen time and again throughout history, desperate people are often the most easily manipulated by those who are able to offer a simple solution to all their problems.
And it's like Amazon makes their own problems by making a desperate person inside of these places by creating the scenario in which that desperation is felt. Yes.
So, the middle manager gets all the support he needs for the coup fairly easily. But just before he's able to put his plan into action, a massive earthquake isolates the warehouse from civilization and buries much of the merchandise inside under rubble.
Likewise, the warehouse is no longer fit for a base of operations either. The bosses, of course, immediately hop into a helicopter to both escape the situation and to get help so everyone else who's trapped can be rescued.
Listen, Demetri, I love you. And I miss you, and I'll miss you, and I love your fervent enthusiasm.
But you're going to need to stay here behind. Make sure that all these squeegees are completely safe.
Okay? We're going to Washington, D.C. All right? I love you.
I'm going to have sex with my wife, and I'm going to think about you. But as soon as the bosses leave, the middle manager who'd been planning the warehouse coup, he steps up as the leader of the hundreds of people left behind.
It's at that moment that everyone discovers that the middle manager is a total psychopath on par with the worst dictators in history. And he quickly uses his charisma to turn this Amazon warehouse into an NC-17 version of Lord of the Flies.
Fuck yeah. I'd love to see that.
But not to be too stereotypical, but any one of us that has worked in any aspect has met a low-powered middle manager. Oh my God.
That if given the opportunity to kill everyone. Yeah, absolutely would.
Joe Garrick's. I remember him.
You already had a guy in mind. Keith.
I just remember Keith from my old job. And a guy named Will Stavenhagen.
First, the middle manager divides the workers into three separate areas of the warehouse so he can consolidate control. Then he makes sure that the groups can't communicate with each other.
After division and isolation, the middle manager and his inner circle turn their attention to the people in their immediate vicinity and begin committing senseless and grotesque atrocities on their fellow employees on an almost daily basis. Weeks pass and the bosses still aren't back.
The warehouse coup is still sort of in the background, but the middle manager is now mostly focused on total control over everyone who's left through rape and murder, partly to save resources and partly because he and his cronies just develop a taste for it. Yeah, and they sort of build a, imagine that they've also built a giant cocoon of him, and he's wearing, you know, like some kind of, definitely minion gear.
He's got a minion hat on and it's made out of several like highly well constructed super expensive tents that you get like on Prime Delivery. You see those things that you can get.
And then like all of a sudden he's just like inside of this with like two big Stanley cups filled with blood. Yes! Yes! They can use the trampoline.
It's covered in goods. Well, the people not in the manager's inner circle then start joining in on the murder just to avoid becoming one of the dozens of victims.
And some of those people get so hooked on the feeling of murder that they beg the manager to give them more people to kill. And that request is often obliged.
Yeah, kill Terry. Yeah.
What? No! After six weeks of this, though, one of the people living under the terror of the middle manager escapes to one of the groups that the manager had isolated, and he tells them about all the atrocities being committed on the other side of the warehouse. You wouldn't believe he put on a bunch of Garfield slippers, right? And he had an OLED 65-inch screen just for some reason attached to a sash around his back.
And he came up, the things that he did, I can't believe what he did. He force-fed, he force-fed Terry five pounds of creatine.
I've never seen someone do this before. You know how much lead is in that? Soon after, a small war breaks out between the isolated group and the middle manager's group, and it's only settled when the bosses finally return in a gilded helicopter.
This is more or less the story of the Batavia and the corporation that made it all possible, the VOC. This whole story, the only way I could put this is that it's a fucking, it's a heist movie mixed with, it's crazy.
It's a Quentin Tarantino movie on a boat. Yeah, it's a heist movie mixed with a horror movie, mixed with a survival movie, mixed with a drama, mixed with a war movie.
It's fucking got everything. It's incredible.
And nutmeg. Yeah.
Everyone loves nutmeg. Which Amazon still sells.
Oh, yeah. Oh, God, yes.
Of course. Honestly, just to celebrate this story, I bought several pounds, if not just through Amazon, and I just left it out in the rain.
I mean, like just to let it rot. Yeah, I'm just using it to dye my skin.
We're going to have a sidebar with that. But before we get to the story of the Batavia, let's acknowledge our main source today.
Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash, which is an absolutely incredible book, but definitely on the nerdier side due to the massive amount of historical context, which is, in my opinion, wholly necessary and utterly fascinating. Oh, yeah.
We're about to get a Roy Cohn's fucking helping of history aids right now because this is going to be a it's thick but I do think that it's extremely important to set up the stakes like why everybody is doing this in the first place yeah and why everyone's so afraid to fuck up and it's like literally once because there's no coming back yeah and also why everyone feels like they have permission to act like they act and to do the things they do. I'd also like to thank listener Peter V for bringing this story to our attention by sending us Dash's book in the mail last August.
So thank you very much, Peter. Thank you, Peter.
Oh, Peter. Thank you so much, Peter.
Peter, sometimes I think about what it would be like to taste your seed.

To kiss your rump. I wish to fuck and to suck you.
Oh, I've always wanted to fuck and suck a man named after Peter. Peter.
Peter. Live from North Wales.
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Now to really understand how the tragedy of the Batavia came to be, how over a hundred people were slaughtered by their co-workers and shipmates, we've got to understand... What? It's about getting slaughtered by your co-workers.
Oh, God. It's fucking awful.
It's the worst. Your office crashes.
Your office crashes and everyone has to fight for themselves. Yeah.
We've got to understand the history of the company that fostered the environment that made all this possible. That corporation is, of course, the Dutch East India Company, or the VOC.
This corporation, one of the first to ever exist, were the owners and operators of the Batavia. Now, to make it very clear up top, because I'm really going to do my best to make the story easy to understand.
I'm fucking, I'm doing absolutely, I'm really fucking trying hard here. We are.
Just pay attention to it. Just pay attention.
Lock in. Okay, I'll do my best, but you know me.
So stupid. Well, the Dutch name of the Dutch East India Company is, I'm going to butcher this, but Veringida Ossendiesa Gompagny.
Or the VOC. How about the Dutch East India Company? Veringida going to get the Dutch accents correct.
No. Nor are we going to really pronounce anything in Dutch correctly.
But we have phonetic things written out. Doing the best we can.
So we're trying. Yeah, we're trying.
It'd be easier if we got high before the show still, but now we wait till afterwards. Well, just know from now on, we're going to be referring to the Dutch East India Company as the VOC.
Okay. The VOC is the big corporation here.
And that's the British India Company? Fuck yeah. Eddie, I swear to God.
You're already, we have to maintain control. Now, by the 17th century.
Oh, wow. Just remember, start early, but just lock it.
No, the 17th century is when all this happened. I guess.
Which is the 1600s. Yes.
You're welcome. Thanks for clearing that up.
Now, by the 17th century, Amsterdam was one of the wealthiest cities in the world, and that wealth was almost entirely owed to shipping. The Dutch had figured out how to ship goods faster, cheaper, and at a larger volume than any other European power.
But the Dutch came out on top because of that most precious of commodities. Spice! Oh, yes! He who owns the spice runs the universe but it's kind of crazy yeah people just sat around eating shit right all day that's why all this food all european foods is like boiled fucking roots and an old stinky lamb and all this kind of shit.
So why isn't it improved? But it's funny. There's actually a story behind why British food was so bland for so long is because spices became so pervasive in society that the upper classes started seeing spice as a lower class thing.
So they made their food purposefully bland as to make it, quote unquote, pure.

And. that the upper classes started seeing spice as a lower class thing.
So they made their food purposefully bland as to make it, quote unquote, pure. And that just sort of pervaded all of English society up until fairly recently.
Being rich fucking sucks. Honestly, the only thing that...
You just become such a pussy. You just become really fucking bored.
And I don't get it. You either become P.
Diddy or you become like, you just collect typewriters.

I don't know why.

Now today, we take the spices we buy at comparatively impossible prices for granted.

But the road that leads from the grocery store all the way back to the 17th century is a long and bloody one.

