Paul Taylor - Australian Ripping Yarns: Cannibal Convicts, Macabre Murders, Wanton Women, and Living Legends

Australian Ripping Yarns

Cannibal Convicts, Macabre Murders, Wanton Women & Living Legends

Paul Taylor

Preface

A Ripping Yarn is a true story, or a purportedly true story, heard or read with the mouth agape. The lips move now and then, involuntarily. Awe, fear, astonishment, revulsion, excitement sometimes even humour: the words that come out depend on upbringing, and the category of the Ripping Yarn.

Yarns that curdle the blood and send a shudder up the spine, such as the diabolical saga of the Batavia the convicts who ate one anotherthe penal death camps, or sadistic serial killers, will draw instant, powerful responses often expletives deleted in polite conversation.

Other yarns may be quirky and amusing. Lola Montez, the firecracker who flogged the Ballarat newspaper editor, or Percy Grainger the eccentric composer who flogged himself and his lady friends, trigger an irresistible titter. Heroic yarns of superhuman endeavour bring reverent responses. Tales of sporting derring-do stimulate our vernaculars you-little-beauty! reaction.

The Ripping Yarns in this book are true. But for the most part, sadly, they are not the stories history teachers tell. John Norton, its safe to say, is someone few know. Yet the rambunctious life of this outstanding scoundrel sums up the best and the worst of Sydney at the turn of the 19th century.

The tales or myths of the romantic, and perhaps not coincidentally, handsome, outlaws Matthew Brady, Ben Hall and Ned Kelly, passed over in a few paragraphs in the history books, nonetheless vividly reveal the social structure, the morals, and the mores of their time, and help explain the legacy they have left us.

Other characters, such as the inimitable confidence trickster Arthur Orton, leave us marvelling at the gullibility of the Victorian era but then invite us to reflect on the adulation we give to the Alan Bonds of our own day. John Giles Price, the inhuman commandant gratifyingly beaten to death by convicts from the hell hulks at Williamstown, reminds us of the cruelty that was so common and is so frighteningly recent in our society.

And then there are the minor players and stories from our tribal memory. The Pyjama Girl in her viewing bath and the Shark Arm mystery at the Coogee Aquariumthe gangsters and their gun mollsFishers Ghost which fingered a killer, and Federici, the phantom of the Princess Theatre who some say still haunts the stage these are people, events, incidents and shadows largely forgotten but integral to our extraordinary heritage.

The expression Ripping Yarn was most likely born in the common rooms and musty dorms of the English public school in the late 19th century, inspired and nurtured by the adventurous and bloody expansion of the British Empire. The Ripping Yarns in this book, however, were Made in Australia, and can be summed up colloquially in that quintessential Australian exclamation: Ripper!

Paul Taylor

Chapter 1

First Blood

Nightmare on the Coral Islands

A century and a half before the arrival of the First Fleet heralded the white settlement of Australia in 1788, two young Dutchmen landed on the mainland of West Australia. Vile, treacherous, serial murderers, they were our first white settlers.

The two didnt choose to come to Australia. It was settle or swing. They settled, and the last the pair saw of the civilisation they left behind was a row of bodies, hands severed, dangling and fly blown on a barren, awful island of death. Jan Pelgrom de Bye and Wouter Looes, two of the 316 men, women and children who sailed on the Dutch merchant vessel Batavia were put ashore, marooned, in 1629 as punishment for their part in a mutiny the bloodiest in history.

October 1629: traitors hang from gibbets on Batavias Graveyard. Those who had signed their name to the pirate oath of allegiance first had their hand severed.

All told, 210 from the Batavia died on three tiny coral islands just off the coast of the mainland of Australia. But, life in the 17th century was cheap, and sea voyages were notoriously risky; mutinies, pirates, shipwrecks, fever and madness were common. What distinguishes the Batavia story from other stories of shipwrecks is the unremitting pageant of the worst of human nature it revealed on a vast, grotesque canvas: surreal savagery, lust, treachery, cowardice and daily for week upon week gruesome murder.

It was a nightmare that began almost as soon as the Batavia set sail from Holland in October 1628. The Batavia , the flagship of the Dutch East India Company, the finest Dutch East Indiaman afloat, was on her maiden voyage, leading a fleet to her namesake city in Java in the East Indies Jakarta, in modern-day Indonesia. On board were sailors, soldiers and merchants and their women and children under the Fleet Commander, the Company senior merchant, Francisco Pelsaert. The Batavia was captained by Ariaen Jacobsz. In the hold were chests containing a fortune: a quarter of a million guilders in silver coin, a casket brimming with gold and jewels and 600 tonnes of wine, cheeses and cloth.

The Batavia looked a splendid vessel, as those who went aboard a meticulous reconstruction of the ship discovered when she sailed to Sydney in 2000. Built of Baltic oak, canvas sails fully rigged, her hull green and gold and with a red lion proud on her figurehead, she was, on deck and safe in sedate Darling Harbour, every inch a ship that would bring out the old sea dog in the most land-locked of lubbers.

Below decks it was a different story. In many places you had to stoop to move about among the huge winches, the cannons and the precipitous companion ladders that shared a stiflingly stuffy, cramped and claustrophobic area. There, in 1628, where more than 300 slept, bloated rats and cockroaches scuttled from stem to stern, faeces and urine disgorged from the bilges and it was foul going in the fairest of weathers for all but the ships commanders: the captain, Jacobsz, and his superior, Pelsaert. These two were to sail the Batavia into waters never dreamed of, far more unpleasant than the cramped squalor below decks.

Pelsaert and Jacobsz were at odds with each other from the beginning. They had been together on a previous voyage to the Dutch East Indies colony and they disliked each other intensely. Jacobsz particularly resented the fact that it was company policy to put a merchant in command above him. Their hatred was exacerbated by a passenger, Lucretia van den Mylen, a beautiful and voluptuous young woman sailing to join her husband in the Dutch colony.

Jacobsz lusted after Lucretia, but Pelsaert took care of her too much care, perhaps. Francisco Pelsaert was a dasher. At the gorgeous court of the Great Moghul in Agra, he had dallied with slave girls and seduced the wives of courtiers. On the Batavia he was in command and Captain Jacobsz had to make do with Lucretias maidservant, Zwaantie Hendrix. Unlike her mistress, with whom she soon quarrelled and left, Zwaantie was all too willing.

On 14 April, after six months at sea, the Batavia , the other nine ships in the merchant fleet and the man-o-war accompanying it reached the Cape of Good Hope and dropped anchor. While Pelsaert was occupied taking on provisions, Jacobsz and Zwaantie went on a ship crawl a belligerent drinking binge that took them from ship to ship docked in the port. With them was a former apothecary from Haarlem, Jeronimus Cornelisz.