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

Speaker 1 When you need eye-catching content fast, use Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Speaker 1 Make visually consistent social posts, presentations, videos, and more with brand kits and lockable templates. Edit, resize, and even translate, all in just a click.

Speaker 1 And use Firefly-powered generative AI features to create commercially safe content with confidence. Start creating with Adobe Express at adobe.com slash go slash express.

Speaker 3 There's a reason Chevy trucks are known for their dependability. It's because they show up no matter the weather, push forward no matter the terrain, and deliver.

Speaker 3 That's why Chevrolet has earned more dependability awards for trucks than any other brand in 2025, according to JD Power.

Speaker 3 Because in every Chevy truck, like every Chevy driver, dependability comes standard. Visit Chevy.com to learn more.

Speaker 3 Chevrolet received the highest total number of awards among all trucks in the JD Power 2025 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Study.
Awards based on 2022 models, newer models may be shown.

Speaker 3 Visit JDPower.com/slash awards for more details.

Speaker 2 Chevrolet, together, let's drive.

Speaker 2 There's no place to escape to this is the last podcast. On the left.

Speaker 3 That's when the cannibalism started.

Speaker 2 You're uning your son's attractiveness. I do know

Speaker 2 I don't see why you're here 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.

Speaker 2 That is they, my Dutch. We're trying to really wrap our brains around the Dutch accent.

Speaker 2 Yeah, trying to wrap our brains around just not just the Dutch accent, but the Dutch language, which is a very difficult language.

Speaker 2 But one thing that Dutch doesn't seem to have words for, which is being completely fucked on an island.

Speaker 2 They learn that later on, though, don't they? Don't they, my friend? They can't sneak up on anybody. Yeah, they also don't have any words for compassion or friendliness.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the last podcast on the left. Yes!

Speaker 2 My name is Marcus Barks. I'm here with the...
Henry Zabulski. Henry Zabirsky.
Henry Zabulski.

Speaker 2 That's as far as I'm going to go. Yeah, I'm going to try.
You know what? The only problem is with a Dutch accent

Speaker 2 specifically Dutch accent

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 that's, of course, the Dutch oven at Larson. How are you doing? What's going on? That's my name.
Don't wear it out.

Speaker 2 But this man, I'm like, it's been a long time since I've been this excited. This really fun episode.
This is a, I cannot wait.

Speaker 2 This whole series comes from a topic. I have no idea how I had not heard about this topic before.

Speaker 2 I have my theories, which we'll get to, but my God, this story is massive. I mean, this is the, it's almost the story of the birth of the modern world with a lot of murder involved.

Speaker 2 And that's why we begin our 25-episode series now

Speaker 2 at the dawn of man.

Speaker 2 Well, this today

Speaker 2 is a naval tale.

Speaker 2 The story of the Batavia. Let's fuck some dudes.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 240 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Murder by the dozen.

Speaker 2 Because if there was ever a tale where the adage, hell is other people applies, it's this one.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 you know, like that's where everything begins. It's just somebody just sitting there.
You've got to wait for an orange. Why can't I have one right now?

Speaker 2 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, you, it's all right, right? Yeah, it's all right.

Speaker 2 Let's go kill a bunch of villages full of babies to get some, right?

Speaker 2 And then we have set up an entire civilization around getting nutmegs. Well, my guy enslavement, 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.

Speaker 2 Except, I did hear that, you know, nutmeg gets you high as fuck, dude. Really? Eagle, man.
So if you

Speaker 2 fucking know it, eat it, dude. You eat like fucking...
Barrel, if you eat like half a pound of nutmeg, you get crazy high.

Speaker 2 If you eat half a pound of almost anything, you get, you feel differently. Yeah, fucking, but not with like with nutmeg, man.
You get crazy, dude. You get nogged out, dude.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's the survive part that's missing.

Speaker 2 Some do survive, but it's definitely not alive. You know, it is

Speaker 2 not one of those where it's a tale of, you know, the

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Oh, it was.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 A man with the unlikely name of Euronymus Cornelis. Yeah, you'd be surprised what you could make a bunch of people do when there's nothing but sand to eat.

Speaker 2 Jeezy, he's the Paul Dano of our story.

Speaker 2 We'll get here. You'll see.
I'm going to cast everybody. I disagree wholeheartedly with the Paul Dano here.

Speaker 2 Yes, because Paul Dano is not in any way charismatic, and Euronymus was a very charismatic man.

Speaker 2 I think Paul Dano's incredibly charismatic. See, he's Paul Dano from There Will Be Blood.
That's where I'm putting him in. Sure.
Yeah, not Brian Wilson. No.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 CNN.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now, the VOC was a shipping company with enough power to be almost a country unto themselves, complete with colonies and a private army.

Speaker 2 And from what I can tell, it wasn't until modern times that businesses were able to again wield so much power and influence.

Speaker 2 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 auric.

Speaker 2 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 packages.

Speaker 2 That is what it is.

Speaker 2 I put the house. I wanted a pair of scissors in one package and I want tape in the other package.
I never choose Amazon made.

Speaker 2 I always say extra plastic, please.

Speaker 2 Thank you. And make sure that the box is way too big for what I order.
Oh, yes.

Speaker 2 But you know, I'm one way, see, as the resident capitalist slash Satanist, what I will say is that, see, we're bored, we're burdened with consciousness. And what consciousness forces us to do more.

Speaker 2 You start talking like a douchebag when you say that. No, listen, no.
No, no, no, you see. We're burdened with consciousness.
And what consciousness forces us humans to do is to consider time.

Speaker 2 You know, a dog doesn't know when its kibble will arrive. It knows by a lick in your eye, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They don't understand time. They don't understand capitalism.
They don't get the apps. They don't have thumbs.

Speaker 2 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 because time, Marcus, is the most precious commodity of all.

Speaker 2 Let go of me.

Speaker 2 Well, the obvious analog to the VOC, the one that puts convenience and profits over people at every turn, is of course, Amazon.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 to go.
I love trips.

Speaker 2 I've seen Santa's workshop.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 and sort of like a giant lockstep army of thousand-pound unstoppable machines?

Speaker 2 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 they don't get bathroom breaks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I thought they're fueled by the piss bottle.

Speaker 2 Well, they're just inspired. So let's take a trip, everyone.

Speaker 2 Imagine an Amazon warehouse a flutter 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.

Speaker 2 Everyone is a cog in a machine within the biggest machine of all, the Amazon Corporation.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm a swinger. Me and my wife, wife, 25 years older than I.
We like to swing on the weekends when I'm not busy here, obviously managing the Amazon warehouse.

Speaker 2 Well, he's just in the middle.

Speaker 2 He's not one of the guys at the top, but 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.

Speaker 2 And no.

Speaker 2 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'll buy five trampolines.
I got some bullets over here. We can sell that

Speaker 2 across the street. There's a lot of young people looking for him.
This is gonna be an amazing time for us, boys. And then y'all can share my wife.

Speaker 2 Now, the warehouse is staffed with some good people and some very bad people, but most are somewhere in between. Wait a second, Demetria.
Where'd you get that shimitar?

Speaker 2 I found it. A man ordered it.

Speaker 2 I use it to defend intake. I'm sorry, that's one of the customer shimitars, Demetria.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 In other words, this warehouse is filled with desperate people.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, the middle manager gets all the support he needs for the coup fairly easily.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Likewise, the the warehouse is no longer fit for a base of operations either.

Speaker 2 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, Dimitri, I love you.

Speaker 2 And I miss you, and I'll miss you, and I love your fervent enthusiasm. But you're going to stay here behind.
Make sure that all these squeegees are completely safe. Okay?

Speaker 2 We're going to Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 All right?

Speaker 2 I love you. I'm going to have sex with my wife and I'm going to think about you.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's at that moment that everyone discovers that the mental manager is a total psychopath on par with the worst dictators in history.

