Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Mutiny of the Batavia: Part 1

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

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occasionally the holds would be so full of seawater shit and piss that they'd have to be pumped out with bilges and Like out into the ocean and apparently the bill just smelled so bad that when they open to everybody On the deck would start vomiting when they open once again if you were like traditional seafaring Polynesian guy and you see this happening. You'd be like bad They must have done something horrible horrible in the previous life. You know what I mean? Like it goes, their manas. Yeah, exactly. Geez. Yes. They they've invented the shit plague boat. Wow. And even, even without the shit, and there was a lot of it, everyone fucking stank. And also, garlic was considered a cure all at the time. So people just smeared garlic all over themselves

So everybody's smell like shit armpit piss and Lucy's previous point like imagine trying to pick out the person having a manic episode in this group No one's having a good time on this shit Even the higher-up guys down there and let's say you decide, I really need to wash my clothes. You know, the garlic's getting very strong. It smells a bit too much like everything. The reason why everybody smelled so bad is because the only fresh water they had was for drinking and it had to be stored in barrels.

Couldn't be used for bathing. It couldn't be used for laundry. It couldn't be used for laundry. What do you have though? Salt water? Copious amounts of your own piss, which was stored in barrels and you used to do your laundry. It's all piss, baby. Salt water, you don't want to drink it.

And obviously like ocean flotsam and whatever, but like surely you could, you know. You can wash your clothes in it, right? He'll haul up a barrel of that stuff and then pour it on your clothes to get the garlic and poo off it like Just just a light hosing. I have a feeling that if you wash I mean, I don't know why they didn't wash their clothes in saltwater. I know why they didn't wash themselves in saltwater It's not good for you know, it'll eventually make the sores worse and stuff like that. Yeah

It'll fuck with all your syphilis sores that you already have. Yeah. The scar tissue from the last time the midwife didn't get her payment on time. This wasn't even accounting for just the environment because when the Batavia hit the African coast, everything on board got so hot that all the rations were spoiled. The water was slimy and it had become infested with worms. And the ship had gotten so hot that the water, which was infested with worms, began to boil.

Okay. How on earth is that even possible though, man? I don't know. These guys were cursed. These guys did something terrible. This is straight from hell. They pissed off some very minor, like, God of human misery. What we're actually discovering is that the Bruegels were actually doing like the Thomas Kinkade version of painting,

what life was like in the Netherlands. They were really churching it up and making things pretty when they had all the skeletons and corpses on wagon wheels and stuff. Yeah, it's still like that. We still wash all of our clothes and yes Yeah, it's sterile. It's fine. I just With all this with all the supplies spoiled obviously Pelsart would have to stop before he made to the Cape So he ordered the ship to make for Sierra Leone Well as they pulled in to restock they ran into the seemingly only white person there, a 15-year-old Dutch child.

He had been hired onto another VOC ship who pulled into Sierra Leone about six months before and ran off. And now decided, please, for the love of God, take me back onto the ship. Please, if you don't take me onto the ship, they're going to cast me in the film Blood Diamond. I'm gonna have to talk like Leonardo DiCaprio. And Pelser decided yeah fuck it you're hired because he knew that eventually some people were gonna start dying and he would need to replace them. He would need that tender fucking the veal cuts of a 15 year old to chow down on. All I can think of is cannibalism. I mean, it's just like this to me is just like this is the logical next. OK, I will say there's no cannibalism in this.

That's surprising. That's the only positive thing I could tell either of you, because there is so much of everything else. Now, after this, they restock and they sail out with, you know, plus one onto their crew. They sail out into a world of absolute horrible, brutal heat and an inconstant around the clock delousing. Now they're trying to keep, in case you're wondering, they delouse with lye? Oh my God.

Burns. Yeah, it's very caustic. It was just chemical burns? Very caustic, yeah. The scene from Fight Club where he gets the chemical burn on top of his hand but just the entire body. But also, if you're stopping in Sierra Leone and you think about that, that you're at that

level of West Africa, basically, you're going to not be going south for a while if you're following the coast. You have to continue going east. And so going through the Pied of Benin and basically, you're heading closer to the equator. So at that point, you're still getting hotter and still getting more tropical. Yeah, it's still getting hotter. And they're worried about lice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not even savanna. It's like, oh, well, the savanna is eventually going to end, right? It's going to get cool. It's like, no, it's going to become Equatorial Guinea. It's going to become even more...

