The Batavia sails!
From a distance, a queenly glide; on board, the frantic effort of all hands. Roars and curses and trumpeted orders. The new ship must be learned and felt. A week at sea and ship and crew will be one.
The Batavia heads out to meet the stormy Noord Zee with her cargo of wealth and wharf rats and souls.
On board, in 1629, is nine-year-old Mayken, a wealthy child travelling with her nursemaid Imke. Mayken’s mother has died, and she is travelling to live with her father in the Dutch East Indies (then called Batavia, now Jakarta). The ship is named after its destination.
Three hundred and fifty years later, in 1989, nine-year-old Gil is sent to live with his grandfather on a remote island off the coast of Australia. In these islands, it turns out, the Batavia had foundered on the coral reefs.
Jess Kidd’s novel is rooted in the true story of the wreck of the Batavia, and moves back and forth between the two children. There are obvious parallels: their age, their orphan status, the recent death of their mothers, their loneliness and imagination. The people around them are largely untrustworthy and have old scores to settle with each other.
Yet the two children are quite different in personality. Mayken is brave, infinitely adventurous (to a degree I found difficult to accept), but privileged and well looked after. Gil is shy, quiet, and ‘different’; his childhood has involved abandonment, hunger, and trauma, and he has learned independence and evasive tactics for survival.
A heads-up to the reader: this is the sort of novel that makes a reader despair of humanity. We know about the shipwreck, and a long ship journey in the 1600s is bound to be gruelling and miserable, but the sheer level of misery, violence and horror makes for an emotionally draining read.
There is a fine cast of largely unpleasant characters on the ship:
On the quarter-deck stands the upper-merchant, Francisco Pelsaert, a fine-boned man in a splendid red coat. The rat-faced under-merchant, Jeronimus Cornelisz is at his side, laughing and pointing. The skpper, Ariaen Jacobsz, with shaved head and drab garb, stands behind. His meaty legs planted, eyes everywhere.
Of the lesser crew members, two play important parts: the steward Jan Pelgrom, and the kitchen boy.
Mayken watches the steward with interest. He has a narrow face and a wife mouth and prominent dirty-green eyes. His head is shaved and he goes barefoot. He smiles up at her, quick and wolfish.
[The kitchen boy Smoert] is small and thin with a blasted, reddened look to him. Pink-rimmed eyes like a rabbit, brows and lashes melted away in the heat of the galley. His shaved head, hands and arms are stippled with scabs and burns from meat-fat splatters.
In 1989, the few people on the island are unfriendly or strangely manipulative. Silvia, a young woman who helps look after Gil, is married to Frank Zanetti, the foremost fisherman on the island. Frank’s vicious son Roper is the terror of the islands, and Roper’s own children are much the same. There is an unexplained tension between the locals and the scientists investigating the wreck.
As you see above, Kidd is good at capturing personalities and appearances, and the characters are generally strong and distinct.
A strong thread of magical realism runs through this novel, heightened by the tension and threatening events. Mayken is told of monstrous eel-like monsters with ‘bilge stink’. Gil is told about the ghost of a girl, ‘young May’ who haunts the island. Both imaginative children have fearful dreams about watery monsters. I found this all a bit overwrought for my taste.
There are many loose ends. “Never bleed on the ground here”, says Silvia at the beginning of the book. But why? Is this taboo based on myth or on some factual reason? We never know.
Imke, Mayken’s nursemaid, has lost the top of her fingers. This is mentioned multiple times, and Mayken is always curious how it happened, but neither Mayken nor the reader ever learn the answer.
The 1600s story was especially folklorish and gloomy, and I found the modern story more interesting. Gil, as a character, is considerably easier to understand than the somewhat artificial Mayken, whose behaviour seems driven by the plot requirements at times. It is a relief that there are some decent people in modern times and Gil’s experiences are not as grim as they could have been.
This was an unusual book, but perhaps more suited for a reader who appreciates noir and magical realism.
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