Speaker 2 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. I just find it fun.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely would. Joe Gehricks.
Yeah, I remember him. Yeah, or given,

Speaker 2 you already had a guy in mind. Keith.
I just remember Keith from my old job. And a guy named Will Stevenhagen.

Speaker 2 Well, 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Weeks pass and the bosses still aren't back.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they sort of build a imagine that they've also built a giant cocoon of him and he's he's wearing, you know, like some kind of

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 They can use the trampoline. You're like,

Speaker 2 he'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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You wouldn't believe he put on a bunch of garbage, he put on Garfield slippers, right?

Speaker 2 He had an OLED 65-inch screen just for some reason attached to a sash around his back.

Speaker 2 And he came 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.

Speaker 2 Don't you see how much lead is in that?

Speaker 2 Soon after, a small war breaks out between the isolated group and the middle managers group, and it's only settled when the bosses finally return in a gilded helicopter.

Speaker 2 This is more or less the story of the Batavia and the corporation that made it all all possible, the VOC.

Speaker 2 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. This is a Quentin Tarantino movie on a boat.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Everyone loves

Speaker 2 nutmeg.

Speaker 2 Which Amazon still sells. Oh, yeah.
Oh, God. Yes, of course.

Speaker 2 Just honestly, just to celebrate this story, I bought several pounds of nutmeg just through Amazon, and I just left it out in the rain. You know what I mean? Like, just to let it rot.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm just using it to dye my skin.

Speaker 2 We're going to have a sidebar with that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like why everybody is doing this in the first place and why everyone's so afraid to fuck up. And you like literally once, because there's no coming back.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And also why everyone feels like they have permission to act like they act and to do the things they do.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Oh, Peter, thank you so much, Peter. Peter, sometimes I think about what it would be like to taste your seed,

Speaker 2 to kiss your rump, I wish to fuck and to suck suck you.

Speaker 4 I've always wanted to fucking suck a man named after Peter.

Speaker 2 Peter.

Speaker 2 Peter. Life on your blade.

Speaker 5 Growing a business is complicated. Your network shouldn't be.
Connected Workplace from T-Mobile for Business gives you fully managed business internet.

Speaker 5 That means network configuration and equipment tailored to your business needs and performance monitoring to keep systems and operations running smoothly.

Speaker 5 One cost-effective solution to connect and support across locations so you can focus on what's next. Accelerate your growth on America's most advanced 5G network.

Speaker 5 Start now at T-Mobile.com slash connected workplace.

Speaker 2 This is an ad by BetterHelp. You know,

Speaker 2 I really lost contact with my extended masters recently. It's been so hard to psychically reach them because so much aluminum is built up in my pituitary gland.

Speaker 2 I guess it's because I've been using all this fancy dance natural deodorant that apparently has extra aluminum in it. But honestly, honestly, I just wish I could reach out sometimes.

Speaker 2 You know, it's just nice to make somebody's day. My ascended masters always tell me I'm right and that I'm not too fat for life.

Speaker 2 But some people don't have ascended masters to talk to. Some people wish they could reach out to somebody.
And this season, BetterHelp encourages you to reach out. Check in on friends.

Speaker 2 Just like it takes a little courage to send that text or grab coffee with someone or ask one of your ascended masters what's the proper way to destroy communism.

Speaker 2 Reaching out for therapy can also feel difficult, but it can be worth it. So I say you get out there and just like I want to, give a call using the powers of Votan.

Speaker 2 And for those of you that don't have Votan, enjoy BetterHelp. This month, don't wait to reach out.

Speaker 2 Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash lastpod.

Speaker 2 That's betteratlp.com slash lastpod.

Speaker 2 If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the idea of learning a new language, you're not alone. Studies show that 70 to 90% of people trying to learn a new language give up.

Speaker 2 Fortunately, Babel's built so that it's really easy to get started. Learning a language with Babel is all about small steps, big wins, and progress you can actually track and feel.

Speaker 2 Their bite-sized lessons fit easily into your daily routine and are also easy to remember.

Speaker 2 It's easy to use Babel, it's easy for you to learn different words, stuff like if you're in Germany and you need to be like, Hey, where can I get some see-through later, Hosen?

Speaker 2 You can learn that. If you go to Mexico City and you want to learn how to say,

Speaker 2 do you have any see-through laterhosen?

Speaker 2 In Mexico City, you can learn how to do that. I believe the Spanish word for laterhosen

Speaker 2 is laterhosen. And I learned that from Babel.

Speaker 2 Here's a special limited time deal for our listeners. Right now, get up to 55% off your Babel subscription at babble.com forward slash left.
Get up to 55% off at babel.com forward slash left.

Speaker 2 Spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com forward slash left. Rules and restrictions may apply.

Speaker 2 Now, to really understand how the tragedy of the Batavia came to be, how over a hundred people were slaughtered by their coworkers and shipmates, we've got to understand.

Speaker 2 It's not like getting slaughtered by your co-workers. Oh, God.
It's fucking off. It's the worst.
It's your office crashes. Your office crashes and everyone has to fight for themselves.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This corporation, one of the first to ever exist, were the owners and operators of the Batavia.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Hey, just pay attention to it. Just pay attention.
Lock in.

Speaker 2 Okay, I'll do my best, but you know me. So stupid.

Speaker 2 Well, the Dutch name of the Dutch East India Company is, I'm gonna butcher this, but Verengied Osendies Compagne.

Speaker 2 Or the VOC. Top of the Dutch East India Company.
Veringied Osendagse gompagne. We are not gonna get the Dutch accents correct.
No, no. Nor are we gonna

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 pronounce anything in Dutch correctly. But you have we have phonetic things written out.
Doing the best we can. We're trying.
Yeah, we're trying.

Speaker 2 It'd be easier easier if we got high before the show still, but now we wait till afterwards.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I swear to God. You're already, we have to maintain control.

Speaker 2 Now, by the 17th century. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 Just remember, start early, but just lock it. No, the 17th century is when all this happened.
I agree. Which is the 1600s.
Yes. You're welcome.

Speaker 2 Thanks for clearing that up.

Speaker 2 Now, by the 17th century, Amsterdam was one of the wealthiest cities in the world, and that wealth was almost entirely owed to shipping.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Spice.

Speaker 2 Oh, yes.

Speaker 2 He who owns the spice runs the universe. Yes, Eddie.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Eddie understood.

Speaker 2 But it's kind of crazy. Yeah.
People just sat around eating shit, right? Like all day. That's what all this food, all European foods, just like boiled fucking roots and

Speaker 2 old stinky lamb and all this kind of shit. So why isn't it improved?

Speaker 2 But it's funny.

Speaker 2 There is 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.

Speaker 2 So they made their food purposefully bland as to make it quote-unquote pure.

Speaker 2 And that just sort of pervaded all of English society up until fairly recently. Being rich fucking sucks.
Honestly, the only thing has become such a pussy. You just get really fucking bored.

Speaker 2 And I don't get it. You either become become P-Diddy or you become like, you just collect typewriters.

Speaker 2 I don't know why.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And it heavily involves the VOC Corporation and ships like the Batavia. We just like spices as

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I had no idea pepper was a tree. Yeah.
I didn't know where it came from. I tell you what, man, I'd fucking kill a girl for some Chef Paul's magic seasoning.
Paul.

Speaker 2 Paul Prudhomme.

Speaker 2 I just got the same. I got the same seasoning from Paul Proudhon.
And honestly, there are sometimes. The poultry is not to be slept on as well.
I love the poultry seasoning.

Speaker 2 And I looked at, like, even just like Holden's daughter came over last night to the house. Delicious.

Speaker 2 And there's a little part of me that was just like, I just imagine, what if that Paul Prudhome was in the center of her torso?

Speaker 2 Could I get it? And

Speaker 2 yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And I just feel like I have earned it.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, you put it there to go kill her.

Speaker 2 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!

Speaker 2 So to show you how the VOC and the Dutch came out on top, let's take one spice and see how its introduction into European society changed everything. Baby spice.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 that spice is nutmeg.

Speaker 2 Oh, so stupid.

