Blood money The coins of Batavia
The museum’s new Pearl Trail, to be rolled out progressively this year, will highlight the treasures of our collection. Appearing in the Dutch Pearl are some of the coins found at the site of the infamous Batavia shipwreck. Will Mather has been delving into the origins of these coins and the stories of the people depicted on them.
IN OCTOBER 1628, BATAVIA left the Netherlands with a cargo of silver – 12 chests each carrying 8,000 silver coins – to trade for spices in the East Indies. Using the new route up the west coast of Australia, it struck a reef on the Houtman Abrolhos on 4 June 1629 and sank. Its commander, Francisco Pelsaert, and senior officers went looking for water, and then decided to head to the Dutch trading fort of Batavia (now Jakarta), in Java. The 268 survivors, passengers and crew were left to endure weeks of torment and brutality by the psychopathic Jeronimus Cornelisz. When Pelsaert returned in October to rescue the survivors, he found that Cornelisz and his henchmen had raped and murdered around half of them in their reign of terror. After punishing the mutineers, Pelsaert set about recovering the chests of silver using the divers he had brought with him. Ten were recovered, one was under a cannon and couldn’t be moved and another had been broken up by the mutineers and the contents scattered. Taking the ten chests, he returned to Batavia in December 1629. The coins in the National Maritime Collection are from the two chests that remained at the wreck site.
The coins from the Batavia shipwreck are unusually diverse in their date and geographic range, reflecting both the scarcity of silver in the Netherlands at the time and the nation’s new role as a centre of the spice trade. The coins in the National Maritime Collection range in date from 1553 to 1628. This period covers the creation of the United Provinces of the Netherlands after its successful rebellion from Philip II of Spain and its spectacular rise as a global maritime trading power. These years also take in the growth of Protestantism in Europe and the start of the Thirty Years’ War between the Protestant and Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire (roughly modern Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic). Around half of the coins are from the Netherlands. Of these, the majority are the federal coinage of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, consisting of the seven provinces Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overijssel, West Friesland and Groningen. The other half are from the multiplicity of states that made up the Holy Roman Empire: duchies, counties, electorates, prince bishoprics and city states that owed their (at times nominal) allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. The states represented are overwhelmingly Protestant and mainly from northern Germany, in particular the silver-rich duchy of BrunswickLüneburg, whose rule was divided among various members of the Welf dynasty – a family that would go on to rule Great Britain as the Hanoverians. Two-thirds of these coins are from the self-governing free imperial cities of the empire, which were its economic powerhouses, with Frankfurt and Hamburg supplying the majority. These cities had thrown off control by feudal lords and owed their allegiance directly to the Holy Roman Emperors, whose name and titles appear on the back of their coins as guarantors of each city’s liberties and privileges. Australian National Maritime Museum
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