Jan Pelgrom de Bye

Jan Pelgrom and Wouter Loos: The First European Settlers of Australia Captain Cook may have claimed Australia for the British when he and his crew became the first Europeans to reach the eastern Australian coast. However, the British were not Australia’s initial European settlers. That distinction fell to a couple of mutineers from the Dutch ship Batavia who in November 1629 were marooned off the coast of Western Australia in reparation for their crimes. The Batavia was on her maiden voyage to the East Indies when she was wrecked off Abrolhos islands on the western Australian coast. While the surviving passengers and crew waited on Beacon Island, the Captain, Francisco Pelsaert took the surviving long boat and 4 of the crew on a 33-day journey to Jakarta in Indonesia to summon help

Pelsaert returned in September to find 125 men, women and children dead. He hunted the mutineers down and sent them for trial in Jakarta. There the majority were executed for their crimes. However, Pelsaert spared the lives of two. One was an eighteen-year-old cabin boy, Jan Pelgrom de Bye Van Bemel, who begged for his life. The other was 24-year-old soldier Wouter Loos. Instead of dying, Loos and Pelgrom were sent on a special mission.

However, while Pelsaert was away, some of the remaining crew mutinied. Pelsaert returned in September to find 125 men, women and children dead. He hunted the mutineers down and sent them for trial in Jakarta. There the majority were executed for their crimes. However, Pelsaert spared the lives of two. One was an eighteen-year-old cabin boy, Jan Pelgrom de Bye Van Bemel, who begged for his life. The other was 24-year-old soldier Wouter Loos. Instead of dying, Loos and Pelgrom were sent on a special mission.

Item, [Mattijs Beer] confesses, that… he had heard that Jan van Bemmel was to cut off the head of a Boy named Cornelis Aldersz… whereon Zeevanck gave as his opinion that the foresaid Jan van Bemmel was too light; therefore Mattijs has offered his services and has requested to be allowed to do it, which was accorded him; therefore he took the sword from the forsaid Jan who would not willingly give it because he wanted to do it himself, but he tore it out of his hands… Jan van Bemmel was busy to blindfold the boy and Jeronimus, who stood next to him, said ‘Now be happy, sit nicely, ‘tis but a joke’, and Mattijs Beer with one blow near enough struck off his head.

All just to prove the sharpness of a sword. Then there is this:

Item, [Andries Jonas] confesses that he was ordered by Jeronimus… to Seals Island; so then Zeevanck… handed him his own knife and said to him, ‘Cut the throats of the women with it’. So without any objection Andries has gone to Mayken Soers, who was heavily pregnant, and, taking her by the hand, led her a little apart and said to her, ‘Mayken my love, you must die’, and threw her underfoot and cut her throat. That being done, he saw that Jan van Bemmel was busy killing Janneken Gist and has gone to his help and has stabbed her to death… The other women, together with still another 15 boys, were killed…

That November, 1629 the pair were put ashore at the mouth of the Hutt River with a boat and basic provisions and the instructions “to know once, for certain, what happens in the land.”The men were instructed to return to the landing spot in two years time to meet the ship that would pick them up. In the meantime, they were to make contact with the Aborigines and offer gifts of wooden toys, beads, and mirrors so they could “make themselves known to the folk of this land by tokens of friendship.”

Writer Peter Hay, writes of Jan De Bye in literature... finally drawn to the puny person of Jan Pelgrom de Bye, cabin boy and, on the islands, Cornelisz’s personal servant and messenger. The ‘capering cabin steward’, Edwards calls him. Edge has a ‘Pelgrom’ among her characters but he is a minor figure, not developed, and the real Pelgrom is realised in her 14-year old ‘Carp’.

Think back to the confessions of Beer and Jonas. The ‘Jan van Bemmel’ is Jan Pelgrom de Bye. The boy who keens after the pleasure of killing, though he is not strong enough to put an adult woman to death (he does own, though, to killing an unnamed boy on Seals Island). The boy who carried the death sentence for those slated for death from Cornelisz to the chosen slaughterers. The boy who, denied the ‘privilege’ of cutting off the head of the blindfolded young netmaker ‘wept because he was not allowed the favour’.

If evil can be personified then surely Jan Pelgrom de Bye sums it pure and throbbing. (I thought to be on a first here: but Crew also selects Pelgrom - ‘there is something truly frightful about the character of Jan Pelgrom’ - as the embodiment of crystallised evil.). No warped intellectuality here - just distilled essence of evil. Pelgrom flits about the island trilling a fire-white madness. ‘Come now devils with all the sacraments, where are you? I wish that I now saw a devil. And who wants to be stabbed to death? I can do that very beautifully.’