Speaker 2 Now nutmeg trees were handy little tu-in-ons that also produced the spice mace. And they grow naturally in exactly one place on earth, the Banda Islands of Indonesia in Southeast Asia.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that's also how we got the black plague.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'm afraid we'll say the stockout scenes that not make us no effect on this patient. Get me a candy cane.

Speaker 2 Yes! The only thing that will cure this man's cancer is peppermint.

Speaker 2 What do you think? Is that Earth Kid Jr.?

Speaker 2 Yes, here in London town we cure everything with Christmas cheer. I think it's super important for people who praise spice.
I do naturally

Speaker 2 heal yourself.

Speaker 2 It's good because I can kill whales on the moon and upon the Batavia. I wish I could.
If I could, I'd kill a baby, but I also prefer nothing.

Speaker 2 Well, 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 air.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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. Ah, yes.
What a good time. Yes.

Speaker 2 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 nutmeg.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's fine. I don't mind 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. Well, I have nutmeg maybe once.

Speaker 2 You put a little bit in it, but honestly, on like a potato gratin, nutmeg's actually really good uplifting flavor. But that's as far as I go.

Speaker 2 Well, before nutmeg, beer with like ale would only last like five days max, and then it would go bad.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Well, in addition to the practical uses, nutmeg was also tied to the surefire moneymaker that that is human sexuality. Nutmeg was considered to be a powerful aphrodisiac.
Nut.

Speaker 2 Eatmeg. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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. I was fucking telling you about, dude.
Yeah. Yeah, dude.

Speaker 2 Fucking have horny ass dreams eating a bunch of nutmeg, man. You were telling me about this? Yeah.

Speaker 2 In your sleep.

Speaker 2 Dreaming last night, On Miss Farley, my pecker was up this morning, Arley, and I was fain without my gown to raise in the cold to get him down.

Speaker 2 Hard shift, alas, but yet assure, although it be no pleasing cure. Yeah, so he doesn't like eating nutmeg, but uh, he uh loves the boners of gifts.
I need the bonus!

Speaker 2 I must have the bonus to have sex with my nephew.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 In 1619. Experiments with nutmeg sounds like a ween album.

Speaker 2 In 1619, this Dutchman, who very well may have just been playing a prank for being honest, he told his friend that if he wanted to capture the object of his desire, he should should do exactly this.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Like, listen, buddy,

Speaker 2 I'm hearing you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I ate like three ball bearings yesterday.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's all I have.

Speaker 2 You can also suck on it for a little while and then you can get the nutmeg taste. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Rinse it off first. Okay, sure.
It's like that fancy coffee.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 After she gulps it down, she will fall hopelessly in love with you. Whoa.

Speaker 2 Now, presumably, the woman who was giving this disgusting swell noticed the change in taste. This tastes tastes like your fuck.
Yeah, this tastes like button.

Speaker 2 It seems you are the cleverest lady I've ever left. Nutmegs Paul.

Speaker 2 Well, the whole plot was quickly uncovered, and the prankster was thankfully not executed. He came very close.

Speaker 2 I don't want to be murdered over nutmegs. Wait, so who was almost killed? The guy who

Speaker 2 tricked him? Yeah, the guy who told his friend to swallow it and all that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the other guy also got in trouble. Yeah, I was going to say, kill the idiot.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it's sort of like, you know, 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.

Speaker 2 But, I mean, the man was, both men were punished for robbing the young woman of her virtue.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That meant that Europe needed a shitload of nutmeg delivered to the continent on a constant basis.

Speaker 2 Now, the Portuguese, Spanish, and English had already supplanted the original Muslim suppliers by this point.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The term and word nutmeg will eventually begin to lose meaning

Speaker 2 during this section. But that's okay.
It's just not.

Speaker 2 It really is like the most boring spice.

Speaker 2 This entire story centers on nutmeg.

Speaker 2 Now, just to make it clear, we're going to be referring to the Indies a lot in this series.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Archipelago. I've never said it before, but...
Archipelago sounds great. Doesn't it though? But, I mean, the point is, though, these are areas of the world that are rich with spice.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Because 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'll start to learn, like you just start, that's insane.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then when people start showing up at your secret little hidey pepper spot, you might gonna get you're gonna get really angry. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Ah, yes.

Speaker 2 Ah, yes, very good. Now, weren't they all apart? Like, there was their big, like, war,

Speaker 2 18 years' war.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of stuff that I had. Pittsburgh.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Holy Roman Empire.
There's a lot of stuff I had.

Speaker 2 charles the fifth i had to skip over a lot of stuff yeah a lot of 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.

Speaker 2 They were a part of the, because of the 18 years' war. One of the long story shorts is that they were cut out of the spice trade.

Speaker 2 And they had to figure, they really had to figure out their own way to get their own shit.

Speaker 2 Now, the VOC was just the second company in history to do business like this, to be a joint-stock corporation.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Corporation isn't anything. You can't arrive like, yes, there are buildings a corporation owns.
Corporations are people, right?

Speaker 2 They are very big people.

Speaker 2 Very, very big people that we can't seem to see the head or the arms or the legs of.

Speaker 2 And they are, but it's interesting in that, that just our language can create a concept that then can become just as real as a building. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 As the VOC and the English East India Company, they both had their own private armies made up of mercenaries from all over Europe.

Speaker 2 You wait till you see the broccoli squads coming from Zuckerberg around here to make sure we're all like

Speaker 2 NBC's fucking tweets. This is gonna happen.

Speaker 2 The VOC had thousands of soldiers on its payroll, which meant that they were capable of waging war and colonization.

Speaker 2 And at times, these companies would go to war with each other over colonized lands, killing thousands in the process. And these people over nutmegs.
Yeah, dude.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Take it. Just pay.
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.

Speaker 2 You're crucifying a guy on a boat.

Speaker 2 Take the nutmeg.

Speaker 2 But they didn't really care about life and death back then. You know,

Speaker 2 it was a lot more willy-nilly.

Speaker 2 Human life. Oh, no, actually, Eddie, I think that human life, its cost has not increased with inflation.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the return on these investments could be as large as 10 times. times their original outlay.

Speaker 2 In other words, the top VOC investors were the Bezoses, the Musks, the Buffetts, and the Zuckerbergs of their day. Man, I could just see the inauguration.
There's like the four of them.

Speaker 2 It's just like, you know, just dudes with the big metal hats and guys with just big like sacks of flour and stuff, just like hanging out. Those are the billionaires.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Only sinister because you are not in it.

Speaker 2 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, once.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Indigo is also a big thing. All of this is in Civ 6, which I've never been, I've never been into trading.
I feel like the the trading in Civ 6 is broken, but we'll get there.

Speaker 2 What is indigo used for? It's a dye. Oh, it's a dye? Yeah, it goes into jeans.
It's blue.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But if you were in the 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.

Speaker 2 You had to at least be born of a higher social status. And you couldn't like work your way up from like a sailor to like, you know, the boss.

Speaker 2 That's crazy that that doesn't happen anymore right yeah it's nice that doesn't happen you can't just be born with a lot of money and then just be able to like make it yeah

Speaker 2 no but we're i 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 17th century when these motherfuckers were in charge make america dutch again

Speaker 2 well i mean as we were saying you know there was room for upper mobility for a merchant who had a successful voyage.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Spice! Yes!

Speaker 2 You must throttle them!

Speaker 2 You must

Speaker 2 control the spice!

Speaker 2 See, as it still is with most corporations today, the VOC's primary goal was to maximize value for shareholders.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This is what completely deregulated capitalism looks like.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You want pepper?

Speaker 2 You want salt?

Speaker 2 You can take it. Just take it.

Speaker 2 We'll make the jeans. We'll make jeans.
Oh no, I named my son and daughter salt and pepper. You take it?

Speaker 2 I don't know, you want, you know? Like, I think we can make an arrangement, right?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So let's take a 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's also the only place on earth where clove trees grow naturally.