And it heavily involves the VOC Corporation and ships like the Batavia. We just like spices as humans.
We've come to like them. I guess I don't know how we discovered spices.
I think literally just came from chewing on shit. Could be.
Because, you know, I didn't know pepper was a tree. I had no idea pepper was a tree.
I didn't know where it came from. I'll tell you what, man.
I'd fucking kill a girl for some Chef Paul's magic seasoning. The redfish blend.
Paul Prudhomme. I got the salmon seasoning for Paul Prudhomme.
Honestly, there are sometimes- The poultry is not to be slept on as well. I love the poultry seasoning.
And I looked at even just like Holden's daughter came over last night to the house. And there's a little part of me that was just like, I just imagined, what if that Paul Prudhomme was in the center of her torso? Could I get it? And, yeah.
Yeah. And I just feel like I have earned it.
Meanwhile, you put it there to go kill her. Yeah.
I'm sorry, Holden. Now it seems somewhat ridiculous that something as simple as spice could lead to the creation of one of the most powerful corporations the world has ever seen.
Bring me the spice! So to show you how the VOC in the Dutch came out on top, let's take one spice and see how its introduction into European society changed everything. Baby spice.
No, that spice is nutmeg. Oh, nutmeg.
Oh, so stupid. Now, nutmeg trees were handy little two-in-ones that also produced the spice mace.
Oh. And they grow naturally in exactly one place on Earth.
The Banda Islands of Indonesia in Southeast Asia. Now, after nutmeg was introduced on a wide scale to Europe in the late Middle Ages by Muslim traders who'd been dealing with the people of the Banda Islands for hundreds of years, it began to be used in all manner of practical ways.
And that's also how we got the Black Plague. For example, by the late Middle Ages, that's the 13th to 15th centuries, doctors in London had come to believe that nutmeg was a cure-all, prescribing it for arthritis, gallbladders, the bloody flux, and even the plague.
I'm afraid to say this, Doctor, it seems that nutmeg has no effect on this patient. Get me a candy cane! Yes, the only thing that will cure this one's cancer is pepp peppermint What do you say, is that RFK Jr.? Yes, here in London town We cure everything with Christmas cheer I think it's super important for people to pray spice I'm not just trying to heal yourself It's good because I can kill whales on the moon I wish I could I could, I'd kill a baby I also prefer nothing Speaking of the plague Those infamous plague masks with the long noses They were stuffed with a blend of spices Including nutmeg To protect against the Black Death Because it was believed that the plague was spread through bad Outside of medicine, Europeans also came to depend on nutmeg for the preservation of meat, because nutmeg naturally slows down rot.
And nutmeg was also used to extend the life of ale. And that was very important, because this was a time when fresh water was in short supply in cities, because the rivers were full of piss and shit.
Oh, what a good time. Yes.
That's also not to mention that nutmeg is yummy. I mean, I don't know.
It's yummy. I don't mind a pumpkin.
I don't care about nutmeg. Yeah, like, I mean, it's fine.
Not in my beer. Old time.
If it's not, literally Thanksgiving Day, I will have a nutmeg beer. But otherwise, I'm going to have a nutmeg anywhere.
I have nutmeg maybe once. You put a little bit in there, but honestly, like a potato gratin, nutmeg's actually really good uplifting flavor.
But that's as far as I go. Well, before nutmeg, ale would only last like five days max, and then it would go bad.
I'm not saying, yeah, if that was the only beer, yeah, I'm drinking nutmeg beer, but I'm saying i don't live then sure sure well in addition to the practical uses nutmeg was also tied to the surefire money maker that is human sexuality nutmeg was considered to be a powerful aphrodisiac nut yeah and one british lord even wrote a poem about his nightly ritual of eating a spoonful of the stuff in order to have arousing dreams. So I was fucking telling you about it, dude.
Yeah. Yeah, dude.
Fucking have horny-ass dreams eating a bunch of nutmeg, man. You were telling me about this? Yeah.
In your sleep. Dreaming last night on Miss Farley, my pecker was up this barning early.

And I was fain without my gown to raise in the cold to get him down.

Hard shift, alas, but yet assure, although it be no pleasing cure.

Yeah, so he doesn't like eating nutmeg, but he loves the boners it gets.

I need the boners.

I must have the boners to have sex with my nephew.

Sometimes, though, as it usually goes with aphrodisiacs,

the sexual component of nutmeg would get people into trouble,

as it did with one particularly rakish young Danish man

whose experiments with nutmeg landed him in the defendant's box

at his very own witch trial. In 1619...
Experiments with nutmeg. Sounds like a ween album.
In 1619, this Dutchman, who very well may have just been playing a prank, if we're being honest, he told his friend that if he wanted to capture the object of his desire, he should do exactly this. Okay.
First, eat an entire nutmeg seed whole. Got it.
Yep. Then, sift through your feces in the days after to retrieve the semi-digested material.
Sure. All right, but what if I've already eaten? Like, listen, buddy, I'm hearing you.
Yeah. I eat, like, three ball bearings yesterday.
There's a bunch around in there.

Like, how do I know what's nut and what's bearing?

You bring it to me and I'll tell you.

Thank you.

Okay, that's all I...

You can also suck on it for a little while.

And see if you get that nutmeg taste.

And then you can get the nutmeg taste.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rinse it off first.

Okay, sure.

It's like that fancy coffee.

Next, grate the nutmeg seed that is passed through your entire digestive tract Into a glass of beer or wine Then give said drink to the object of your affection After she gulps it down, she will fall hopelessly in love with you Now presumably the woman who was giving this disgusting swill noticed the change in taste This tastes like your fat. Yes, it's a butt egg.

It seems you are the cleverest lady I've ever laid.

Nutmegs upon.

The whole plot was quickly uncovered,

and the prankster was thankfully not executed.

He came very close.

I don't want to be murdered over nutmegs.

So who was almost killed?

The guy who tricked him?

Yeah, the guy who told his friend to swallow it and all that. And the other guy also got in trouble.
Yeah, I was going to say, kill the idiot. Yeah, but it's sort of like when you hire someone for murder, you're the one who gets charged with first degree murder.
Yeah. It's sort of like that.
Yeah. But, I mean, the man was, both men were punished for robbing the young woman of her virtue.
Now, by the 17th century, nutmeg had been completely integrated into European society, as nutmeg-spiced ale and nutmeg-seasoned meat had become the expected standard as opposed to the occasional treat. That meant that Europe needed a shitload of nutmeg delivered to the continent on a constant basis.
Now, the Portuguese, Spanish, and English had already supplanted the original Muslim suppliers by this point. But while the Dutch were late to enter the spice trade, they soon became the number one supplier of nutmeg after the establishment of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC.
The term and word nutmeg will eventually begin to lose meaning during this section. But it's okay.
It's just nutmeg. It really is like the most boring spice of all of them.
This entire story centers on nutmeg. Now, just to make it clear, we're going to be referring to the Indies a lot in this series.
By the Indies, we mean the islands of Southeast Asia, which includes the Malaysian, Philippine, and especially Indonesian archipelagos. Y'all got to say archipelagos or archipelagos.
It's archipelago. Archipelago.
I've never said it before, but archipelago sounds great. Doesn't it though? Yeah.
But, I mean, the point is, though, these are areas of the world that are rich with spice. Yes, must flow.
Now, one of the reasons why the Dutch became so much better than anyone else at the spice and shipping game is because they understood navigation on a level that surpassed even the vaunted British Navy. See, as all the European powers spent more time on the high seas, they developed dossiers for specific routes that included maps and sailing instructions.
These dossiers were called rudders, and the secrets contained therein were so closely guarded that if a captain were to fail to destroy the rudder for their journey upon capture by enemy forces, or if he just lost the fucking thing, he could be executed for treason. You just are out there, man.
When you go that far out into the ocean and you just don't know how big it is, like you start to learn, like you just start. That's insane.
Yeah. To just do, to attempt this is so out of, I would not do this, obviously.
I'm a comedian. I say inside.
Yeah, yeah, no. You would be killed immediately on the boat.
Yeah. And also it's just like, why not just say you destroyed it if you lost it? I'd be like, I felt threatened, so I destroyed it.
People can't, because people can't keep a secret. And then when people start showing up at your secret little Heidi pepper spot, you're going to get really angry.
Well, the Dutch eventually developed the best rudders out of anyone, mostly because their cartographers had put together the most comprehensive and accurate maps of the time. But since the Dutch

caught on late as to how valuable

the spice sourced from the islands of Southeast

Asia could be, their fleets in the

beginning were made up of a lot of smaller

companies in the Netherlands

competing against both each other

and the more consolidated companies of Europe

like the British East India Company.

Ah, yes.

Ah, yes, very good. Now, weren't they all a part, like, there was their big, like, war? 18 years war.
There's a lot of stuff that I had. Habsburg.
Holy Roman Empire. There's a lot of stuff I had to.
Charles V. I had to skip over a lot of stuff.
Yeah, a lot of shit. Yeah.
Well, the Dutch government decided that in order to dominate the spice trade, it would be in the country's best interest to form a single joint stock corporation made up of a bunch of small investors. And in 1602, that was how the VOC was born.
Because weren't they cut out? Like, that was like a part of it. They were a part of it.
Because of the 18 Years War, one of the long story short says is that they were cut out of the spice trade. And they had to figure, they really had to figure out their own way to get their own shit.
Now, the VOC was just the second company in history to do business like this, to be a joint stock corporation. They were right behind the British East India Company, and all the corporations since have followed in the footsteps of these two businesses.
Basically, this is the birth of the modern corporation. And it's one of the most powerful aspects of the human animal, the fact that we can understand in 4D space in reality, a concept and make it real.
Like, a corporation doesn't exist Corporation isn't anything. You can't arrive like, yes, there are buildings a corporation owns.
Corporations are people, right? They are very big people. Very, very big people that we can't seem to see the head or the arms or the legs of.
And they are. But it's interesting in that that are just our language can create a concept that then can become just as real as a building.
Yeah. But while today's corporations wield enormous power over our daily lives using politics and lobbying, the strength of the VOC and its competitors in the 17th century was far more literal.
As the VOC and the English East India Company, they both had their own private armies made up of mercenaries from all over Europe. You wait till you see the broccoli squads coming from Zuckerberg around here to make sure we're all liking NBC's fucking tweets.
This is gonna happen. The VOC had thousands of soldiers on its payroll, which meant that they were capable of waging war and colonization.
And at times, these companies would go to war with each other over colonized lands, killing thousands in the process. Over nutmeg.
Yeah, dude, and you know that these guys are all like, it's just nutmeg. They're like on this island being like, we don't even like the nutmeg.
It's everywhere. We just fucking, we're sick of nutmeg.
Have it. Take it.
Just pay it. Pay for it.
Take the nutmeg. What do we give a fucking shit? Just take it.
It's nutmeg. Why are you doing it? You're torturing that guy.
You're disemboweling that guy. Holy shit.
You're crucifying a guy on a boat. Take the nutmeg.
But they didn't really care about life and death back then. You know, it was a lot more willy-nilly.
Humans, human life. Oh, no, actually, Eddie, I think that human life, its cost has not increased with inflation.
Now, as for the people who invested in the VOC went, and to give you an idea of how much money we're talking about here, the investors were made up of 200 merchants across the United Provinces of the Netherlands. At minimum, an investor required 5,000 guilders to join, which is roughly $26,000 in today's currency.
Doable. Yeah.
The largest investors, however, contributed the modern equivalent of $11.5 million, and the return on these investments could be as large as 10 times their original outlay. In other words, the top VOC investors were the Bezos's, the Musk's, the Buffett's, and the Zuckerberg's of their day.
Man, I could just see the inauguration, just like the four of them. It's just like, you know, just dudes with the big metal hats and guys with just big like sacks of flour and and stuff.
Just hanging out. Those are the billionaires.

