I Had Heard Of The Wreck Of The Batavia,

but I have never actually read about it, until now,

illustration by GL Archive/Alamy Stock, it is a scene of bloodshed, horror and murder, the Batavia started out as a brand-new ship of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). With 341 people on board, she departed the Netherlands in October 1628 on her maiden voyage, bound for what is now Jakarta, Indonesia. But after sailing for thousands of kilometres, she smashed into a reef near Beacon Island in June 1629. Dozens of passengers died attempting to swim ashore. Finding the island bereft of fresh water, the Batavia’s captain, Francisco Pelsaert, set out to sea in a small boat to seek help, and then in his absence the mutiny started, the full horror of which is now only fully coming to light thanks to the determination of Daniel Franklin, the munity was lead by Jeronimus Cornelisz, the ship’s junior merchant, historians have theorized that Cornelisz sought to take the ship’s treasure and become a pirate,

photograph courtesy of Daniel Franklin, it was his belief in archaeological deduction, that meant that decades after a skull was found in the sand on Beacon Island off the coast of Australia, forensic anthropologist Daniel Franklin managed to liberate the rest of this skeleton from beneath a fisherman’s hut, a small teardrop-shaped piece of skull, the fragment slotted perfectly into a hole that mars the right side of the cranium excavated 51 years earlier, more or less proving they had found the right bones, the teardrop bone fragment, say Franklin and his colleagues in a paper about the discovery, suggests this person died from a heavy blow to the head, likely with a bladed weapon. Large fractures elsewhere around the cranium hint they suffered two or perhaps three other forceful injuries, “Whoever killed this person, they did a very thorough job,” says Franklin. “It was a very violent end.” Which was the fate of many of the nearly 200 men, women, and children died or were murdered under Cornelisz’s command, while some of the younger women were raped and kept as sex slaves, I had no idea of the terror that befell the passengers on the ill fated Batavia, to read the full story have a look here.