Speaker 2 You don't like cloves? No! You don't like spiced wine? No. You don't like a mold wine? I also remember smoking cloves when you thought that was cool? Yeah.
Dude, I bought was my favorite.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I smoked cloves until I coughed blood. I bought like multiple packs of cloves, and now I just can't.
Thanks, Banda.

Speaker 2 Well, as far as the Europeans went, the Bandanese have been trading with the Portuguese for about 90 years when the VOC finally showed up.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We will take that. Thank you.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 loving what China was doing on the in the Asian

Speaker 2 continent good work China first thank you they're just so angry because their shoes are fucking made out of wood

Speaker 2 it is hell trying to play horse have you ever tried to play horse in wooden clogs

Speaker 2 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 Bandanese, 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.

Speaker 2 And as you might expect, the prophecy very quickly came true. Racist!

Speaker 2 Yeah. Why do they gotta be white? Why do they gotta be white?

Speaker 2 But it is interesting in that way because they called it some magical prophecy when it was definitely a Muslim guy that's like, oh, they're coming here. Yeah, it's not a magical prophecy at all.

Speaker 2 This isn't some mystical thing. I'm seeing some of the things.
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.

Speaker 2 And I have a distinct feeling they're figuring out how to find me.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 All because the natives have 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?

Speaker 2 Because this shit's blowing. This has gone 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 do it, dude.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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. They're trying to live with our nutmeg.

Speaker 2 No shit. Revenge for breaking a contract.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's negotiation.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they learned a new mechanism of sending out a bunch of ships at once.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So they actually, which is interesting, so there's support on the open ocean. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The VOC also had far more capital, stronger support from their government, and better ships than anyone else.

Speaker 2 Man, if it's so been fun if I had to like be the first mate of the Hollywood video ship to come come up in 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 the 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 a Kevin James Wilson vehicle especially

Speaker 2 but listen that was a fucking guaranteed money maker that's the version that's their nutmeg helps 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 might have to Marshall

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 Peterzoon Kuhn.

Speaker 2 If I were to cast the biopic, Jans-Kuhn would be played by Ralph Innison, the father and the witch. Very much so.
Great. Great.
Great casting.

Speaker 2 And he was put out there because they didn't want him back in the Netherlands anymore.

Speaker 2 Legitimately, this man was so scary and he was such a non-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.

Speaker 2 Nicknamed Deskrale because of his thin figure and bony fingers.

Speaker 2 The guy talks like

Speaker 2 Kuhn was a humorless and ultimately genocidal VOC company man through and through.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So no one made him laugh? Yes!

Speaker 2 I laughed.

Speaker 2 There was one time I laughed. I saw a young, beautiful Bantanese woman fiddle with child.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 I chuckled.

Speaker 2 You're hilarious. Thank you.
That's a part of my you want to check me out. It's 2 World for Netflix, the comedy special where I'm just uncontrollable saying things people wish they could say.

Speaker 2 Well, to start with, Jan Kuhns 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.

Speaker 2 Once captured, Kuhn burned Jakarta to the ground and built the VOC capital city of Batavia on its ashes.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So we got Batavia the colony and Batavia the ship. Now, Kuhn spent the next year building up his forces.

Speaker 2 And before long, he'd amassed an army of 13 ships, 1,600 soldiers, and this is fucking incredible. 80 Japanese Ronins.
How many?

Speaker 2 Fucking samurais without lords or masters. Well, I guess they're right over there.
Yeah. They're mercenaries.
Yeah, they're total mercenaries. So it's like, yeah, let's get the fucking samurai.

Speaker 2 Like, they'll show them what's what's what. Yes, my favorite is when they all get together and they do that cheeseburger, cheeseburger skip.

Speaker 2 Absolute favorite a little culturally insensitive.

Speaker 2 Now, true to form, the Ronin were the deadliest and cruelest men in Kuhn's crew.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This is funny.

Speaker 2 People say we're not funny. This is funny.

Speaker 2 On one occasion, six Japanese Ronin on the VOC's payroll cordered and beheaded 44 Bandanese prisoners with samurai swords. Why?

Speaker 2 Because that's what they wanted to do. Oh, okay.
Then they displayed the heads on bamboo spikes for all to see. Honestly, I'm looking for self-starters.

Speaker 2 I'm looking for people that have they they anticipate needs yeah

Speaker 2 super 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

Speaker 2 i mean this whole story is i mean it might as well be called the evil that men do you know it's what happens when you know 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 power, but there is also a kind of like a manifest destiny style.

Speaker 2 We are expressing our power over the world. Oh, absolutely.
No, that happened again and again.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They would 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.

Speaker 2 kind of want an orange yeah yeah like ah well here's my orange let's go take florida yeah

Speaker 2 we live in california

Speaker 2 i want the other ones i want the other ones so sweet the ones with the snakes in the trees

Speaker 2 i want one taken from a dead child's hands

Speaker 2 now young kun'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.

Speaker 2 I do tell to do that.

Speaker 2 And thereafter, he set himself on the task of completely annihilating the Bandanese people.

Speaker 2 Many Bandanese were driven into barren areas by VOC armies and starved, while others were simply beaten to death.

Speaker 2 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 salts? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Honestly, there's some crazy shit over there.

Speaker 2 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 Ronin about teriyaki?

Speaker 2 Do not tell them the secret of teriaka.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Anyone on the islands caught growing, stealing, or possessing these plants without authorization were subject to the death penalty carried out by VOC employees. Doesn't it just randomly grow?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but if it's on your land, if it's in your room, if you've got it with you,

Speaker 2 you're fucking dead and this is before we decided that we can like Grow it ourselves or whatever Yeah, so we just wanted because they already had it

Speaker 2 and it well it only grows in certain climates like you can't just grow fucking you can't I don't think you can grow a nutmeg tree in like Bristol Yeah, but you it sounds like a children's book

Speaker 2 You could steal one plant it in a Greek island that you've stolen. Yeah, Mikunos.
Yeah, eventually they did start planting them on other islands. Oh, sure.

Speaker 2 But for the longest time, this was the the only place where you could get nutmeg.

Speaker 2 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, like, they charged me.

Speaker 2 They're like, well, you know, because I was the manager on time, and they said,

Speaker 2 can you handle this? Can you talk to this guy? And I had to hold a gun in the back of his head while he committed Sepiko. Yeah.
In front of J.K. Rowling.

Speaker 2 And it was honestly truly one of just, she's so nice in person. Are you surprised?

Speaker 2 She answers her phone, turf, turf. As long as blood's squirting on her shoes, she's fine.
Yeah, she loves it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Now, for taking the plot on his life personally, Kuhn received a strongly worded letter from the men who ran the VOC, the aforementioned Dentleman 17.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I gotta hear it myself. And the letter did end with a winky face.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 one of those emojis.

Speaker 2 You've been a bad, bad widow boy. Yes, I have.

Speaker 2 I guess I should go to Sprinker.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 In other words, Kuhn was reprimanded not for crimes against humanity, but for bad business practices.

Speaker 2 Despite the reprimand, Jans kept his position as one of the VOC's chief merchants and was thereafter considered 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.

Speaker 2 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? You're a fucking killer.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm sure. I sure were to watch.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Anyone in Europe who wanted their spiced wines and erectile AIDS, we're now contributing to the profits of the VOC somewhere down the supply line. What's it doing? Oh, I don't care.

Speaker 2 Erectile AIDS is, you know, how it all got started. Yeah, that's really very sad.
That is very sad. That is true.

Speaker 2 Acorns and literats. Acorns and tree eggs.
So many people are focused on where their money is today. Me too.
Mine's in a bucket or covered with my filth.

Speaker 2 Acorns is the financial wellness app that cares about where your money is going tomorrow. Thanks, Acorns.
And with the Acorns Potential screen, you can find out what your money is capable of.

Speaker 2 It's incapable of being president.

Speaker 2 Acorns is a smart way to give your money a chance to grow. Sign up now and Acorns will boost your new account with a $5 bonus investment.

