The Batavia

By Isabel Satti

The Batavia

It was the twenty- eighth of October 1628 when the Batavia set sail from the Netherlands for the trade of spices from Indonesia. The three hundred and forty-one people on board had no idea how bad Jeronimus Cornelisz was. They crashed on a reef and had to go to an Island.

• The reason the Batavia crashed was the person watching at night saw the waves breaking and told the captain. The captain said that it was just the moon shining on the waves. He was wrong. It was not Jeronimus Cornelisz like the people on board the ship thought.

The Batavia got broken on the reef. It couldn’t get off because the tide was as high as it was going to get. If it was low tide they could say that when the tide rose they would float off. The people on board decided to make lighter by throwing things into the sea but it didn’t work. Eventually they gave up and swam to land. Not everyone could swim, and some drowned. Jeronimus told some people to leave their weapons and go get water. Some other survivors ended up on one of the Abrolhos Islands: Beacon Island.