In 1629, the Dutch East India Company launched a large merchant
ship, the Batavia, on her maiden voyage to Java and the Dutch East
Indies. With nearly three hundred souls aboard and a wealth
of gold and gems to stimulate the spice trade, the Batavia plied
the Indian Ocean, suffered a serious mutiny, and ran aground on a
small series of flat islands off the west coast
of Australia. How the mutiny affected the balance of power
of these liferaft islands while the Batavia's skipper sailed north
for help in an open lifeboat, how the frightened survivors
succumbed to human treachery even as they fought the elements and
struggled to scrape enough food out of a bleak circumstance, and
how some measure of justice was attained for the spilling of the
blood of innocents, are the fundaments of Dash's story, but Dash
also explains how the Dutch East India Company was critical to the
booming economy of Amsterdam, and how various religious schisms
within the chaos of the Protestant Reformation created class
differentials that revealed themselves not only in the home port,
but also in the composition
of the crew and guard soldiers launching the mercantile revolution
towards the other fertile continents.
A fullscale replica of the Batavia has been built and now sits at
harbor at Australia's National Maritime Museum in Sydney. I
visited this ship a little over a year ago, and could not get the
images of it out of my head as I imagined what it must have been
like with almost 300 passengers aboard. By today's coddled
standards, the Batavia would accommodate about fifty
people before terminal claustrophobia set in.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzer |
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