Speaker 2 Join the over 14 million all-time customers who have already saved and invested over $27 billion with Acorns. Head to Acorns.com/slash Left or download the Acorns app to get started.

Speaker 2 Paid non-client endorsement. Compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns.
Tier 2 compensation provided.

Speaker 2 Potential subject of various factors such as customers' accounts, age, and investment settings. Does not include Acorns fees.

Speaker 2 Results do not predict or represent the performance of any Acorns portfolio. Investment results will vary.
Investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor.

Speaker 2 View important disclosures at acorns.com/slash left.

Speaker 6 The growing demand for content means more chances for off-brand work getting out there. Adobe Express can help.

Speaker 6 It's the quick and easy app that gives your HR, sales, and marketing teams the power to create on-brand content at scale. Ensure everyone follows design guidelines with brand kits and lock templates.

Speaker 6 Give them the confidence to create with Firefly generative AI that's safe for business. And make sure your brand is protected, looks sharp, and shows up consistently in the wild.

Speaker 6 Learn more at adobe.com/slash go slash express

Speaker 3 there's a reason Chevy trucks are known for their dependability. It's because they show up no matter the weather, push forward no matter the terrain, and deliver.

Speaker 3 That's why Chevrolet has earned more dependability awards for trucks than any other brand in 2025 according to JD Power.

Speaker 3 Because in every Chevy truck, like every Chevy driver, dependability comes standard. Visit Chevy.com to learn more.

Speaker 3 Chevrolet received the highest total number of awards among all trucks in the JD Power 2025 U.S. Vehicle Dependability Study.
Awards based on 2022 models, newer models may be shown.

Speaker 3 Visit jdpower.com slash awards for more details.

Speaker 2 Chevrolet, together, let's drive.

Speaker 2 Now, concerning the type of person that was willing to work for the VOC, the number one quality needed was a tolerance for risk.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Statistically speaking, you were far more likely to die than you were to get rich.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Also, they would trade with closer places.

Speaker 2 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 cover 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 the bottom of the talent pool was at this leg yes and like how for 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 or yeah they went around they would usually they would start in uh that 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 at the Netherlands you take a right at 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.

Speaker 2 It's going to mess around. And guess what? Australia is surrounded by miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of coral, which is extremely sharp and destroy ships, countless ships.

Speaker 2 So it's interesting. 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Please kill me and forget me because I don't even know my name.

Speaker 2 I'm a random man with a bandana, and I'm next to a cannon. But you'll never know me, will you?

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 I am his brother. I look just like him and sound just like him, too.

Speaker 2 Where'd you come from? Home.

Speaker 2 Doesn't really matter, because I'm a walking corpse.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The merchants were the men responsible for protecting the goods and the profit potential of the voyage.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's over the captain. So the captain is the person who knows how to run the ship.
and do all the stuff the ship, but he is a boss. It's just some guy from the company.
And that's all he does.

Speaker 2 Let's surprise the newspapers and go four feet ahead with this ship called the Titanic.

Speaker 2 Like all these guys knew.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now, concerning the social standing of the merchants, many of them were most definitely in the past fuck-up category.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 very many.

Speaker 2 Now, on a VOC ship, merchants were divided into two ranks, upper merchants and undermerchants. These were the middle managers of the company.

Speaker 2 But since most of them were in dire financial straits, even they were desperate men.

Speaker 2 As such, one of the VOC's desperate undermerchants will play the psychopathic villain in today's tale, a man named Euronymus Cornelis.

Speaker 2 You talk to me and you ask me how do you control a man, and I tell you, you do it by his soul.

Speaker 2 Excuse me, I farted.

Speaker 2 I'm not feeling well.

Speaker 2 You don't have to call them under merchants. You can just call them merchants.
Well, that's that. Well, that's the thing different.
It's to separate them from the upper merchants.

Speaker 2 But the up, you can still call the guys the upper merchants and the other guys merchants. We don't have to call them shitheads.
You know what's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 This is actually one of the traits that's going to come up again and again in this story.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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 Euronymus Cornelis.

Speaker 2 Because after the Patavia wrecked, Euronymus would use his psychopathic charm to trap the survivors in a nightmare of his own making. None of this happens without Euronymus.

Speaker 2 Now, Euronymus Cornelis was indeed a complete and utter psychopath, but he was not the same stripe as, say, a Ted Bundy.

Speaker 2 Rather, Euronymus 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.

Speaker 2 It's nice to have an invitation to violence.

Speaker 2 Thank you because I was just a pussy before.

Speaker 2 Not now, though. I'll kill everyone, but I won't fuck their corpses.
My thing is

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Well, Euronymus's whole thing is not that he would kill anyone, is that he liked to get people to kill for him. The true capitalist.

Speaker 2 Born in 1598 in the Dutch town of Leivarten to wealthy landowning parents, Euronimus was raised as an Anabaptist.

Speaker 2 The Anabaptists were a fascinating and highly aggressive Christian cult, and their philosophy of violence undoubtedly influenced Euronymus Cornelis in the most negative of ways.

Speaker 2 Now, the core principle of the Anabaptists was that they believed that only adults acting on their own free will should be baptized.

Speaker 2 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 the church.

Speaker 2 I can do it by leaving it out in the rain.

Speaker 2 I mean, kind of agree. No, I do too.

Speaker 2 It's stupid. It means nothing.
Yeah, it's theater.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Sorry, I get really scared. Is that Christ? Oh my God, is he there? Oh, no, just some long-haired guy.

Speaker 2 White-skinned.

Speaker 2 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!

Speaker 2 I love it. Although it's sometimes, although it's kind of nice to take a break and see the whites going against the whites.
Yeah, yeah, just like different kinds of whites.

Speaker 2 Fighting and skirmishing and doing shit.

Speaker 2 You know, it's funny because of all of the hero 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.

Speaker 2 And it's like, so far in this episode, we've killed thousands, thousands of people.

Speaker 2 And that's just theater. That's just history, which I think is amazing.
Just thinking about it. They just all wiping stuff out.

Speaker 2 And because it's not individually cleaving someone to death, I feel like this kind of may be part of the issue. Yeah.
Is that we see it kind of like you just like forget. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 At least. Because, well, there's also the whole, you know, the whole island.
Yeah. Yeah.
Was murdered.

Speaker 2 Well, in the year 1534, Anabaptists seized the German town of Munster, where they expelled or killed any non-believers and spent 16 months as rulers of their own little theocracy.

Speaker 2 The leaders, predictably enough, soon began practicing compulsory polygamy because they'd

Speaker 2 expelled or killed many of the men in Munster. And it was definitely a thing that they just stumbled upon because of their prophecy.

Speaker 2 And it's not just because the guy just noticed that there's a lot of just like open wives.

Speaker 2 He 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.

Speaker 2 They had to do it. They had to because God said.

Speaker 2 Finally, though, the city was retaken by a joint force of Catholics and Protestants. Oh, wow.
Yeah, working together

Speaker 2 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 do.

Speaker 2 They like to mutilate the genitals. Yeah.

Speaker 2 display them. And you use a little door knocker.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's the balls.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Let's say Munster's the Munsters.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Others, however, followed an Anabaptist named Menno Simmons, who adopted a philosophy of nonviolence. Well, we now know the descendants of these followers of Menno as the Mennonites.
Oh, the Amish.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the Amish Light, as we like to call them in Texas.

Speaker 2 Because they would make their own clothes, but they would still wear Nikes and shop at Walmart. And they could have cell phones.
Yeah. And you got to take care of your feet, you know.
Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, yeah, I never got what the point of Mennonites was, but.
It's just bad social people. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Mennonites. I've actually, I think I knew some Mennonites.
It's interesting. It's technically like a very peaceful shoe.
Like it's kind of a Quaker-y thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Amongst those who still believed in the philosophy of violence were the parents of our villain, Euronymus Cornelis.

Speaker 2 For Euronymus, 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 All right, time to learn Korean.

Speaker 2 Ow!

