Dark Histories

In 1628, the Batavia, a flagship Dutch Indiaman left the port of Texel in the Netherlands bound for the Dutch capital in the East Indies filled to the upper decks with gold, silver, gems and jewellery, along with a crew made up of a host of down and out soldiers, sailors and officers. Life in the Dutch East India Company was notoriously hard, but the crew aboard the Batavia were in for a special kind of torture, when the ship was wrecked off the Western Coast of Australia, leading to several months of indescribable bloodshed and violence at the hands of an especially twisted Commander.   SOURCES   van Duivenvoorde, Wendy (2015) Dutch East India Company Shipbuilding: The Archaeological Study of Batavia and Other Seventeenth-Century VOC Ships. Texas A&M University Press, USA.   Dash, Mike (2003) Batavia’s Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny. Crown Publishing Group, NY, USA.   Fitzsimmons, Peter (2011) Batavia. William Heinemann Publishing, Australia -----