Well, as far as who these people at the top were, the VOC was led

by a sinister-sounding group of capitalists

named the Gentleman 17.

Only sinister because

you are not in it.

Because when we are together,

hanging out just the 17 of us,

we are having some of the

best times of our lives. We're going to have the best time of our lives.
The Gentleman 17 directed the VOC's overall strategies and in the process reaped the majority of the profits gained from Southeast Asian imports, which those imports also, it wasn't just spice. They also imported precious metals.
They imported cotton, indigo, and eventually people. Indigo is also a big thing.
All of this is in Civ VI, which I've never been. I've never been into trading.
I feel like the trading in Civ VI is broken. Yeah, we'll get there.
What is indigo used for? It's a dye. Oh, it's a dye? Yeah, it goes into jeans.
It's blue. It's like it's a plant.
All right, cool. Now I know.
Well, the VOC transported pretty much anything that would fit on a ship and anything that could be sold at a profit in Europe. The profit margins, at least for those at the top, were astounding.
And that was due in large part to the absolutely ruthless policies the VOC instituted. As for the men in the middle and the bottom, they were told that they could earn a fortune working for the VOC with just one trip across the ocean.
Now, that, of course, wasn't always the case, as most sailors and soldiers received a set salary that was well below a living wage. But if you were in above the line, you'd make a fuck ton of money.
Yeah, if you were able. But that's the thing.
You kind of already had to start above the line in order to get above the line. You had to at least be born of a higher social status.
You couldn't work your way up from a sailor to the boss. That's crazy that that doesn't happen anymore, right? It's nice that it doesn't happen.
You can't just be born with a lot of money and then just be able to make it. No, I really want people to pay attention to the fact that the world is quickly returning to the way it used to be.
It's very much returning to the way it was back in the fucking 17th century when these motherfuckers were in charge. Make America Dutch again.
Well, I mean, as we were saying, you know, there was room for upward mobility for a merchant who had a successful voyage. And men often rose in rank and opportunity

in the VOC by taking a cue from the top and operating from a place of cold cruelty, all in the name of profit. Spice! Yes! You must throttle them! You must control the spice! See, as it still is with most corporations today, the VOC's primary goal was to maximize value for shareholders.
But there was not a single guardrail in place back in the 17th century to keep the VOC's bosses or employees from going too far in pursuit of higher profits. This is what completely deregulated capitalism looks like.
Basically,

the VOC's policies resulted in not only inhumane conditions for their employees,

but all-out wars against indigenous populations in which men were handsomely rewarded for the

torture and slaughter of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people.

You want pepper? You want salt? You can take it. Just take it.
You want jeans? We'll make the jeans. We'll make jeans.
Oh no, I named my son and daughter Salt and Pepper. Is that all you want? I think we can make an arrangement, right? Well, this slaughter was especially prevalent in the conquest of the Banda Islands and the subsequent establishment of the Batavia colony on the island of Java.
So, let's take a moment to explain just how the VOC established a foothold in the Indies and how they came to be the world's number one purveyors of spice. Pice! Gimme, gimme.
Now, in the early 17th century, the Dutch and the English were neck and neck when it

came to the international spice game.

And one of the most valuable spiceries in the world, the aforementioned Banda Islands

of Indonesia, were in dispute between the two.

Now, as I said earlier, the Banda Islands are the only place on earth where nutmeg grows

naturally.

But that wasn't its only valuable spice.

It's also the only place on earth where clove trees grow naturally. You don't like cloves? No! You don't like spiced wine? No! You don't like a mulled wine? I also remember smoking cloves when you thought that was cool.
Yeah. Dude, that was my favorite.
Yeah, I smoked cloves until I coughed blood. I bought like multiple packs of cloves of clothes, and now I just can't.
Thanks, Banda. Well, as far as the Europeans went, the Bandonese had been trading with the Portuguese for about 90 years when the VOC finally showed up.
Now, the Portuguese had, of course, not been the kindest of trading partners, but the Dutch were far worse. Worse than anyone, in fact.
Somebody's got to be the worst colonizer. It's the Dutch.

We will take that. Thank you.

Honestly, it's a huge honor

to be called the worst

colonizer because

there's so much competition and it's just

nice to be nominated with some of

my favorite people. Spain, loving

you. Loving

what China is doing on the continent. Good work, China.
Just thank you. They're just so angry because their shoes are fucking made out of wood.
It honestly is hell. It is hell trying to play horse.
Have you ever tried to play horse in wooden clogs? Well, the Dutch's arrival on the Banda Islands was marked with an omen.

When they stepped foot on land, a

volcano that had been dormant for

centuries suddenly erupted.

For the Bandaese, this was

the fulfillment of a prophecy foretold

five years earlier by a Muslim

holy man who said that an army

of white strangers would soon

arrive to the Banda Islands to take them

by force. And as you might expect, the prophecy very quickly came true.
Racist! Why they gotta be white? Why they gotta be white? But it is interesting in that way because they called it some magical prophecy when it was definitely a Muslim guy that's like, uh, they're coming here. It's not a magical prophecy at all.
This isn't some mystical thing. I'm seeing this shit.
He's a businessman who is telling you the fucking forecast of the market. I know these guys and they can't wait to not pay me anymore.
And I have a distinct feeling they're figuring out how to find me. Well, to begin the campaign to take the Banda Islands, the VOC invaded one of them in particular and slaughtered the entire population.
1,800 people died. All because the natives had been trading with the English after signing a treaty with the VOC for 100% trading rights.
Listen, before you do anything, just don't tell them about hazelnuts. Okay? Because this shit's blowing this scum way out of fucking proportion, buddy.
All right, this was not supposed to be like this, dude. Hey, man, want some cinnamon? Don't fucking even do it, dude.
They get hooked. Don't even talk about dill.
I mean, with this slaughter, I mean, the Bandanese were basically killed for breach of contract. And out of 1,800 murdered, 400 died by drowning when they tried to escape the VOC's vicious private army by swimming to another island.
Once depopulated, the VOC replaced the people of this island with natives from other islands as workers, and they built a fortress with the highly unsubtle name of Fort Revenge. I just love the ring of it.
I just love it. It's just fun.
It's easy to remember. Revenge for what? They killed everybody.
For trying to live with our nutmeg. No shit.
Revenge for breaking a contract. Yeah.
They broke a breach of contract. You were meant to just trade with us.
You fucking went with our, you go to our competitors. I'll fucking show you what happens when you go to our competitors.
It's negotiation. Now, after the VOC had been operating from Fort Revenge for almost a decade, the Bandanese decided to finally throw in their lot with the English.
Because as bad as the English India Company was, the VOC was worse. The Bandanese, however, had no idea just how far ahead of the game the VOC was by 1620.
To begin with, most VOC ships were heavily armed with cannons, which had originally been installed to defend themselves against Portuguese, Spanish, and English ships also on the lookout for spice. And they learned a new mechanism of sending out a bunch of ships at once.
They learned that that's the way to do it. Instead of just sending out one guy and hope he comes back, you just send out a constant flow of ships.
Yeah. So that it never stops.
And you send them out like 15 at a time. Yeah.
So that it never stops. So that you're always, so they're crossing each other.
So they actually, which is interesting. So there's support on the open ocean.
Yeah. But within just a few years of its founding, the VOC went on the offensive and began to intentionally sink the ships of foreign competitors in full naval battles.
The VOC also had far more capital, stronger support from their government, and better ships than anyone else. Man, it would have been so fun if I had to, like, be the first maid of the Hollywood video ship to go up there, and I had to slaughter everybody at the fuck on the blockbuster ship.
You know what I mean? Just to get, because they all have the new fucking, they got Hitch in first. You know what I mean? So I got to get all that Hitch because people are looking for Hitch, right? That's Kevin James Will Smith vehicle.
We know Hitch. But listen, that was a fucking guaranteed money maker.
That's the version, that's their nutmeg. That was our nutmeg.
I don't want to fucking get on the fucking Joe's Crab Shack ship and have to go fight the Logan's Roadhouse ship. You might have to, Mark.
Well, putting all these factors together, the better ships, the stronger government, the bigger capital, the VOC had nearly wiped out the English East India Company by 1620, which meant that the Bandanese of Indonesia never stood a chance, nor did the English. Now, the VOC's man on the ground in Indonesia, the man who eventually wiped out the Bandanese, was a right Dutch bastard named Jans Pieterzoon Kuhn.
If I were to cast the biopic, Jans Kuhn would be played by Ralph Inneson, the father and the witch. Very much so.
Great. Great casting.
And he was put out there because they didn't want him back in the Netherlands anymore. This man was so scary and he was such a persona non grata that they put him out in the middle of fucking nowhere because also they knew he'd be the guy that would kill everybody.
Nick, nicknamed Disclale because of his thin figure and bony fingers. Yes.
That's that guy, right? The guy who talks like this. Come here.
Come, doctor. Kuhn was a humorless and ultimately genocidal VOC company man through and through.
Kuhn was a chief merchant, a high management position in the VOC, and his only goal when he arrived on the Banda Islands in 1612 was to subjugate its people and secure the world's largest supplies of nutmeg and cloves for his company. So no one made him laugh? I laughed.
There was one time I laughed. I saw a young,oneese woman Fiddled with China And I sat and I watched as she gave birth And as the feet Slid out of her gash I saw that it was dead And in that moment I chuckled You're hilarious Thank.
That's a part of my, you want to check me out, it's too wild for Netflix thing. Comedy special where I'm just uncontrollable saying things people wish they could say.
We'll start with, Jan Koons took a thousand men on the VOC payroll and invaded the island of Java to conquer the city of Jakarta, both as a show of force and to further drive the English East India Company out of the Indies. Once captured, Kuhn burned Jakarta to the ground and built the VOC capital city of Batavia on its ashes.
This settlement, one of the first company towns in history, was named after the Germanic tribe that were thought to be the ancestors of the Dutch people. So we got Batavia the colony and Batavia the ship.
Now Kuhn spent the next year building up his forces, and before long he'd amassed an army of 13 ships, 1600 soldiers, and this is fucking incredible, 80 Japanese ronins.

