Month: November 2024

Distilled to its essence, capitalism and communism fractionate based upon one overarching worldview. Now, I realize I’m oversimplifying. College professors and political scientists have built entire careers out of these nuances.

Despotic ideologues have slaughtered millions along the way. However, if you were called upon to compare and contrast the foundational differences between these disparate worldviews, I would propose that it is this: Capitalists believe that people are innately bad. Communists believe that people are innately good. Everything else stems from that.

By way of example, communists believe that, if left to their own devices, mankind will come together selflessly and work toward a common goal for the greater good. By contrast, capitalists espouse that humans will forever strive to improve their individual lot. As a card-carrying conservative capitalist myself, I can attest that communists are delusional and that human greed is the most powerful engine in the known universe.

Properly harnessed, however, capitalism has brought us such stuff as Mars robots, smartphones, supersonic airplanes, GPS-guided bombs and silicone breast implants. Now, to illustrate my point …

A 17th-Century Case Study

Launched in 1628, the Batavia was the flagship of the Dutch East India Company. On her maiden voyage, she carried 341 passengers and crew along with a dozen treasure chests full of silver and a load of precious gems. She was bound for Batavia, her namesake, in the Dutch East Indies. The mission was to deposit the passengers, swap the valuables for spices, and return to Europe, making the East India shareholders filthy rich in the process.

Unbeknownst to Capt. Francisco Pelsaert, an East India official named Jeronimus Cornelisz was plotting a mutiny. Cornelisz’s nefarious plan involved stealing the ship and associated swag and using it to embark on a newfound career in piracy. His ultimate life goal was to start a new nation someplace in his own image. Clearly, everyone involved was a devout capitalist.

The rumor was that Cornelisz sabotaged their navigation but legitimately screwed it up in the process. The Batavia subsequently struck Morning Reef near Beacon Island off the western coast of Australia. It took a while for the tides and surf to tear the ship apart. Of the 341 souls on board, 301 survived to reach the nearby island. The remaining 40 drowned.A fair amount of the original treasure that remained in the Batavia wreck has since been recovered. Photo by Guy de la Bedivere.

Things Get Real

These small islands offered no fresh water and little protein, aside from sea lions and birds. The captain and a small contingent struck out in a 30-foot longboat in search of Batavia and help. The rest of the survivors were left under the command of Jeronimus Cornelisz, who turned out to be a psychopath.

Cornelisz, the aspiring pirate, consolidated all weapons and food under his personal control. He then dispatched the soldiers in the group led by a man named Wiebbe Hayes in another small boat to nearby islands, ostensibly to find water. His tacit hope was that these 20 or so guys would just die.

With limited resources and a lot of mouths to feed, Cornelisz then directed his subordinates to start killing the survivors. At first, he contrived legal charges against his victims like theft or hoarding. Eventually, however, they began killing for fun. When the dust settled, Cornelisz and his band of cutthroats had murdered 110 men, women and children. A few of the comelier lasses they kept on as sex slaves.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the Hayes expedition did indeed find food and potable water on nearby West Wallabi Island. They communicated this back to the main group via prearranged smoke signals. Now Cornelisz was in a bit of a spot.

Meanwhile, after an arduous 33 days at sea in their small boat, Cpt. Pelsaert actually arrived at Batavia. The local Governor-General, Jan Peterson Coen, immediately gave him command of the ship Sardam. While his mission was to rescue the shipwreck survivors, the good governor also asked that he perhaps bring back all that treasure while he was at it. It took Pelsaert a further 30 days or so to find the right islands again.

At least one survivor of the massacre on Beacon Island made it over to West Wallabi with the horrific news. Hayes and his men had no weapons. They were, however, trained soldiers, so they set about building a fort and fashioning implements of violence from materials that had washed up from the wreck.

By now, Hayes’ troops were relatively well-fed, while those of Cornelis were quite peckish. Despite only one side having access to muskets, Hayes’ men successfully withstood several amphibious assaults. It was, however, quite the iffy thing. Much blood was spilled and in a most brutal fashion.

Hayes eventually took Cornelisz hostage just as the Sardam arrived. With the assistance of the guns and crew of the Sardam, Cornelisz’s mutineers were subdued. Here’s where the real fun began.

Actions Have Consequences …

Cpt. Pelsaert was none too pleased to hear the sordid details of what Cornelisz and company had been up to in his absence. He held a cursory trial and then remanded Cornelisz and his primary henchmen to nearby Seal Island. There, his sailors chopped off the offenders’ hands and hanged them to a man.

Two of the lesser mutineers, one of whom was a cabin boy named Jan Pelgrom de Bye, were marooned on the Australian mainland and never heard from again. These were actually the first two European criminals to be abandoned on this curious continent. There would eventually be many more.

The remaining mutineers were transported to Batavia for proper trials. Five were hanged. Several others were keelhauled, flogged or dropped from the yardarm. This last punishment involved being suspended from the ship’s superstructure by a rope and dunked repeatedly into the ocean while underway. Think waterboarding on steroids. Cornelisz’s primary lieutenant, Jacop Pietersz, was broken on the wheel. Being broken saw one lashed to a wagon wheel and having your arms and legs crushed and then threaded through the spokes. That would suck.

Ruminations

Of the original complement, only 122 survived to reach Batavia in peace. A subsequent tribunal found Cpt. Pelsaert to have been partially responsible for the chaos. He, therefore, had his financial assets seized. Pleaser succumbed to disease within a year. Wiebbe Hayes was promoted to sergeant and rightfully hailed a hero.

Over the course of four years in the early 1970s, the Batavia was raised and subsequently preserved in the Shipwreck Galleries in Freemantle, Western Australia. Preservationists recovered 20 tons of timber, an anchor, multiple cannons and scads of other ore mundane stuff, including four navigational astrolabes. The sordid story of the Batavia and her crew serves simply to illustrate that, if left to our own devices, human beings are indeed reliably bad.