Speaker 2 These letters are sharp.

Speaker 2 Now, after school, Euronimus became an apprentice to an apothecary on the road to becoming one himself.

Speaker 2 Apothecaries were in essence the pharmacists of their day, concocting potions and treatments from roots, herbs, and other exotic ingredients like animal excrement.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Oh, good, because I've been eating it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Your lungs, oh man, I can see them from here. They're healthy.
There's just nothing like just sitting there coughing and joking, just being like, hey, have some more horse shit.

Speaker 2 Like, listen, you don't seem to be feeling good.

Speaker 2 Have you had any horse shit today? Well, that's why Nick Nolte's still alive because he's always horse. Oh,

Speaker 2 yeah.

Speaker 2 Animal penises were also held in high regard by apothecaries. Dried boar penis, for example, supposedly reduced phlegm and balanced the humors.

Speaker 2 The way you used to do that was in the old-fashioned manual where you used to go,

Speaker 2 taking rid of the phlegm. Yeah, because a lot of the apothecary stuff,

Speaker 2 it was all around the four humors theory, you know, was that phlegm, blood, bile. What's the fourth one? Snooberance.
I think it was snoopers. Snooperance.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's how you get, it's when you get a bore throat. Yep.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Stupid. Fuck.

Speaker 2 But if you really wanted the top-of-the-line cure-all from an apothecary, it believed that nothing was better than ground-up mummy flesh. Mummy toast.
Oh, please. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, I try it once, you know, twice if you ask.

Speaker 2 It could probably get you sick. Yeah.
Interestingly, though, in addition to cures, apothecaries also made poisons. They were kind of exterminators.
They made rat poison and such.

Speaker 2 They did a lot of weird shit. Yeah.
I always remember for Romeo and Juliet. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 But as we'll see later, after the wreck of the Batavia, Euronymus was just as bad at making poisons as he was at the rest of the apothecary business.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 This is delicious. They're actually going to show later, like, he's bad at it.
It's like pepping up, he just accidentally makes delicious. He's like, wow, this is good.
This is crystal Pepsi.

Speaker 2 All right, you'll die any hour now. Yeah.
You're bad at making poison is you make them sick, but you don't kill them. And so they just sit there screaming and screaming in pain.

Speaker 2 Which, you know, isn't really the point.

Speaker 2 Unless it is. Unless it is.
Now, in addition to his bad business sense, Euronimus's personal life was also an absolute nightmare.

Speaker 2 The year before his business failed, he got married to another Anabaptist and settled in the Dutch city of Haarlem. His wife soon became pregnant, but the pregnancy was difficult.

Speaker 2 For some reason, Euronimus 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.

Speaker 2 Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2 I think that she was probably hot. That's what I was going to say.

Speaker 2 That was the issue here. I think that has been a husband issue since day one.
Yep. Since nannies existed.

Speaker 2 So when the baby finally came, the midwife mishandled the delivery and left the placenta in the womb of Euronymus' wife, which became infected and septic.

Speaker 2 The new mother was therefore unable to breastfeed. What? Yeah.
That's what happened when you leave the placenta up in? That's what can happen. You're supposed to take it out.
How does it affect?

Speaker 2 Has it clogged the tubes? I don't know. Yeah, you're supposed to take it out and you got to put it back in the front hole.
That's what I thought. Yeah.
And then you fold it back up. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. If you don't take it out, though, hard to keep singing and dancing.
I know that much. Did your your mom eat your placenta?

Speaker 2 Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 I don't think my mom even knows that that is a thing that people do.

Speaker 2 Did your mother eat your placenta? No, she ordered in.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Whose sandwich? His.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Within weeks, if the average 17th-century infantile death from syphilis is anything to go on, Euronymus's child died a horrible, horrible death. Funny story, I'm sure.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But concerning the woman who gave the baby syphilis, the author Batavia's graveyard speculates that Euronymus might have had an affair with her and contracted syphilis himself, which would partly explain his horrific behavior after the Batavia wrecked.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's because he didn't fully become who he was going to be until the moment came where he could finally blossom. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 Yeah, again, this may have just been one factor that unlocked Euronymus's true psychopathy.

Speaker 2 See, after the Batavia wrecked and its passengers and crew were stranded, Euronymus was definitely acting on a philosophy, and that philosophy was heavily influenced by a man named Johannes Torrentius.

Speaker 2 This guy's fascinating, too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, see, Torrentius was Euronymus's 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.

Speaker 2 He's the most actual Dutch person we've met so far.

Speaker 2 Well, 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.

Speaker 2 Something cool. Yeah.
He said he would place blank canvases on the floor, and the paintings would magically create themselves.

Speaker 2 Tarantius 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.

Speaker 2 He likes chicken.

Speaker 2 And Tarantius 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He was like, I'm just not feeling good right now. I'm not feeling very confident right now in myself.

Speaker 2 You know, I just reminded him, like, you're Satan. You know, you don't need to, you don't need all of this, Mishagush.

Speaker 2 You know, just feel good for yourself. Feel good by yourself.
And I really think you took it to heart in many ways. And he gave me five dicks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's pretty good. Pretty cool to be me.

Speaker 2 Three are on my body. Two were in my pocket.
Two were in my pocket.

Speaker 2 I made a bit of a stittle drum with them.

Speaker 2 Torintius, however, was not a Satanist. He was a Gnostic.
Which is basically a Satanist, according to these fucks. Agnostic means you don't believe in shit.
No. Gnostic.
Not agnostic.

Speaker 2 Gnostic. That meant that he believed that God and Satan were equal.
Yes. Oh, cool.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and since Torintius 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 Euronymus Cornelis?

Speaker 2 See, Gnostics believe that's why they're super controversial, is that all of their books were taken and hidden in caves, right? Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, those are all Gnostic works.

Speaker 2 The book of Enoch. Yes, and what it 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Before long, Euronymus was mixing Tarantius' Gnostic beliefs with Anabaptist dogma.

Speaker 2 And eventually, Euronymus 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What is even trees?

Speaker 2 But in 1628, the same year Euronymus went bankrupt, Tarentius finally wore out his welcome in Dutch high society.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 After Tarentius' trial, Dutch authorities declared that all suspected heretics be banished from the city of Haarlem, which ended up working to the advantage of Euronymus Cornelis.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it takes a while to kill someone with a 10-pound pussy. Very big pussy.
There's a lot lot of energy to draw upon. The baby didn't touch the sides.

Speaker 2 So, Euronym, 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.

Speaker 2 Now, the only explicit criteria to sign a VOC contract was that you should not be bankrupt, nor Catholic, nor infamous.

Speaker 2 Now, Euronymus was bankrupt, but he still still had a fairly high social status because he came from a wealthy family and he had connections.

Speaker 2 As such, a wealthy captain, who I'd imagined regretted this decision later, vouched for Euronymus to the VOC.

Speaker 2 Euronymus 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.

Speaker 2 So that was at the time, they didn't really know what they were getting involved in.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's what this guy's like. It's like no experience whatsoever.
He's just evil. Now being pre-evil.
Pre-evil. Pre-evil.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, he's definitely on the road.

Speaker 2 He's abandoned his ailing wife to, you know, she has to go make money. What is she going to do? And honestly, you spend an afternoon with her.
She is just.

Speaker 2 My baby is zero as I'm a bargain bitch all day.

Speaker 2 All day.

Speaker 2 Okay, so send me to Jakarta.

Speaker 2 Now, being an undermerchant made Geronimus a member of the upper class on a VOC ship. That upper class included upper merchants, bookkeepers, clerks, and their assistants.

Speaker 2 Basically, on a ship the size of the Batavia, you had about a dozen of these guys.

Speaker 2 And so Geronimus 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And in fact, they were one of the first companies to ever do so. Dude, I was like, looking at pictures of it.
Fucking insane. It's crazy.

Speaker 2 It's huge, right? I guess it's one of those where we all like, that's where all the thing comes from where we're like, people doubt that ancient man could have done specific giant things.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, how many people even died making the goddamn ship? A lot.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This, of course, helped with their strategy of flooding the zone. But besides just building them fast, the VOC also built them better.