And they do know that. They just didn't have a choice. That was the closest port to go to because they had no food or water. Oh, no. I was just thinking for our benefit to imagine like, oh, yeah, it's just going to get hotter and worse and more worms. They're worried about a lice breakout. So that's why they were doing the lousing. I feel like the lice are the least of my worries at this point in time. Well, lice carry typhus, which would kill everybody on board. Also, it's gross, but just the sheer volume of sores you can get from lice and people

scratching and no sanitation at all. Those can become infected and in that heat can very quickly turn into a cellulitis or worse, sores and pustules and stuff. Just jump into the ocean and die at this point. And then to make things worse, the wind died and left them stuck bobbing in the ocean for a very long time. So people are basically jumping off the boat and turning into bullion cubes just dissolving. Just dissolving, yeah. The Delausing didn't stop other outbreaks on board. That's where the Knorr guy got the idea he's Dutch too. The Delausing didn't stop other outbreaks on board, which were considered just part of living on a ship.

Namely bedbugs, rats, and what I could only say is a biblical plague level of cockroaches. There were so many cockroaches that the captain offered a bounty of a tincture of brandy for every man that could kill a thousand of them. There was never any shortage of cockroaches. It probably came with something they loaded on in Sierra Leone. I assume the Dutch child. Wild. Just that child is infected with cockroaches. And this one for months as the Batavia bobbed around waiting for the winds to pick up

and take them towards the Cape of Good Hope, just in time for scurvy to begin sweeping through the ship. Obviously, this is, scurvy is something that could very easily be cured with vitamin C and prevented with vitamin C, but they didn't know that yet. I didn't think they knew that for like a while, huh? It's one of those secret dumb things from history is at one point people figured it out and scurvy effectively went away and then people forgot

why they were giving sailors lemons and lemon juice and pickles so they took them away for a cost-cutting measure and then scurvy came back and they didn't know how to fix it again. They didn't realize the citrus was doing it they just thought that guy who was always eating marmalade was just kind of a pervert. And they just really likes pickles. It's really weird. Um, I think a lot of ships have like sauerkraut and pickled stuff for the same reason, but didn't have it yet. 12 people are dead.

They chuck them overboard. Psh, is light bit of bullion. Some of that preserved parsley just kind of floats away. Soldiers and sailors in the ship pass their time. Like you would imagine hundreds of broadcast dudes with nothing but time on their hands would. They fought, they gambled, they stole from one another. I would definitely be like,

here's a 15 year old child joined the crew. I'm sure that's gonna go great. I mean, to be fair, a lot of them were also teenagers. Oh, fair, yeah. There's a lot of very weird old men and a lot of very young children. Also women, but we'll get to that point. I think better say the way man. My mom was midwife. I Got my mom's midwifery acts But for the command staff with with, you know, you're on a miss included

They had other things to do long philosophical conversations and debates Which is where he began to let his belief system slip a little bit but not all of it And people really liked him because he had a way of speaking that he picked up from Van Der Beek that enthralled like an audience. He's a very smooth guy. He was well-educated, well-educated to the point that he was something of a curiosity. People like him didn't end up on VOC ships. So the captain, Jakobs, quickly became his friend. However, things would begin to break down in very foreseeable ways.

The VOC in general did not allow women on board their ships for let's just say obvious reasons. But in the case of the Batavia, there were several women on board. Most of them were married or married to members, like high level employees of the VOC that were in Batavia already. So they're just going over there to be with their families.

A lot of them were traveling with their husbands and children as well. One woman named Lucrezia quickly found out that the captain really had a thing for her, despite the fact that she was married and constantly shot him down around the clock. So he did the only thing a smooth man such as the Captain could do. He offered to pay her for sex, which was also shot down.

And she's like a decently high society woman. So it was like, I mean, that's of course always insulting to do, but even more insulting as far as like social norms are considered the 60 dunderd's. It just feels like there's a vestigial memory of all of this kind of travel in European culture and that's why they don't really complain about easy jet sucking so bad. The fly one is fine. It's still better than the VOC. It's better than the doldrums off serial.io.