How? Fucking samurais

without lords or masters. Well, I guess

they're right over there. Yeah.
They're mercenaries.

Yeah, they're total mercenaries. So he's like,

yeah, let's get the fucking samurai.

They'll show them what's what.

Yes, my favorite is when they all get together

and they do that cheeseburger cheeseburger

scam.

My absolute favorite is a little culturally insensitive. Now, true to form, the Ronin were the deadliest and cruelest men in Coon's crew.
Besides being vicious warriors, they would torture prisoners psychologically by beheading some of them and rolling the heads around the feet of the other captives while laughing at the panic it caused. Ha ha, it's funny! People say we're not funny, it's just funny! On one occasion, six Japanese ronin on the VOC's payroll quartered and beheaded 44 Bandanese prisoners with samurai swords.
Why? Because that's what they wanted to do. Then they displayed the heads on bamboo spikes for all to see.
Honestly, I'm looking for self-starters. I'm looking for people that have they anticipate needs.
Yeah. They're really great within the corporate culture here at the VOC.
And it's good they use bamboo because it grows back so easily. Yes! And it's sustainable.
I mean, this whole story is, I mean, it might as well be called the evil that men do. It's what happens when people are left unchecked.
When you just say, go out and be as cruel and mean and savage as possible and come back and we'll give you a nice little fat paycheck. Well, because these guys also believe, there was obviously it's money and it's's power but there's also a kind of like a manifest destiny style oh we are expressing our power over the world oh absolutely no that that happened again and again you know it happens with you know it also happens you know when native populations start dying of disease that the europeans would bring over they say, this is God's judgment on these people.

They're dying because we are meant for this land.

Yeah, and you know, people don't care

as long as they still got their nutmeg coming in.

I kind of want an orange.

Yeah.

Yeah, like, ah, well, here's my orange.

Let's go take Florida.

We live in California.

I want the other ones.

I want the other ones. So sweet.
The ones with the snakes in the trees. I want one taken from a dead child's hands.
Now, Jan Koon's orders from the VOC, they were just to subjugate the Bandanese. He was not supposed to slaughter them en masse.
But when a torturous interrogation of a Bandanese warrior revealed a plot on Kuhn's life, he took it very personally. I do tend to do that.
And thereafter set himself on the task of completely annihilating the Bandanese people. Many Bandanese were driven into barren areas by VOC armies and starved, while others were simply beaten to death.
Many more were enslaved and forced to work the plantations that were quickly springing up around the islands, but not that many. Dude, have you heard of garlic salt? Honestly, there's some crazy shit over there.
You should go to that other island over there. I've heard they've got, have you heard of smoked paprika? Yeah.
Why don't you ask the rodent about teriyaki? Do not tell them the secret of teriyaki. In the end, it's estimated that out of the 15,000 people that Kuhn found on the Banda Islands, fewer than a thousand survived his campaign of terror.
Furthermore, the VOC ordered that all clove and nutmeg trees not controlled by the VOC were to be destroyed so as to regulate the supply and keep the prices as high as possible. Anyone on the islands caught growing, stealing, or possessing these plants without authorization were subject to the death penalty carried out by VOC employees.
Didn't it just randomly grow? Yeah, but if it's on your land, if it's in your room, if you've got it with you, you're fucking dead. And this is before we decided that we can grow it ourselves or whatever.
Yeah. Because they already had it.
So we'll just take it. Well, it only grows in certain climates.
I don't can't just fucking... You can't...
I don't think you can grow a nutmeg tree in, like, Bristol. Yeah, but you can...
It sounds like a children's book. You could steal one, plant it in a Greek island that you've stolen.
Yeah, Mykonos. Yeah.
Eventually, they did start planting them on other islands. Oh, sure.
But for the longest time, this was the only place where you could get nutmeg. I still...
honestly, and truly, this also reminds me of my craziest days at Borders, is that we found out that someone had taken some books, like one of the employees, and it was really crazy about how they charged me. They're like, well, you know, because I was the manager on time, and they said, can you handle this? Can you talk with this guy? And I had to hold a gun to the back of his head while he committed seppuku.
Yeah. In front of J.K.
Rowling. And he was honestly truly one of just, she's so nice in person.
You'd be surprised. She answers her phone, turf, turf.
As long as blood's squirting on her shoes, she's fine. Yeah, she loves it.
Now for taking the plot on his life personally, Kuhn received a strongly worded letter from the men who ran the VOC, the aforementioned Gentleman 17. But their issue was not with the genocide per se, but what the genocide might do to trade relations.
I'm sorry I didn't think about it like that. I got ahead of myself.
And the letter did end with a winky face. Yeah, one of those emojis.
You've been a bad, bad little boy. Yes, I have.
I guess I should get a spanky. See, word of genocide tends to get around, and there were plenty of other native civilizations in the Indies that the VOC planned to do business with.
In other words, Kuhn was reprimanded not for crimes against humanity, but for bad business practices. Despite the reprimand, Jans kept his position as one of the VOC's chief merchants and was thereafter considered a Dutch national hero in the mold of so many colonists before and after, and even has a statue that stands to this day.
But he was also the man for the job because someone, they believed that they needed that type of psychopath to hold this far, very valuable outpost for them. You down with VOC or a fucking Kelly? Yeah, sure.
I can't wait to watch. Now, while the Dutch government was somewhat involved in all this, the genocide and subjugation of the Bandanese was planned, authorized and carried out by employees of the VOC.
Again, it's just a private company. And with this conquest, they'd prove that they would do and allow just about anything if it increased their profit margin.
Once the Banda Islands were in their grasp, the VOC completely controlled the world's nutmeg and clove supply, which brought them close to a total monopoly on the global spice trade at large. And just like how we can't avoid putting money into Amazon's pockets, even if we don't buy shit from Amazon directly, most likely the people we buy shit from do use Amazon, anyone in Europe who wanted their spiced wines and erectile aids were now contributing to the profits of the VOC somewhere down the supply line.
What you doing? Oh, I don't care. Erectile aids is, you know, how it all got started.
Yes, it's really very sad. That is very sad.
That is true. Life from your blade.
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Now concerning the type

of person that was willing to work for the VOC, the number one quality needed was a tolerance for

risk. See, out of the million some odd people who sailed with the VOC to the Indies over the course

of their existence, less than one in three returned to Europe alive. It was not a comfortable trip.
It wasn't a fun trip. Yeah, and you were just as likely to die on the trip as you were when you got to the East Indies themselves.
Statistically speaking, you were far more likely to die than you were to get rich. some who sailed to the indies did end up settling in southeast asia but most of the settlers were

killed by various plagues, diseases, or in skirmishes with the natives. The VOC's reputation for brutality and this acknowledged risk, however, attracted a certain type of man to their employment, a type whose morals were flexible, to say the least.
Now, didn't, like, so they would also, they would trade with closer places. So they would trade with other people in Europe, and they'd probably trade in some other places, probably in the Middle East, maybe, where they do a couple things.
Right, yeah. But then, it's kind of interesting, on this leg, this was the leg that was the most profitable, but also the most horrible.
The Indies leg. It was the longest, it was the worst, It was the most dangerous.
And so that's why all of the bottom of the talent pool was at this leg. Yes.
And just for my own thought process, how would they actually get there? Would they have to go all the way around Africa down the bottom? Yeah. They went around.
They would start from Europe. They would sail down to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, stop once, and then make the rest of the trip to Indonesia.

So what they learned was a faster way to go was because it was about taking a left.

Like, literally, you had to go from, it was a left out of Netherlands.

You take a right in Africa.

And then you get to right before Australia.

And you make a left.

And you go up. And you catch this one current.
But guess what happens if you don't? You can get really fucked up. Guess what Australia is surrounded by? Miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of coral, which is extremely sharp.
And it destroys ships. Countless ships.
So it's interesting. It's almost like you're kind of waiting for something to go wrong.
Yep. Now the roll call on a VOC ship was made up of sailors, soldiers, tradesmen, and merchants.
The soldiers and sailors were often otherwise unemployable men who were violent, often lazy, and above all else, expendable. And that's how I like to be.
Please kill me and forget me, because I don't even know my name. I'm a random man with a banana and I'm next to a cannon.
But you'll never know me, will you? All right. I am his brother.
I look just like him and sound just like him too.

Where'd you come from?

