When they came to unknown waters the masters and helmsmen of the early modern era had to rely on their experience and their knowledge of wind and current. They did have some charts, since in the 17th century VOC captains had charted a good deal of the west and south coasts of Australia.

 

The sailing orders from the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia instructed vessels ‘at latitude 40 degrees South or thereabouts, where a strong west wind blows, to maintain an easterly course to the longitude of the island of Java and then sail northwards to the Sunda Strait’. In practice, however, the ships often held their easterly course for too long, believing they were still in the open sea, far from land, while in fact they were close to the west coast of Australia. And once there, escape was impossible, because the west wind drove the unwieldy vessels relentlessly towards the rocks. At least four VOC ships foundered on that treacherous coast and the castaways endured dreadful privations.

 

On 4 June 1629, the Batavia, under the command of Francisco Pelsaert, struck a string of islets surrounded by coral reefs, known to the Dutch as ‘Frederick Houtman’s rocks’. While Pelsaert tried to fetch help from Batavia, a band of the remaining sailors turned to mutiny and murder. In a bloodbath unparalleled in the annals of Dutch seafaring, forty conspirators killed 115 of the shipwrecked crew. Back home, the story made such a stir that a book detailing the horrors was published in 1648.

 

In 1656, the Vergulde Draeck ran aground on a reef. The ship broke in half, and 118 members of the crew (and the cargo) were lost. The second mate and six of the crew headed for Batavia in a small open boat to fetch help, leaving 68 survivors to fend for themselves on the barren coast. When the boat reached Batavia five weeks later, several rescue expeditions set off immediately. None found any trace of the ship or the crew.

 

The outward voyage of the Zuytdorp, with a cargo that included ducats and bars of gold and silver, was clearly doomed from the start. After leaving Vlissingen in 1711, the Zuytdorp was becalmed in the Gulf of Guinea where many of the crew sickened and died. It never reached Batavia, but was crushed against 30-metre high rocks on the Australian coast. On 9 June 1727, the Zeewijk, commanded by Jan Steyns, was wrecked on the coral islands of Houtman’s Abrolhos. The crew built a new vessel from the wreckage, and managed to reach Batavia.

 

It was not until well into the 20th century that marine archaeologists found and examined the wrecks of the Batavia, the Vergulde Draeck, the Zuytdorp and the Zeewijk.