Watchandi Man. Robert Hallsworth
Introduction
In 1629 the VOC (Dutch East Indies Co.), ship, Batavia was wrecked on the Abrolhos Islands off the West Australian coast.
What followed became one of the most horrific events in maritime history and has been well documented.
Subsequent to these events two members of the Batavia’s crew, Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom de Bye were marooned on the mainland.
They were never seen or heard from again, although many believe that they did integrate with the local aboriginal tribe, the Nhanda people.
If this is true, it may well have been the birth of multicultural Australia!
This is the story of what might have happened.
Author's Notes
This novel is a work of fiction, it is, however, based on certain facts.
The Batavia’s commander, Francisco Pelsaert, did maroon Wouter Loos and Jan Pelgrom on the mainland at Wittecarra creek, near Kalbarri, although the actual site has been questioned by some. The only written record of events comes from Pelsaert’s diary, and even that has been challenged for its accuracy in detail.
All of the events described occurred in pre-colonial times, without the benefit of the English language. Words and names, such as Kangaroo, Wattlebird and Didgeredoo did not exist. I have tried to use the expressions used by the early Dutch, e.g. ‘a cat-like hopping animal’ (Kangaroo).
I am grateful to Violet Drury, ‘Agu Jada Wana’ and Juliette Blevins,
Nhanda, An Aboriginal Language of Western Australia, both provided me with words and names of Nhanda people.
The name Kalbarri was chosen by the Government of the day when the town at the mouth of the Murchison River was gazetted in 1951. It did so on the suggestion of Anthropologist and welfare worker, Daisy Bates, as being the name of a Nhanda warrior and also a local edible seed.
Eighty-three years after Loos and Pelgrom were marooned, another VOC ship, the Zuytdorp, was wrecked on the cliffs north of the Murchison River. Many of its crew and passengers are known to have scrambled to safety ashore, surviving for a time with the help of local aboriginals.
The word Watchandi appears in the Lexicon of Nhanda language (Blevins), but my use of its derivation from the Dutch expression, ‘Wachtanderzee’ which means watching by the sea, comes from Henry Van Zanden’s ‘The Lost White Tribes of Australia’.
Although contentious, it is not such a quantum leap if you consider the way it is pronounced in Dutch, the ‘W’ having a ‘V’ sound and a ‘Z’ sound at the end. There are no ‘V’ or ‘Z’ sounds in Nhanda, their attempts to repeat the term could easily have sounded a bit like, ‘Watchandi’.
Finally, as I said at the outset, this is a work of fiction.
Read, imagine, enjoy.
Prologue
An extract from the West Australian newspaper dated 3rd. Feb. 1934.
‘Pieter, ------ with a great blonde beard, not white but bright golden, sturdy sinuous limbs, decidedly bandy, a noble girth and a passion for the sea – none of these, aboriginal characteristics. Provided that there is the same strong atavistic tendency among the white races, as there is among the Negroid and Asiatic, Pieter is quite possibly an amazing throwback over fourteen or fifteen generations, to the early Dutchmen. It may even be to the two desperadoes marooned by Pelsaert near Champion bay in 1629. “
1954 and a lone geo-explorer draws the Landrover into his base camp as the sun is setting in the western sea.
‘Your late Phil’ a colleague calls to him.
‘Yeah.’ he replies, ‘I’ve just been watching that character on the cliff top again. He just seems to wander up and down, looking out to sea all the time, as if he is looking for something ‘.
‘Probably a Watchandi’ said his companion, himself part aboriginal.
‘A sea watcher, you know, a throwback from the old Nhanda people who have lived around here for hundreds of years’
‘But what is he looking for?’ said Phil.
‘The old people called the sea, Kuranup, they believed that was where the spirits of the dead lived, and sometimes, so the legend goes, the spirits would come back from the sea, with white faces, in tall ships with white sails. Sometimes they brought good times and sometimes they brought bad.
Perhaps he’s just watching Kuranup for another, ship from the dead’.
Chapter One
DESOLATION'S HARBOUR
Timeline. November 1629
It’s almost midday; two young men stand on a beach of golden sand beneath a clear blue sky and warming sun.
Their gaze is fixed on a sailing ship which, with anchor won and sails unfurling is leaving them to their fate. The land at their backs is in fact, a continent of almost three million square miles, and they are about to become its first white, European inhabitants.
At this point in time, however, these things are still unknown to the world, and it will be hundreds of years before they become recognized facts, but at this moment nothing could be further from their minds as they stand, one either side of the small, makeshift boat which has brought them to this shore.
The boat, a schouw, although Pelsaert had called it a sampan, was put together by carpenters on the island from scraps of timber from the wreck and it held all they possessed in this world. Somehow, they had managed to reach the beach through the pounding surf, more by good luck than judgement, for neither of them was a seaman. They had then dragged the boat up onto the sandbar that guarded the mouth of the small river.
The effort, physical as well as mental, of being cast adrift from the ‘Sardam’ as she lay at anchor in the shallow bay, negotiating the surf and reaching the relative safety of the beach, had exhausted them. Drawing in deep breaths, they watched as the Sardam, her sails filling with the freshening south-westerly breeze, slipped away to the north, taking with her their last connection with civilization, left to their fate on a hostile and unknown shore.
They had been marooned by the Commander, Francisco Pelsaert, for the part they had played in the mutiny and massacres on the Abrolhos Islands that had followed the wreck of the Batavia, almost five months previously.
The taller man, Wouter Loos, at twenty-four, is the older of the two, tall, lean and muscular, a shock of fair hair and bushy beard frame a broad face, a long aquiline nose, craggy brow and deep-set blue eyes that convey the impression of a tough, physical character, attributes his current situation will have great need of.
He glances at his companion and wonders again, why he was chosen to share a challenge such as this with this half-crazed youth.
Jan Pelgrom De Bye is just eighteen, and it’s this tender age that has saved him from the gallows, fellow countrymen and shipmates they may be, but that is where the similarity ends.
Pelgrom is short and scrawny, a shock of flaming red hair, crown a narrow face, a beak-like nose separates a pair of wild grey-green eyes, which continuously flicker from side to side, like an animal in a cage. The expression reflects this young man’s character; his entire short life has been spent running and hiding, surviving by graft and cunning.
An unlikely pair, chosen by destiny to carve a niche in histories pages, their thoughts are not of fate or history at this moment, however, more a cocktail of emotion, relief, fear, horror, desolation.
Relief at having escaped