Speaker 2 VOC ships were the most complex machines in existence at the time. Conveyances that maximized loading, cost, cargo space, and defense.

Speaker 2 And the Batavia was considered the top of the line when it came to VOC ships.

Speaker 2 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 average of eight months one way.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Measuring as long as a football field is wide, the Batavia had four decks, three masts, and 30 guns. Its upper works, this it sounds like the gaudiest fucking thing in the world.

Speaker 2 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, overawe the people of the East.

Speaker 2 What I love first is when a boat has tits on the front of it

Speaker 2 and it shows respect. It shows respect.
People respect the tits in the shop. That's Island.
They go and they look at it, they're like, whoa, look at those big tits. Yes, that's too busy for them.

Speaker 2 A lot of times they did have tits on the front. That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, like literally.

Speaker 2 Well, they also said specifically this boat because a lot of times they wouldn't put a lot of like juzh into these boats, but the Batavia, they're like, let's make this one nice.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the gentlemen 17 were like, fucking go all out with this ship. In all, the construction of the Batavia cost the modern equivalent of $13 million.

Speaker 2 But if all went well, it was expected to pay for itself a dozen times over.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But unfortunately for the VOC, the Batavia would not make it to the Indies even once. Spoiler!

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.
Castle Batavia.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they were going to just bring stuff to build him a house. There's shit there.
No.

Speaker 2 It's nutmeg.

Speaker 2 We got rocks.

Speaker 2 Not the good rocks. The good rocks.
Well, concerning treasure, the ship was loaded with boxes of silver, millions of dollars worth of the stuff. This is the Ocean's 11 style.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the silver was earmarked for trade with the locals in the Indies. But most impressive were the massive 500-pound wooden chests full of gilders, worth $32.5 million in today's currency.
One boat.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This is 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.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 we will meet the guy that's in charge of the money that will be on the boat. That is our main character,

Speaker 2 our Paul Rudd.

Speaker 2 And the Gentleman gentleman 17, they're not going on the trip. No, no, no, no.
Does Jeff Bezos work at the fucking Amazon factory?

Speaker 2 Every once in a while, he'll put on a little shower cap and the white hair. And he just kind of like goes like, oh, it's crazy.
Golf balls.

Speaker 2 Now, the captain of the Batavia was a man named Ariana Jakobs. Jakobs was in his mid-40s, which actually made him one of the oldest men on the Batavia.
This is our Nick Nolty. Yeah.
God damn it.

Speaker 2 God fucking damn it. Fucking ship.

Speaker 2 That is what this guy is. He's a salty dog, man.
Yep. Jakobs was a quick-tempered alcoholic rapist, but an excellent sailor nonetheless.
It's kind of like makes me one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's the whole thing. It's redundant.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now, this is our Paul Rudd. 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.

Speaker 2 And his whole list is going to rest on Pelsart's shoulders. I got a feeling his family is going to get killed.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He'd been hired at the lowest merchant rank, but had worked his way up because he had a knack for languages and was particularly skilled at negotiation.

Speaker 2 This guy, I mean, he's just some dude, but he knew how to speak like Urdu. He knew how to speak fucking a whole bunch of different languages.

Speaker 2 But he also was a guy that was kind of like, he was viewed as charming.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He's a salesman, but he's a fuck-up. He's a constant fuck-up.
Well, Pelsart, well, actually, no, Pelsard was not a constant fuck-up. I mean,

Speaker 2 his sometimes.

Speaker 2 Every once in a while, he fucked up. It's the penis.

Speaker 2 It's the penis. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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, the British might fight.

Speaker 2 I guess when they don't really wear jeans like we do.

Speaker 2 Pelsart's weakness, however, was women. The ladies.
And his dalliances once almost cost the VOC dearly. While negotiating at a court in India, Pelsart seduced a noble woman.

Speaker 2 But just before sex, she mistook a bottle of clove oil for a bottle of wine and after drinking the whole thing homie come on i mean you can only be so responsible

Speaker 2 you can't tell the difference between wine and clove oil i don't know

Speaker 2 she fucking after they fucked she dropped dead oh shit oh man

Speaker 2 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 taste you could do you know use their fucking their version version of sex workers, them.

Speaker 2 You can 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 ended up being more attractive.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 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 did we have the clove oil? I don't know.
Fucking hate cloves.

Speaker 2 No, and he immediately went into this like cliche. Like, she's fucking young, man.
You gotta help me. Yeah, you gotta help me.
She was normal before.

Speaker 2 You gotta help me out, man. You think it's time to get some new shit, you think? Huh? It's a fucking second girl.
Don't need not me this week, man. Lucky he had a boat full of lady murderers.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Not so secretly. We're talking about it now.
Oh, now we're ruining the secret.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 As the common VOC saying went, there were no Ten Commandments south of the equator.

Speaker 2 I'm going to steal that.

Speaker 2 When do you go south of the equator? When we go to Australia? No, I don't know. Is there Ten Commandments and Australia? When do you follow the Ten Commandments? Well, I don't murder.

Speaker 2 I don't. Well, I covet.

Speaker 2 I guess I make fun of my mom. Yeah.
But also, I love her. I do honor her in a way.
But

Speaker 2 you're all about false idols. I'll tell you that.
You really are.

Speaker 2 And so with Francisco Pelsart acting as the leader of the expedition as upper merchant, Ariana Jakobs as captain following Pelsart's orders, and Euronymus Corneles 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.

Speaker 2 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 like a whole

Speaker 2 scandal, like a whole thing that I didn't even want to go into. But yeah, he's like,

Speaker 2 this is like last chance time for Francisco. This is a very, because he's on, because it's a horrible run.
You don't want, it's a real nice ship, but it is a rough fucking run.

Speaker 2 He does not want to be on this. So you have him, you have Ariana Jakobs, who literally, he's got a, he's fucking, what's his name? He's about to retire.

Speaker 2 This is his last, this is supposed to be his last trip. Oh, he's our Danny Glover.
Yeah, but he's like, he's nebulous, right?

Speaker 2 He's kind of, but his whole thing is like, this is 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.

Speaker 2 Then you have Euronymus, who's a psychopath that we don't know yet.

Speaker 2 I know you said it earlier, but how many people are on the boat? Well, that's what I was about to get into.

Speaker 2 These three men made up just a fraction of the Batavia's full passenger manifest. And all the Batavia was loaded with 340 people.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 For the most part, the soldiers were German, but their ranks included men from France, Scotland, England, and the Netherlands.

Speaker 2 They were largely untrained, and from what it sounds like, they lived by prison rules in prison-like conditions while aboard the Batavia.

Speaker 2 For example, casual violence and thievery 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.

Speaker 2 And also, they didn't always bugger each other. Mostly, they saved that for the cabin boys.
Yep.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Everyone else, get better or die. As far as where they lived, soldiers' quarters were on the orelop, the lowest deck of the ship.

Speaker 2 The ceilings in the orelop 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.

Speaker 2 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 orelop.

Speaker 2 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.
That's kind of Well, that's also a good thing.

Speaker 2 It's like a push-up side.

Speaker 2 Well, also, to be honest, that's why you send so many. Yeah.
So that you can lose 15%.

Speaker 2 Like, literally. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They're expendable. Remember, everyone on this boat is expendable.
They're expendable. Yeah.
Nobody's care. Nobody gives a shit.
Yeah, we got it if any one of these guys come back. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's the Jet Lee's, the Dolph Lundgrens of it. This is what I'm saying.
It's Oceans 11. Nobody's going to miss any of these fuckers.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 As a result, I'd imagine the Orlop developed quite the interesting aroma after a few voyages. Oh, yeah.
Oh, my Uber is here. I wonder if the.

Speaker 2 Also, what they would do is the treasure room. So that was also what I loved is that all the money and all the jewels because also Pelsart was bringing his own personal jewels.

