Batavia

In the 16th and 17th centuries the Dutch were northern Europe's leading shipbuilders, innovating in design with the fluyt and in technology with the windmill-driven sawmill. They still built by the bottom-based sequence, shaping and laying the lower planking edge to edge before the frames went in, so the planks set the shape of the hull - the same method used on medieval cogs. Ships of the Dutch East India Company were generally built in the company's own yards to charters that specified key hull dimensions and the sizes of the scantlings, but which never amounted to plans or drawings of the hull's shape.

Unlike ships built for the European trade, VOC East Indiamen were planked with a double skin of oak, sheathed with a double layer of pine incorporating tar and animal hair and closely spaced iron nails to keep out the teredo worm. Batavia's length-to-beam ratio was 4.4 to 1, narrower than her predecessors - a 1619 VOC charter gives 3.9 to 1 - and part of a trend to narrower designs early in the century, at a time when 3 to 1 would not have been unusual. Like other Dutch ships of the day she was built of oak imported from the forests bordering the Vistula.

She may have been one of two ships specified in the VOC charter of 29 March 1626; these vessels normally took eighteen months to build. The name Batavia was chosen on 29 June 1628, and the company pushed to have her ready for the next fleet of six ships due to leave that September or October. She would be its flagship.

Batavia sailed from Texel on 29 October 1628 for the Dutch East Indies to buy spices. Her orders were to use the Brouwer Route, which ran well south of a direct course to Jakarta; with no way to measure longitude it was hard to judge when to turn north, and a late turn risked the coast of Australia. She sailed under commander and senior merchant Francisco Pelsaert with Ariaen Jacobsz as skipper - two men who had already fallen out at Dutch Suratte, where Pelsaert had publicly dressed Jacobsz down for drunkenly insulting him in front of other merchants.

Also aboard was the junior merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz, a bankrupt apothecary from Haarlem fleeing the Netherlands in fear of arrest for heretical beliefs associated with the painter Johannes van der Beeck. By Pelsaert's account, Jacobsz and Cornelisz planned to seize the ship and its gold and silver. After the Cape of Good Hope, Jacobsz is alleged to have steered deliberately off course and away from the fleet, and the plotters staged the sexual assault of a prominent passenger, Lucretia Jans, hoping Pelsaert's discipline would look unjust and win them recruits. Jans could not identify her attackers.

On 4 June 1629 Batavia struck Morning Reef near Beacon Island in the Houtman Abrolhos, off the western coast of Australia. Of the 322 aboard most got ashore, but 40 drowned. The survivors, including all the women and children, were ferried to nearby islands in the ship's longboat and yawl, where an initial survey found no fresh water and little food beyond sea lions and birds.

Pelsaert took the longboat to look for water. It was a little over nine metres long, its sides raised with extra planks for barely two feet of freeboard, rigged with one mast and ten oars, and dangerously overloaded with 48 people - everyone who knew there was no water at the wreck insisted on staying with the boat. After failing to find water on the mainland they headed north. Pelsaert's journal records landing around 15 June at a latitude he guessed at 23 degrees south, where water was found, and notes the termite mounds and the plague of flies. The voyage of nearly 3,000 kilometres took 33 days and everyone survived.

Behind them, Cornelisz took charge of the survivors by virtue of his VOC rank, having drifted for two days after the ship broke up. He commandeered all weapons and food, then moved a group of soldiers under Wiebbe Hayes to West Wallabi Island, roughly 8.7 km to the northwest, on the pretext of searching for water and expecting them to die there. He never killed anyone himself; he coerced others, usually on the pretext that the victim had committed some crime, planning to cut the island's population to about 45 so supplies would last. His followers murdered at least 110 men, women and children. A small number of women were kept as sex slaves.

Hayes's men had in fact found good water and food. They learned of the killings from survivors fleeing Beacon Island, made weapons from wreckage washed ashore, set a watch and built a small fort of limestone and coral blocks. Cornelisz sent men to destroy them and lost the fights - his people were half-starved and the soldiers were not - and when he came himself to bring Hayes under his command, Hayes took him hostage. The survivors regrouped under Wouter Loos and nearly carried the fort with muskets, just as Sardam appeared. A race to the rescue ship followed; Hayes reached her first and told Pelsaert what had happened.

Pelsaert held the trial on the spot, because Sardam would have been overcrowded with survivors and prisoners on the return voyage. The worst offenders were taken to Seal Island; Cornelisz and several of his men had both hands chopped off before being hanged, and so became the first Europeans legally executed in Australia. Loos and a cabin boy, Jan Pelgrom de Bye, judged minor offenders, were marooned on the mainland and never heard of again, which makes them the first Europeans to live permanently on the Australian continent - the place is now thought to be Wittecarra Creek near Kalbarri.

The remaining mutineers went to Batavia for trial, where five were hanged and others flogged, keelhauled or dropped from the yardarm on the voyage home. Cornelisz's second, Jacop Pietersz, was broken on the wheel. Jacobsz was tortured but never confessed and escaped execution for lack of evidence; what became of him is unknown. A board of inquiry found Pelsaert had shown a lack of authority and seized his assets, and he died within a year. Hayes was made a sergeant and his men corporals. Of the people who had sailed from Texel, only 122 reached the port of Batavia.

Pelsaert also had salvage to do. Each ship of the class carried an estimated 250,000 guilders in twelve wooden chests of about 8,000 silver coins each, mostly rijksdaalder struck by the individual Dutch states with a remainder from German cities such as Hamburg. Hauling the chests up proved difficult; by 13 November 1629 ten had been recovered, some 80,000 coins, with one jammed under a cannon and one broken open by Cornelisz's men.

Surveying the Abrolhos for the British Admiralty in April 1840, Captain John Lort Stokes reported beams of a large vessel on the southwest point of an island and thought them likely to be Batavia. In the 1950s the historian Henrietta Drake-Brockman argued from archival work that the wreck must lie in the Wallabi group, and in 1963 the lobster fisherman David Johnson sighted it. Systematic excavation ran through the 1970s in punishing conditions - Indian Ocean swell prevented diving on 173 of the 447 days spent on site.

About 20 tonnes of hull timber came up, roughly 3.5 per cent of the original ship, along with port-side stern timbers, cannon, an anchor, four astrolabes, pottery, weapons, cooking gear and trade goods. Batavia is the only early 17th-century VOC wreck whose surviving hull components have been retrieved, conserved and studied in detail; the timbers were mounted on a steel frame so that individual pieces could be removed for treatment. In 1972 the Dutch government transferred rights over Dutch wrecks in Australian waters to Australia. From 2015 researchers unearthed skeletons on Beacon Island, and a five-year international study reported the remains of twelve victims in individual and mass graves, with evidence of a fierce struggle.

The story has been retold ever since. Drake-Brockman's Voyage to Disaster appeared in 1963, Hugh Edwards's Islands of Angry Ghosts in 1966, Mike Dash's Batavia's Graveyard in 2001 and Peter FitzSimons's Batavia in 2011; there have been documentaries, novels, an album by the ensemble Flairck and a song by Deströyer 666. The developer of the reality show The Traitors, Jasper Hoogendoorn, said in 2023 that the programme's original concept was strongly influenced by it. A replica built between 1985 and 1995 using 17th-century materials and methods is moored as a museum ship at Lelystad, and many of the artefacts are held at the Western Australian Shipwrecks Museum in Fremantle.