Home. Doesn't really matter.
Because I'm a walking corpse. Well, the tradesmen on the ship, which included carpenters, cooks, surgeons, and what have you, they seemed like men who were just looking for steady work.
But if a man ended up on a VOC ship, it usually meant that he had fucked up pretty badly at some point in his life. This is last stop shit.
But speaking of fuck ups, let's talk about the merchants. The merchants were the men responsible for protecting the goods and the profit potential of the voyage.
And as such, they were given authority to override the captain's orders if the merchant deemed it necessary to protect the VOC's interests. Nothing like a corporation putting in some talentless, unconnected middle person to be at the very top of the little thing that you might know because he's over the captain.
Yeah, he's over the captain. So the captain is the person who knows how to run the ship and do all the stuff with the ship, but he is a boss.
It's just some guy from the company, and that's all he does. Let's surprise the newspapers and go four feet ahead with this ship called the Titanic.
It's like all these guys do. And what happens when they kill the captain? The first mate takes over, or they take over? I think they just keep going, like, promoting from within the sailors.
But that's the thing, is that the captain, we're going to get to his job later, but mostly he's there to navigate and to manage the sailors, keep the sailors in line. Now, if the merchant survived the sea voyage and landed in the Indies, they then had the task of maximizing profits on the ground by negotiating with the local leaders the VOC hadn't killed yet to obtain spices and or goods to bring back to Europe.
Now concerning the social standing of the merchants, many of them were most definitely in the past fuck-up category. The majority were down on their luck financially, disgraced debtors who'd lost everything, or businessmen on their way down the economic ladder who would do anything to turn around their failing fortunes.
Sometimes if you came back with a super fucking successful run from the indies, you could get re-put back into some form of respectable, like, there was always kind of like a shot that maybe if I come back and I make everybody a fuck ton of money, they'll legitimize me again. And then I could go back to doing a more cush thing.
I can go to France or I could go to some other place. It's not fucking Jakarta.
Now, was there like a shit ton of merchants on the ship or was there just like three or four? Just a few. Yeah.
Yeah. There weren't there weren't very many.
Now, on a VOC ship, merchants were divided into two ranks, upper merchants and under merchants. These were the middle managers of the company.
But since most of them were in dire financial straits, even they were desperate men. As such, one of the VOC's desperate undermerchants will play the psychopathic villain in today's tale, a man named Euronymous Cornelis.
You talk to me, and you ask me how do you control a man? And tell you you do it by his soul excuse me I farted I'm not feeling well you don't have to call them under merchants you can just call them merchants well that's the thing it's to separate them from the upper merchants but the up you can still call the guys the upper merchants and other guys merchants. You don't have to call them shitheads.
You know what I'm saying. This is actually one of the traits that's going to come up again and again in this story.
Once we get to the actual plot, you really start to see the corporatization, the ladders put into place, that these guys follow like they are real God's law that's how afraid they are of their bosses that these roles will be actually extremely important to the story that comes up because of how everybody behaves according to their roles well of course they're scared of their bosses they kill islands of people in front of them yes this is why we're doing the Context. Yeah.
Yes, their bosses execute people. Now, to be perfectly clear here, the dictatorial middle manager in the Amazon allegory that began today's episode, that represented Euronymous Cornelius.
Because after the Patavia wrecked, Euronymous would use his psychopathic charm to trap the survivors in a nightmare of his own making. None of this happens without Euronymous.
Now, Euronymous Cornelius was indeed a complete and utter psychopath, but he was not the same stripe as, say, a Ted Bundy. Rather, Euronymous is more like a Nazi who probably would have gone his entire life without hurting another person had circumstances not opened the door to savagery.
It's nice to have an invitation to violence. Thank you, because I was just a pussy before.
Not now, though. I'll kill everyone, but I won't fuck their corpses.
My thing is that I need a government's permission to do it, but as soon as I get it, I can't fucking wait to do it. Well, Euronymous' whole thing is not that he would kill anyone.

It's that he liked to get people to kill for him.

The true capitalist.

Born in 1598 in the Dutch town of Liewarten to wealthy landowning parents,

Euronymous was raised as an Anabaptist. The Anabaptists were a fascinating and highly aggressive Christian cult,

and their philosophy of violence

undoubtedly influenced Euronymous Cornelis

in the most negative of ways.

Now, the core principle of the Anabaptists

was that they believed that only adults

acting on their own free will should be baptized.

Infant baptism, in their opinion, was utter horseshit,

because babies can't really decide anything for themselves.

You're just making a baby wet,

and I don't need to make a baby wet in a church. I can do it by leaving it out in the rain.
I mean, kind of agree. No, I do too.
Yeah, of course. It's stupid.
It means nothing. Yeah, it's theater.
This belief about baptism, however, was considered heresy to both the Catholic Church and the Protestants, which put the Anabaptists at odds with the rest of the Netherlands from the get-go. Additionally, Anabaptism was a millenarian cult, meaning they believed that a vengeful Christ was sure to return any day now to kick off a vicious apocalypse.
Is that Christ? No, just some guy. Sorry, I get really scared.
Is that Christ? Oh my god, is he there? Oh no, just some long-haired guy. White skin.
But most importantly, as far as the Anabaptist neighbors went, they believed that it was their duty to build a new Jerusalem by force, which led to mass murder in the year 1534. Yay! Yay, I like it! Although it's kind of nice to take a break and see the whites going against the whites Yeah Just like different kinds of whites Fighting and skirmishing and doing shit You know what's funny Because of all the serial killers I feel like so many people cover Like they always want us to cover true crime And do serial killers Because they're like Oh, we want blood We want murder And it's like So far in this episode We've killed Thousands Thousands of people And that people.
And that's just theater. That's just history, which I think is amazing.
Just thinking about it, they're just all wiping stuff out. And because it's not individually cleaving someone to death, I feel like this kind of maybe part of the issue is that we see it kind of like you just like forget.
Yeah. That it's just, no, this is like bigger than a serial killer? To be clear, 44 people have been beheaded in this episode already.
Yes. At least.
At least. Because, well, there's also the whole, you know, the whole island.
Yeah. Yeah.
Was murdered. Well, in the year 1534, Anabaptists seized the German town of Munster, where they expelled or killed any nonbelievers and spent 16 months as rulers of their own little theocracy.
The leaders, predictably enough, soon began practicing compulsory polygamy because they'd expelled or killed many of the men in Munster. And it was definitely a thing that they just stumbled upon because of their prophecy, and it's not just because a guy just noticed that there was a lot of just, like, open wives.
You just never just said like, oh, wow, there just seems to be a bunch of lonely ass women here that I could have sex with. They had to do it.
They had to because God said. Finally, though, the city was retaken by a joint force of Catholics and Protestants.
Oh, wow. Yeah, working together.
Look at that. Who executed the leaders and nailed the genitals of one in particular to the city gates.
It's usually what they do to polygamists, stuff like that. They really don't like it.
They really like to mutilate the genitals and display them. And you use a little door knocker.
It's the balls. By the end, around 3,000 people had died in the so-called Munster Rebellion.
This was all due to the Anabaptists. And where was Grandpa? Can I say Munster's...
The Munster's Reference. The Munster's Reference, yeah.
Well, after the rebellion was put down, the Anabaptists splintered, and some factions continued robbing and killing anyone who wasn't a member of their cult. Others, however, followed an Anabaptist named Menno Simmons, who adopted a philosophy of nonviolence.
Well, we now know the descendants of these followers of Minnow as the Mennonites. Oh, the Amish! Yeah, the Amish light, as we like to call them in Texas.
Yes, Amish light. Because they would make their own clothes, but they would still wear Nikes and shop at Walmart.
And they can have cell phones. Yeah.
And you gotta take care of your feet, you know. Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I mean, I never got what the point of Mennonites was. They're just bad social people.
Yeah. No, no, no, I've actually, I think I knew some Mennonites.
It's interesting. It's technically like a very peaceful, like it's kind of a Quaker-y thing.
Yeah. But I never got the point of like, you have to make your own clothes, but you can buy Nikes.
It's because they are just barely hanging on. There were, however, some Anabaptists who assimilated into the Mennonite religion in name only, while still following the violent ideologies of other Anabaptist leaders, if only to survive in a decidedly anti-Anabaptist environment.
Amongst those who still believed in the philosophy of violence were the parents of

our villain, Euronymous Cornelius. For Euronymous, using organized violence to get what you want would very much have not only been an acceptable path, but second nature.
I learned to read by getting spanked with each letter. He used to write up a bunch of letters, and they used to spank me with them

and I'll tell you what

I know the language He used to write up a bunch of letters, and they used to spank me with them.

And I'll tell you what, I know the language better than anyone.

All right, time to learn Korean.

How?

These letters are sharp.

Now, after school, Euronymous became an apprentice to an apothecary on the road to becoming one himself.

Apothecaries were, in essence,

the pharmacists of their day,

concocting potions and treatments

from roots, herbs, and other exotic ingredients

like animal excrement.

Well, as far as the exotic ingredients went,

specifically the animal excrement,

pigeon shit was supposed to be a cure for epilepsy,

while horse manure was said to cure

the lung condition known as pleurisy. Oh, good.
I haven't eaten it. Your lungs, oh man, I can see them from here.
They're healthy. There's just nothing like just sitting there coughing and choking and just being like, hey, have some more horse shit.
Like, listen, you don't seem to be feeling good. Have you had any horse shit today? Well, that's why Nick Nolte's still alive.

Because he's always like, horse shit.

Animal penises were also held in high regard by apothecaries. Dried boar penis, for example, supposedly reduced phlegm and balanced the humors.
The way you used to do that was the old-fashioned manual where you used to go, Yeah, because a lot of the apothecary stuff, it was all around the four humors theory. What's that? Phlegm, blood, bile.
What's the fourth one? Snooberance? I think it was snooberance. Oh, it's when you get a poor throat.
Yeah. Stupid.
Fuck. If you really wanted the top-of- of the line cure-all from an apothecary, it was believed that nothing was better than ground up mummy flesh.
Oh, please. Yeah.
I mean, I try it once, you know, twice if you ask. It can probably get you sick.
Interestingly though, in addition to cures, apothecaries also made poisons. They were kind of exterminators.
They made rat poison and such. They did a lot of weird shit.
Yeah. I always remember from Romeo and Juliet.
Mm-hmm. But as we'll see later, after the wreck of the Batavia, Euronymous was just as bad at making poisons as he was at the rest of the apothecary business.
And after trying to run his own shop for a few years, he declared bankruptcy in 1628. I don't understand.
How are you bad at making poison? Is it just like orange juice? This is delicious. They're actually going to show later like he's bad at it.
It's like 7-Up, he just accidentally makes delicious. He's like, wow, this is crystal Pepsi? Alright, you'll die any hour now.
Yeah. You're bad at making poison as you make them sick, but you don't kill them.
And so they just sit there screaming and screaming in pain. Which, you know, isn't really the point.
Unless it is. Unless it is.
Now, in addition to his bad business sense, Geronimus' personal life was also an absolute nightmare. The year before his business failed, he got married to another Anabaptist and settled in the Dutch city of Harlem.
His wife soon became pregnant, but the pregnancy was difficult. For some reason, Euronymous hired an absolute lunatic as a midwife, an uncouth, deranged, and dangerously incompetent individual who danced and sang compulsively, frequently spoke of so-called torments inside her head, and slept every night with an axe.
Like... Thank you, thank you.
I think that she was probably hot. That's what I was going to say.
I think that was the issue here. I think that has been a husband issue since day one.
Yep. Since nannies existed.
So when the baby finally came, the midwife mishandled the delivery and left the placenta in the womb of Euronymous' wife, which became infected and septic. The new mother was therefore unable to breastfeed.
What? Yeah. That's what happened? You leave the placenta up in? That's what can happen.
You're supposed to take

it out. How does it affect? Has it clogged the tube

or some shit? I don't know. Yeah, you're supposed

to take it out and you gotta put it back in the front hole.