Speaker 2 He had a collection of something like 75 grand of jewels that were kept in this specific safe room that was behind the Orlop.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 No, they didn't. Oh, no, they would be the bad stuff.
No, that's the whole point: is that where the soul, like the place where the soldiers were brought to the Andies, they would just

Speaker 2 cops of that place. Yeah, and on the way back, that hold was filled with spice.
Okay, good. And then, but ostensibly, the ship would go again.
So then it's just going to get worse and worse.

Speaker 2 So it just starts smelling like nutmeg, shit, piss, you know, body odor and cloves. Yeah, like being in Santa's pants.

Speaker 2 The Washington Commander's locker room. room.

Speaker 2 Now, the soldiers were the lowest station aboard the Batavia, but the ones right above them, the sailors, weren't much higher.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I don't care if I die. I don't know who I am.
Me neither. Yeah, me neither.
Row one guy.

Speaker 2 To be lower than a sailor.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Some people have

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Let me suck on your eyeballs. I just honestly, just for fun, just for something different.
I'd place it at the open source that you're covered at. Oh,

Speaker 2 oh, now I forget.

Speaker 2 If they're not open, you can't feed them.

Speaker 2 Little mo.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Try to try to try to keep them separate.

Speaker 2 Put them up in the crow's nest. They would give them little hours.
They would be allowed to go up top. They would allow to go up top.
Everyone would have to leave.

Speaker 2 They were allowed to go up top and then they have to go back down.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We are an extension of the Netherlands. And this boat will

Speaker 2 remain

Speaker 2 orderly 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'd try real hard to not die.

Speaker 2 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 Indy or the East Indies, yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Many reasons.

Speaker 2 Other passengers on the Batavia's maiden voyage included a 52-year-old Calvinist minister named Gisbert Bastions, who had brought along his wife, seven children, and their servants.

Speaker 2 Minister Bastions was headed to the Indies not as a missionary, but to serve the Dutch coloners who'd made a home there.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 He's gonna get it bad.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Apparently, one in five Dutch ships that were built crashed on this sandbank and fucking sank.

Speaker 2 And this is kind of like, so Pelsart and Jacobs immediately had sort of that antagonistic relationship because Jacobs was kind of like, he didn't, but he got stuck and he showed, he's like, I'm an old sea.

Speaker 2 It's like, I'm an old sea dog and I'll tell you how to do this. And he saved the boat.
And everyone's like, oh, okay, maybe things will be fine. Yeah, Captain.
Where was the sandbank?

Speaker 2 Was it by Europe or Africa? It's right outside. It's right outside of the Netherlands.
It's so aggravating.

Speaker 2 But the ship was saved by Captain Jakobs' excellent instruction.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 From what it seems, though, during that six months on the water, Euronymus Cornelis became friendly with Captain Jakobs 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.

Speaker 2 He was trying to cut off, 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.

Speaker 2 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. Yeah.
For some reason, they got hammered.

Speaker 2 Well, it's like the varsity team beats up the JV team. But they're on the same team.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm part of the same school, but like I play football. You play baseball.
I'm going to slap you.

Speaker 2 Basically.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This naturally led to some resentment amongst the crew, especially the soldiers.

Speaker 2 Because now it's like, well, you're not going to get two and a half weeks anymore to know breathe fresh air and be a human you now have a little over a week perhaps not coincidentally it's also around this time that captain jakobs and euronymus corneles 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 two man it just builds so now it's gonna build because you remember like we're gonna see what causes them to kind of put together what it's like to plan a mutiny.

Speaker 2 And how it all gets fucking just destroyed in a second. I love that it's already horrible, but it gets worse.
No.

Speaker 2 You have no idea how bad it's going to get. These guys go straight to hell.
Yeah. I'm like, not even joking.
These guys are going straight to hell. No, it is a full descent into hell.

Speaker 2 It's as much as I've ever seen.

Speaker 2 But the families will be fine.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
The women and children do great. They do great.
Yeah. Yeah.
You ever heard of Menudo?

Speaker 2 That came from this.

Speaker 2 That was the kids.

Speaker 2 From this.

Speaker 2 They became Menudo.

Speaker 2 Wow. And then, yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, shit. Yeah.
And then, you know, Live and Live Eat a logo.

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, over there.
And, you know, now he's an actor.

Speaker 2 Incredible. Yeah.
All from all from the Batavia. Let's just say we have no idea how long this is going to be.
But it's going to be not that long. Mm-hmm.
Right? It's going to be, you know.

Speaker 2 A couple episodes. Yeah, definitely.
A few. It's going to be a few episodes.
I'm very excited with this fucking shit because it's about about to get really fucking gnarly immediately. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But you'll see. If you go to patreon.com slash slash podcast enough, you could watch us scream about it and have our jaws flopping around.

Speaker 2 Wait, you already pay for that money. And you go to LP on the left and TikTok and Instagram, for some reason, they're still there.
Yeah. So you want to go look at that.

Speaker 2 That's good for advertising. Yes, we know.
And then twitch.tv slash LPNTV. Go and watch our streams.

Speaker 2 Such as not tonight. Yesterday we did Hoopa Google, but it will soon be on YouTube.
Yes, it'll be on YouTube. And then then you can see the next live hoopagoogoo on February 6th, 6 p.m.

Speaker 2 Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern.
And that is, of course, starring Mr. Ed Larson.
Yes!

Speaker 2 I was on the last Hoopa Google. Dr.
Nurse. Yeah, Mr.
Nurse. Mr.
Nurse. Yeah, Mr.
Nurse, the musical accompaniment. Yes, yeah.
Wonderful music. Thank you.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 I played the best Christmas music my synth could make.

Speaker 2 Also, we're going to be in Dallas on February 22nd,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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. Yeah, fuck you.

Speaker 2 I dare you to show up.

Speaker 2 Because we are asking you to. Yeah.
And I will put you on the list. That's right.
I will put you on the list and I will spank myself.

Speaker 2 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. And at the end of June, we're coming back to Atlanta for our rescheduled date.
Yep.

Speaker 2 I cannot wait to see all of you. Can't wait.
Can't wait to see y'all on the high seas.

Speaker 2 I don't want to go, and I'm not going to go. Yeah.

Speaker 2 On the high seas? Yeah, I'm not going to the high seas. No, you are.
You actually, you actually.

Speaker 2 You actually had a meeting today specifically about you going on the high seas. Yeah, the crime wave.

Speaker 2 I still feel like a low sea. I think it's low sea.
Yeah, Henry and I are going to do a cruise that we're going to announce it next week, and you'll be able to buy tickets and meal off.

Speaker 2 You're going to come see us on a 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. Yeah.
I'm going to stay home.

Speaker 2 We understand. As you should.
Hail Satan, everyone. Cokey.
Hail Peter. Yeah.
Yeah. I was hoping you would.
For seven in the book. Yeah.
Oh, that is.

Speaker 2 I was hoping you would. Peter, I see you in there, Peter.
Peter, let me suck it, dick.

Speaker 2 I was so good, Dick.

Speaker 2 I bet he's feeling a lot of conflicted feelings right now because he did get chatted out by his favorite podcast, but then he's also having to relive probably the lifelong trauma about his name.

Speaker 2 Being a computer, yeah. Yeah.
But you know what you're going to do. It's double-edged sword.
Life sucks. See you later.
Bye, Peter. Bye here.

Speaker 2 Tires matter.

Speaker 4 They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road. Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Speaker 4 Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy. Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options.

Speaker 4 Go to tire rack.com to see tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews. And be sure to check out all the special offers.
TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.

Speaker 6 Try angel stuff for your tushi.

Speaker 2 It's made by angels. Soft and strong, budget-friendly.

Speaker 2 The choice is simple. A roll that feels like paradise.
And always at a heavenly price.

Speaker 2 Angel Soft, Angel Soft. Soft and strong, so it's simple.

Speaker 6 Pick up a pack today.

Speaker 2 Angelsoft. Soft and strong, simple.