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I recently read Voyage to Disaster by Henrietta Drake-Brockman which I bought last year when I was going through a bit of a shipwreck phase . In case you’re not familiar with the story, basically what happened is this; in 1629 the Dutch East India Company’s ship hit a reef in the vicinity of the the Houtman Abrolhos just off the West Australian coast. About 268 people survived the wreck and were marooned on small low lying islands. Unfortunately they were marooned with a complete psychopath called Jeronimus Cornelisz who manipulated those around him to murder 125 survivors, including women and children

Think Lord of the Flies, only a thousand times grislier, three hundred years earlier, non-fictional, and heavy with appendices

There is a lot of this, ‘Jeronimus Cornelisz gave me a beaker of wine and a dagger and told me to stab Jansz/Hansz/Fransz to death so I did’ and the various testimonials, witness accounts, and final verdicts blur into a redundant and repetitive list of slaughter until you begin to feel as though they’ve killed several thousand people

In reading this, I did wonder if the villains had not been brought to justice, and had in fact succeeded in seizing either the Batavia or the rescue yacht Sardam, and gone on their murdering merry way as pirates as they’d planned, whether they would have been viewed differently. Because everyone likes a mass murdering pirate but mass murdering mass murderers are decidedly uncool

On a more cheery note, I discovered that you can eat bird’s nests and that decks and gun-ports were painted red to make bloodshed seem less shocking, in similar vein to British redcoats

This book is a good source of historical documents. The writing didn’t come to life for me (probably just as well, I didn’t sleep well as it was). I don’t know if it was the odd way in which things were sequenced or the fusty style of writing (to be fair, the author was born close to the start of last century) but it was at times fairly tedious. Which is not good when you have a story that virtually writes itself

Overall it was a bit too much for me, just in terms of humans being a lamentable bunch of no-hopers