That's what I thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then you fold it back up. Yeah.
Put it in your ass.

Yeah. If you don't take it out though, hard to keep

singing and dancing. I know that much.
Did your mom

eat your placenta? Uh, absolutely not.

I don't think my mom even knows

that that is a thing that people do. Did your mother eat your placenta? Absolutely not.
I don't think my mom even knows that that is a thing that people do. Did your mother eat your placenta? No, she ordered in.
She actually didn't eat mine. She actually wanted one from the restaurant.
Yeah, my father chopped it up and put it on an Arby's sandwich. Whose sandwich? His! Yeah! Well, because the new mother was sick, she was unable to breastfeed.
But Euronymous was like, all right, the first midwife, she's insane. Let's get rid of her.
But instead, he hired a wet nurse to handle the breastfeeding who was just as bad, if not worse. A woman who had already gone mad with syphilis.
And the baby contracted the disease as a result. Within weeks, if the average 17th century infantile death from syphilis is anything to go on, Euronymous' child died a horrible, horrible death.
Funny story, I'm sure. By the end, babies who died from syphilis bled profusely from the mouth and anus and were covered in so many sores and rashes

that they were said to have looked moth-eaten when they mercifully died.

But concerning the woman who gave the baby syphilis,

the author of Batavia's Graveyard speculates that Euronymous

might have had an affair with her and contracted syphilis himself,

which would partly explain his horrific behavior after the Batavia wrecked. Everything I do is highly logical.
Even my madness. I'm surprised he didn't murder her.
He had made love to her. It's like the only time.
And then it ended up leading to a bunch of murder. It's because he didn't fully become who he was going to be until the moment came where he could finally blossom.
Yeah, again, this may have just been one factor that unlocked Euronymous' true psychopathy. See, after the Batavia wrecked and its passengers and crew were stranded, Euronymous was definitely acting on a philosophy.
And that philosophy was heavily influenced by a man named Johannes Torrentius. This guy's fascinating, too.
Yeah. See, Torrentius was Euronymous' fencing partner and friend, but he was better known in the Netherlands as a highly controversial painter who was infamous for openly using sex workers, refusing to financially support his wife, and allegedly being in regular contact with Satan.
He's the most actual Dutch person we've met so far. Torrentius claimed that all of his artistic skills came from black magic rituals.
Yeah, you wouldn't know what they're like. It's what I do.
You just wouldn't know. It's something I do.
It's something cool. Yeah.
He said he would place blank canvases on the floor and the paintings would magically create themselves. Terentius also bought black chickens and roosters exclusively so he could sacrifice them to Beelzebub.
They're the only ones he takes. It's just his favorite thing.
It's his favorite color. He likes chicken.
And Terentius claimed to go on long walks in the woods where he would have extensive conversations with Satan himself. It's crazy talking to my old buddy.
I was talking to my old buddy in the woods the other day. And he said to me, I was like, Lord Satan, how are you feeling? And he was saying something, he was like, I'm not feeling good right now.
I'm not feeling very confident right now in myself.

You know, I just reminded him, like, you're Satan.

You know, you don't need all of this, Mr. Gush.

You know?

Just feel good for yourself.

Feel good by yourself.

I really think you took it to heart in many ways.

He gave me five dicks. Yeah, it's pretty good.
Pretty cool to be me. Three are on my body.
Two are in my pocket. Two are in my pocket.
You can see. I made a bit of a stiddledrum with them.
Terentius, however, was not a Satanist. He was Gnostic.
Which is basically a Satanist according to these fucks. Agnostic means you don't believe in shit.
No. Gnostic.
Not agnostic. Gnostic.
That meant that he believed that God and Satan were equals. Yes! Oh, cool.
Yeah, and since Terentius had friends in high places, he was able to openly discuss his Gnostic beliefs where others might be charged with heresy. And who else was listening but Euronymous Cornelius.
See, Gnostics believe, that's why they're super controversial, is that all of their books were taken and hidden in caves, right? The Dead Sea Scrolls, those are all Gnostic works. The Book of Enoch.
Yes, and in the Book of Judas, the Book of Thomas. And basically what they say is, you don't need the capital C Church to get enlightenment.
Jesus is in everyone. You can have this mystical property, and the church doesn't like that because that means that you don't need them.
Yeah, and it means they don't get your money. Yeah.
Before long, Euronymous was mixing Terentius' Gnostic beliefs with Anabaptist dogma, and eventually, Euronymous came upon the conclusion that he was incapable of sin, that no thought or deed, not even murder, could be described as evil. Because what is evil anyway? It's just four letters.
Four letters. What can you even do? What's a letter? Just a line on a piece of paper.
What's paper? It's tree blood. What is even trees? But in 1628, the same year Euronymous went bankrupt, Terentius finally wore out his welcome in Dutch high society.
He was arrested for heresy at long last, tortured on the rack, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. I can't imagine who he pissed off to make this happen.
After Terentius's trial, Dutch authorities declared that all suspected heretics be banished from the city of Harlem, which ended up working to the advantage of Euronymous Cornelis. See, by that point, he'd failed as an apothecary, he was bankrupt, his baby had died of syphilis, and his wife still hadn't recovered from the womb infection.
She's being a huge bummer about it. I'm just like, listen, baby, can we get past this? It's been a week.
I'm just impressed she's still alive. Yeah, I mean, just barely.
She had a very big pussy. Yeah, it takes a while to kill someone with a 10-pound pussy.
Very big pussy. There's a lot of energy to draw upon.
The baby didn't touch the sides. So, Euronymous, his life in fucking ruins, more or less used the heretic order as an excuse to abandon his wife for a job with who else but the VOC.
Now, the only explicit criteria to sign a VOC contract was that you should not be bankrupt, nor Catholic, nor infamous. Now, Jeronimus was bankrupt, but he still had a fairly high social status because he came from a wealthy family, and he had connections.
As such, a wealthy captain, who I'd imagine regretted this decision later, vouched for Jeronimus to the VOC. Jeronimus was therefore hired as an undermerchant and was soon bound for the Indies to make his fortune.
He also was one of the only guys that wasn't a total fucking criminal to apply. So that was, at the time, they didn't really know what they were getting involved in, and so they were kind of, it was like, you know, when, I guess in the Army or in the Navy, people get kind of upset when someone goes to, like, officer school and just shows up and takes over.
Yeah. That's what this guy's like.
It's like no experience whatsoever. He's just evil.
Pre-evil. Pre-evil.
Pre-evil. Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, he's definitely on the road. He's abandoned his ailing wife to, you know.
He went to go make money. What else is she going to do? And honestly, you spend an afternoon with her.
She is just, my baby has got ziplas. I'm a bargain bitch all day.
All day. Okay, so send me to Jakarta.
Now, being an under merchant made Geronimus a member of the upper class on a VOC ship. That upper class included upper merchants, bookkeepers, clerks, and their assistants.
Basically, on a ship the size of the Batavia, you had about a dozen of these guys. And so, Deuteronomy and a dozen others of his class would make up the business staff on one of the most impressive ships in the VOC fleet.
Finally, we arrive at the Batavia. Now, a big factor in the VOC's success on the high seas was their ability to streamline mass production of ships on an industrial scale.
And in fact, they were one of the first companies to ever do so. Dude, I was looking at pictures of it.
Fucking insane. It's crazy.
It was huge, right? I guess it's one of those where we all like, that's where all the thing comes from where people doubt that ancient man could have done specific giant things. But then when you look at what manpower can do on its own, it's so fucking impressive.
If you have no regulations, it's amazing what you can pull off. Yeah, how many people even died making the goddamn ship? A lot.
Well, while other shipbuilders in Europe took at least two years to build one ship, the VOC could construct and launch sea craft in just six months. This, of course, helped with their strategy of flooding the zone.
But besides just building them fast, the VOC also built them better. VOC ships were the most complex machines in existence at the time, conveyances that maximized loading, cost, cargo space, and defense.
And the Batavia was considered the top of the line when it came to VOC ships. Now, the Batavia was a class of ship the VOC called a return ship, which was designed to carry both high-class passengers and cargo on long voyages to and from the Indies, A distance of some 15,000 miles journeyed over an average of eight months one way.

And it's a big central ship, right?

It has a bunch of smaller ships that kind of go with it, right?

Like kind of like support ships.

Measuring as long as a football field is wide, the Batavia had four decks, three masts, and 30 guns.

Its upper works, it sounds like the gaudiest fucking thing in the world. Its upper works were painted bright green and gold, while its stern was decorated with gaudy flourishes, specifically requested by the Gentleman 17, so as to, quote, over all the people of the East.
What I love first is when a boat has tits on the front of it, and it shows respect. It shows respect.
People respect the tits when they show up at the island. They go, and they look at it.
They're like, whoa, look at those big tits. Yes.
Let's do business for them. A lot of times, they did have tits on the front.
That's what I'm saying. Like, literally.
Well, they also said specifically this boat, because a lot of times, they wouldn't put a lot of, like, zhuzh into these boats. But the Batavia, they're like, let's make this one nice.
Yeah, the Gentleman 17 were like, fucking go all out with this ship. In all, the construction of the Batavia cost the modern equivalent of $13 million.
But if all went well, it was expected to pay for itself a dozen times over.

Over the course of 10 to 20 years,

ships of the Batavia's class were supposed to last for six round trips to and from the Indies before they were dismantled and their timber used to build houses.

But unfortunately for the VOC, the Batavia would not make it to the Indies even once.

Spoiler!

Now, as far as cargo bound for the island of Java on the Batavia would not make it to the Indies even once. Spoiler! Now, as far as cargo bound for the island of Java on the Batavia went, it included a 25-foot prefabricated gateway and 137 sandstone blocks weighing 37 tons.
They were going to use these building materials for a castle. So what they do is, so if you're going to the Indies, it's such a long fucking trip, so there's, and because they have business out there, there's a bunch of people that will put stuff onto the ship to go and bring over there because they got shit to handle over there.
This was from Kuhn. Kuhn was trying to build a castle that was supposed to be in tribute to himself.
Yeah. And so he literally- Called Castle Batavia.
Yeah, they were gonna just bring stuff to build him a house. Mm-hmm.
There's shit there! No. It's nutmeg.
We got rocks! Not the good rocks. Not the good rocks.
Well, concerning treasure, the ship was loaded with boxes of silver. Millions of dollars worth of this stuff.
This is the Ocean's Eleven style. You have to start seeing all this stuff that's going on.
So yeah, so now we got the big blocks. That's like one thing.
That's the boring stuff. And then all of a sudden you see these big loads of fucking silver just being dropped in one by one by one.
And you remember it's staffed by entirely criminals. Yeah.
And the silver was earmarked for trade with the locals and the Indies. But most impressive were the massive 500 pound wooden chest full of guilders worth 32..5 million in today's currency.
One boat. These chests were the last things loaded on board the Batavia before it set sail.
And as was custom, the loading of the treasure was done under the personal supervision of the Gentleman 17. This was the only time they actually came out to the docks to watch the money be loaded onto the boat.

Because they were the ones that brought the money. They had to hand over the money to the guys.
Now,

we will meet the guy that's in charge

of the money and will be on the boat

that is our main character,

Paul Rudd. Our Paul Rudd.

And the gentleman

17, they're not going on the trip.

No! No, no, no. Does

Jeff Bezos work at the fucking Amazon

factory? Every once in a while, he'll put on

a little shower cap and go out Thank you. 17, they're not going on the trip.
No! No, no, no. Does Jeff Bezos work at the fucking Amazon

factory? Every once in a while, he'll put on

a little shower cap and go out

there, and he just kind of like

goes like, oh, this is crazy, golf balls.

Now, the captain of the Batavia

was a man named Ariana Jacobs.

Jacobs was in his

mid-40s, which actually made him

one of the oldest men on the Batavia.

This is our Nick Nolte.

Yeah. God damn it.
God fucking damn it. That fucking ship.

That is what this guy is. He's a salty dog, man.

Yep. Jacobs was a quick-tempered alcoholic rapist, but an excellent sailor nonetheless.

It's kind of like, makes me one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the whole thing.
It's redundant.

Yeah.

Well, that made him right

at home working for the VOC.

But as I mentioned earlier, the captain

was not the true commander of a VOC ship.

While Jacobs was in charge

of the navigation and sailor management,

the person who was really

calling the shots on the Batavia

was the upper merchant, a man named

Francisco Pelsart. Now this is our Paul.
Yeah. This is our lovable scamp.
Okay. And he's going to have to figure out if he can make it right in the end.
Yeah. And his whole list is going to rest on Pelsart's shoulders.
I got a feeling his family's going to get killed. Now, Pelsart's job was to place the cargo and profits of the company above all else when the batavia launched pelsart was one of the voc's most valued upper merchants he'd been hired at the lowest merchant rank but it worked his way up because he had a knack for languages and was particularly skilled at negotiation this guy i mean he's just some dude but he knew how to speak like urdu.
He knew how to speak a whole bunch of different languages. But he also was a guy that was kind of like he was viewed as charming.
Well, he was good at it. He was a good negotiator and he wasn't brutal.
He was like a guy that liked kind of like in a way liked people. Like he liked the job in a way.
He's a salesman. But he's a fuck upup.
He's a constant fuck-up. Well, Pelsart, well, actually

no, Pelsart was not a constant

fuck-up. Well, he's

sometimes... Every once in a while

he fucked up. It's the penis.

It's the penis. Yeah.

Well, Pelsart had been responsible for establishing

the VOC's lucrative indigo trade

and it even urged the Gentleman 17

to expand the company throughout India

before the British had a chance to do

so. They refused his advice

and let the British take India. But had the Gentleman 17 listened to Francisco Pelsart, the modern world would be a very different place.
Yeah, British might find... I guess they don't really wear jeans like we do.
Pelsart's weakness, however, was women. The ladies women and his dalliances once almost cost the VOC dearly while negotiating at a court in India Pelsart seduced a noble woman but just before sex she mistook a bottle of clove oil for a bottle of wine and after drinking the whole thing I mean come on I mean can only be so responsible.
You can't tell the difference between wine and clove oil. I don't know how much...
Fuck, man! Fucking, after they fucked, she dropped dead. Oh, shit! Oh, man! Oh, fuck, man! Well, because at the time, it was very...
It was customary for if you were in another country. They let you fuck pretty much anybody you want.
You could fuck up anybody of any case. You could do, you know, use their fucking version of sex workers.
You could do whatever. They didn't care.
But the main thing was like, leave the local nobility alone. But he ended up because, but guess, I think a lot of them are being more attractive.
The problem is you meet a princess. Yeah.
She's hot as fuck. Yeah.
And then you fucking kill her accidentally because you're a moron. Why do we have the clove oil?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Fucking hate clothes.

No, and he immediately went into this like cliche like, she's fucking dead, man.

She's got to help me.

You got to help me.

I wish she was normal before, man.

You got to help me out, man.

You think it's time to get some new shit?

You think?

Huh?

It's the fucking second girl.

Don't need on me this week.

Lucky he had a boat full of lady murderers.

Yeah, he called upon his fellow VOC employees to help him cover up the death of the noblewoman.

And they were able to secretly bury her body without the Indian court discovering what had happened.

Not so secretly.

We're talking about it now.

Well, now we're ruining the secret. Well, this sort of shit happened all the time with the VOC as cover-ups and corruption became baseline behavior for just about every merchant.
As the common VOC saying went, there were no Ten Commandments south of the equator. I'm going to steal that.
When do you go south of the equator? When we go to Australia? there's no Ten Commandments when do you follow the Ten Commandments? I don't murder well I covet I guess I make fun of my mom but also I love her I do honor her you're all about false idols, I'll tell you that. Yeah, you really are.
I mean, that's the whole shit.

And so, with Francisco Pelsart acting as the leader

of the expeditionist upper merchant,

Ariana Jacobs as captain

following Pelsart's orders,

and Euronymous Cornelis,

assigned as one of the ship's

undermerchants,

the Batavia set sail

on its maiden voyage

for the island of Java

in October of 1628.

Just remember,

each one of these guys

have their back

absolutely against the wall.

I'm not going to be able to help. the Batavia set sail on its maiden voyage for the island of Java in October of 1628.
Just remember, each one of these guys have their back absolutely against the wall. Francisco Pelsart had to beg his way onto this ship.
He had just gone through a whole scandal, a whole thing that I didn't even want to go into. But yeah, this is like last chance time for Francisco.
Because it's a horrible run. It's a real nice ship, but it is a rough fucking run.
He does not want to be on this. So you have him.
You have Ariana Jacobs, who literally, he's fucking, what's his name? He's about to retire. This is supposed to be his last trip.
Oh, he's our Danny Glover. Yes, but he's nebulous, right? But his whole thing is, this is the last time I'm supposed to go.
This is the last trip. Oh, he's our Danny Glover.
Yes. But he's like, he's nebulous, right? He's kind of, but his whole thing is that this was the last time I'm supposed to go.
This is the last time I'm doing this shit. I'm never doing it again.
And then you have the other guy, then you have Euronymous, who's a psychopath that we don't know yet. I know you said it earlier, but how many people are on the boat? Well, that's what I was about to get into.
Oh, okay. These three men made up just a fraction of the Batavia's full passenger manifest.
In all, the Batavia was loaded with 340 people. A hundred of these 340 were soldiers who had been contracted by the VOC for garrison duties in the Indies.
Desperate men with nothing to lose and nothing to do for the entirety of their eight-month journey. For the most part, the soldiers were German, but their ranks included men from France, Scotland, England, and the Netherlands.
They were largely untrained, and from what it sounds like, they lived by prison rules in prison-like conditions while aboard the Batavia. For example, casual violence and thievery amongst the soldiers was the norm, and the only bonds were friendships of convenience or between guys who just happened to be from the same town.
And also, they didn't always bugger each other. Mostly they saved that for the cabin boys.
Yep. Your friend would keep an eye on your possessions, share their food and water, and take care of you if you got sick, because the sick bays on the Batavia were reserved for officers, VOC merchants, and higher-class passengers only.
Everyone else, get better or die. As far as where they lived, soldiers' quarters were on the oar lop, the lowest deck of the ship.
The ceilings in the oar lop were low enough so as to make standing upright impossible, and it was so close to the waterline that the men didn't have vents or portholes for air or light. Now, this might have been bearable if not for the fact that the soldiers spent the majority of the eight-month-long journey in the oar lock.

Wouldn't that make your soldiers weaker?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

But once they got there, they maybe could rest and recoup and then get back.

You still do push-ups, I guess.

Also, to be honest, that's why you send so many.

Yeah. So that you can lose 15%.
Mm-hmm. Like, literally.
Yeah. They're expendable.
Remember, everyone on this boat is expendable. They're expendable, yeah.
Nobody gives a shit if any one of these guys come back. Yeah.
It's the Jet Lees, the Dolph Lundgrens of it. This is what I'm saying.
It's Ocean's Eleven. Nobody's going to miss any of these fuckers.
And like prisoners, the soldiers were only allowed outside of the Orlop for two 30-minute periods a day to use the latrines and breathe fresh air. For their health.
Oh, good. For their health.
If it's any indication as to how the VOC regarded soldiers, the Orlop did double duty. That was where the spices were stored on the return journey.
As a result, I'd imagine the Orlop developed quite the interesting aroma after a few voyages. Oh yeah, my Uber is here.
I wonder if the also what they would do is the treasure room. So that was also what I love, is that all the money and all the jewels, because also Pelsart was bringing his own personal jewels.
He had a collection of something like 75 grand of weedle that were kept in this specific safe room that was behind the Orlop. So in order to get to it, you would have to go through the soldiers to get to that stuff.
That's smart. Yes.
Also, why even bring the soldiers back? They didn't. Oh, yeah.
They would be filled with stuff. No, that's the whole point, is that where the place where the soldiers were brought to the Indies, on the way back...
They would just become cops of that place. Yeah.
Yes. And on the way back, that hold was filled with spice.
Okay. Good.
Yeah. And then, but ostensibly, the ship would go again.
Yeah. So then it's just going to get worse and worse.
So it just starts smelling like nutmeg, shit, piss, you know, body odor and clothes. Yeah, like being in Santa's pants.
The Washington commander's locker room. Now, the soldiers were the lowest station aboard the Batavia, but the ones right above them, the sailors, weren't much higher.
The Batavia's crew was made up of 180 unwashed men with no changes of clothes who lived in less than 70 feet of deck that shared space with a dozen heavy guns and miles of cable. I don't care if I die.
I don't know who I am. Me neither.
Yeah, me neither. We're all one guy.
To be lower than a sailor. It was said that the ordinary VOC seamen was such a horrifying sight that they were kept far away from the higher class passengers, so as to not offend the passengers' delicate sensibilities.
Some people have... Honestly, they're allergic to me.

And I don't know if it's my personality or if it's the fact that I'm

covered in barnacles.

Oh, yes. Let me

suck on your eyeballs.

Honestly, just for fun. Just for something

different. I'd place it at the open

sores that you're covered in.

Oh, now I forget.

If they're not open, you can't

feed them. Little mouth.

I'm so sorry. Oh, now I forget.
If they're not open, you can't feed them. Speaking of passengers, though, the Batavia also held the families of any VOC employee who could afford to bring them along.
That meant that there were plenty of women and children aboard this ship. And the women especially had to constantly be on their guard to protect themselves from the rapacious soldiers and sailors.
And they were sort of kept separate. Tried to.
Please! They tried to. They tried to keep them separate.
Put them up in the crow's nest! They would give them little hours. They would allow to go up top.
Everyone had to leave. They were allowed to go up top, and then they had to go back down.
But they were like, it's also kind of funny because it's, again, as we'll see, it's this desperate attempt to create this modern civilized hierarchical society on this boat we are an extension of the netherlands and this boat will be it will remain order orderly and it will and it will be fine from here on out why would you bring your family because they encouraged it so that you wouldn't worry about so you try real hard to not die yeah so you'd be so you could keep an eye on them because if it's safe, you just didn't want to be apart from them, if you planned on settling in the West Indies, or the East Indies. Yeah, many reasons.
Other passengers on the Batavia's maiden voyage included a 52-year-old Calvinist minister named Chrisbert Bastions, who had brought along his wife, seven children and their servants. Minister Bastions was headed to the Indies

not as a missionary, but to serve the Dutch coloners who'd made a home there. But unfortunately for the minister, booking passage on the Batavia would be the worst decision he ever made.
What? What did you just say? Did he get dysentery? He's gonna get it bad Now, the Batavia got off to a bad start. It was beset with delays and storms and even ran aground just after launch on a sandbank.
Apparently, one in five Dutch ships that were built crashed on this sandbank and fucking sank. And this is kind of like, so Pelsart and Jakobs immediately had sort of an antagonistic relationship because Jakobs was kind of like, he didn't, but he got stuck and he showed, he's like, I'm an old sea dog.
It's like, I'm an old sea dog and I'll tell you how to do this. And he saved the boat.
Everyone's like, oh, okay, maybe things will be fine. Yeah.
Where was the sand bank? Was it by Europe or Africa? It's right outside. It's right outside of the Netherlands.
That's so aggravating. But the ship was saved by Captain Jacobs' excellent instruction.
And once it got to sea it began its 15 000 mile journey with a fleet of six other ships all overseen by upper merchant francisco pelsart now after six months at sea the batavia put in at the cape of good hope in south africa which was the only acceptable port of call mandated by the voc because they wanted round trips to take the shortest amount of time possible. From what it seems, though, during that six months on the water, Euronymous Cornelis became friendly with Captain Jacobs because the two of them, along with a group of sailors, they got drunk one night and stole one of the Batavia's boats for a little ride around the Cape.
He was trying to kind of blow off steam and Jakobs was a really bad fucking drunk. He was a bad drunk and a rapist and what he was doing was they were going around all the other boats and in a funny way he just started fights with the crews and all these other boats.
Like this guy just decided to fight the entire mission. For some reason they got hammered.
Well it's like the varsity team beats up the JV team. But they're on the same team.
Yeah, yeah, I know. We all go to the same school, but, like, I play football, you play baseball, I'm gonna slap you.
Basically. Well, upper merchant Palsart couldn't have been more angry with this little adventure, and as a result, cut the Batavia's time in port to just eight days, less than half of what was expected.
This naturally led to some resentment amongst the crew, especially the soldiers, because now it's like, well, you're not going to get two and a half weeks anymore to, you know, breathe fresh air and just be a human. You now have a little over a week.
Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also around this time that Captain Jacobs and Euronymous Cornelius began plotting the mutiny that would result in six weeks of bloody mayhem, the one that was supposed to make them both very rich men. And that is where we'll pick back up next week for The Tragedy of the Batavia Part 2.
Man, it just builds. So now it's going to build.
Cause you remember like we're going to see what causes them to kind of put together what it's like to plan a mutiny and how it all gets fucking just destroyed in a second. I love that.
It's already horrible, but it gets worse. No, you have no idea how bad it's going to get.
These guys go straight to hell. I'm not even joking.

These guys are going straight to hell.

No, it is a full descent into hell.

As much as I've ever seen.

But the families will be fine.

Oh, yeah.

The women and children do great.

They do great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You ever heard of Menudo?

That came from this.

That was the kids.

From this. They became Menudo and then yeah and then you know live and live eat a loca there and you know now he's an actor incredible yeah all from all from the batavia let's just say we have no idea how long this is gonna be but it's gonna be not that long right it's gonna be you know a couple episodes yeah definitely a few it's gonna be a few episodes very excited with this fucking.
But it's going to be not that long. Right? It's going to be a couple episodes.
Yeah, definitely. A few.
It's going to be a few episodes. Very excited with this fucking shit because it's about to get really fucking gnarly immediately.
But you'll see. If you go to patreon.com slash podcast enough you can watch us scream about it and have our jaws flopping around.
You can pay for that money. And you go to LP on the left of TikTok and Instagram for some reason they there.
Yeah. So you want to go look at that.
That's good for advertising. Yes, we know.
And then twitch.tv slash LPNTV. Go and watch our streams.
Such as, not tonight, yesterday we did Hoopa Goo Goo, but it will soon be on YouTube. Yes, it'll be on YouTube.
And then you can see the next live Hoopa Goo Goo on February 6th, 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m.
Eastern. And that is, of course, starring Mr.
Ed Larson. Yes! I was on the last Hoop-a-Goo-Goo.
Dr. Nurse.
Yeah, Mr. Nurse.
Mr. Nurse.
Yeah, Mr. Nurse, the musical accompaniment.
Yes, wonderful music. Thank you, thank you.
I played the best Christmas music my synth could make. Also, we're going to be in Dallas on February 22nd.
Actually, Grand Prairie, Texas. So make sure you catch us there.
And then, of course, on the 14th of March, we'll be at the Ryman Theater in Nashville. And just two days after that, that's Sunday on the 16th, Henry and I got a side stories in Huntsville, Alabama.
We're coming for you, NASA. Yeah, that's right, you NASA pieces of shit! I fucking dare you to show up! Because we are asking you to.
And I will put you on the list. I will put you on the list and I will spank myself.
And then, of course, we will be on the 18th of April. We'll be in Detroit and on May 3rd we'll be in Toronto at the end of June, we're coming back to Atlanta for our rescheduled date.
Yep. I cannot wait to see all of you.
Can't wait. Can't wait to see y'all on the high seas.
High seas. I don't want to go, and I'm not going to go.
Yeah. On the high seas? Yeah, I'm not going to the high seas.
No, you are. You actually had a meeting today specifically about you going on the high seas.

Yeah, the crime wave.

But I still feel like a low sea.

I think it's low sea.

Yeah, Henry and I are going to do a cruise, and we're going to announce it next week,

and you'll be able to buy tickets and meal off.

You're going to come see us on a true crime cruise.

You just got to be careful, okay?

Honestly, we're going to go out there.

Someone's going to get murdered.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I must stay home.

We understand.

As you should.

Hail Satan, everyone.

Huggy.

Hail Peter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was hoping you would.

For sending the book.

Yeah.

Oh, that is it.

Thank you. I'm a stay home.
We understand. As you should.
Hail Satan, everyone. Okay.
Hail Peter. Yeah.
Yeah. I was hoping you would.
For sending the book. Yeah.
Oh, that is nice. I was hoping you would.
Peter, I see you in there, Peter. Peter, let me suck your dick.
I want to suck your dick. I bet he's feeling a lot of conflicted feelings right now because he did get shouted out by his favorite podcast, but then he's also having to relive probably the lifelong trauma about his name.

Being a computer, yeah.

But you know, what are you going to do?

It's double-edged sword. Life sucks.

See you later. Bye, Peter!

Bye!

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