They Found 125 Bodies on Australia's Oldest Shipwreck.

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]This is a mass grave on a tiny island off the coast of Australia. The skeletons buried here show cutlass wounds and crushed skulls. Blade marks cut deep into their bones. In 1629, around 300 people survived a shipwreck that made it to these islands. They thought the worst was behind them. They had beaten the sea. They believed they were the lucky ones. Over the next 3 months, about 120 of them are going to be murdered. Not by an enemy, not by the people who already lived in this part of the world. They were murdered by the survivors of the same shipwreck. My name's Joe and this is one buried earth video that is well worth your time. So, 1628, the Dutch East India Company, known as the VOC, is the most powerful trading company in the world. It runs the spice trade between Europe and the East Indies, and it has its own ships and soldiers. It even has its own money.

[00:01:02]It's less like a company and more like a small country. The Batavia is the VOC's brand new ship. A large, heavily armored vessel on her very first voyage. She leaves the Netherlands in October 1628.

[00:01:19]She's carrying around 340 people. Most of them sailors and soldiers, but also VOC officials and passengers, including women and children traveling out for new lives. She's also carrying a fortune.

[00:01:34]Chests of silver coins, trade goods, and jewels. Enough wealth to fund a small colony. The plan was to sail south around the bottom of Africa, then ride strong westerly winds east across the southern Indian Ocean before turning north towards the East Indies. It was the fast route, but it had danger built into it. If a ship rode those westerly winds too far before turning north, it would sail straight into the uncharted west coast of Australia. And in 1629, almost nobody in Europe even knew Australia was there. Three men on board matter most in this story though.

[00:02:17]Francisco Pelsaert, the commander and the most senior VOC man on the entire ship. He was ill for much of the voyage.

[00:02:26]And then we've got Arie Jacobsz, the ship's skipper. He and Pelsaert hated each other. And a junior officer named Jeronimus Cornelisz, a man with heavy debts and a past he was running from.

[00:02:42]Before the Batavia ever hit that reef, something dangerous was already brewing on board. During the long voyage south, a plan was forming. The skipper, Jacobsz, was angry at the commander, Pelsaert, and Cornelisz, the junior officer, also had his own reasons to want a way out of his old life. He had debts waiting for him back home. He may have also been mixed up with some dangerous ideas. A religious movement that taught that sin wasn't real, that a man truly couldn't be guilty of anything he did. A kind of idea that sounds harmless in a quiet room and turns incredibly dangerous in the wrong man's head. Together, the skipper and the junior officer started planning a mutiny. The idea was simple. Seize the ship, take the treasure, and then turn pirate. To pull it off, they needed a crew divided and the commander weakened.

[00:03:40]So, one night, a group of men ambushed a young woman passenger in the dark. She was a well-known woman traveling out to meet her husband. The attack on her was meant to stir up some chaos and give the plotters an excuse to move against Pelsaert, but it stalled. Pelsaert started already investigating. He was getting ready to punish the men responsible, and the mutiny hadn't even started yet. And then, before any of it could play out, the ship hit the reef.

[00:04:12]The shipwreck didn't create a killer.

[00:04:15]It just set one loose. The night of June the 4th, 1629, the Batavia is sailing fast in the dark.

[00:04:24]Up in the rigging, the lookout sees white water ahead of the ship. He calls out a warning. He's told it's just moonlight shining on the waves.

[00:04:35]It wasn't moonlight. It was surf breaking on a coral reef directly in the ship's path. The Batavia sailed straight onto the morning reef, part of a scatter of low islands called the Houtman Abrolhos off the west coast of Australia. The ship struck hard and fast. Waves began to break her apart where she sat. What followed was panic.

[00:04:59]In the dark, in the noise, people fought to get off of the ship. Some drowned right there in the surf. Around 40 people died in the wreck itself.

[00:05:11]The rest, about 300 people, were ferried to a nearby island in the ship's small boats. Most of them ended up on a small flat island that would later be called Beacon Island. And this is exactly where the real horror of the Batavia begins.

[00:05:29]Not with the wreck, but with the survivors and where they landed. Picture these islands, small, flat, bare. Coral and sand, only a few hundred meters across. Barely anything growing.

[00:05:45]No fresh water.

[00:05:46]None The survivors had escaped the sea, but they washed up somewhere with nothing.

[00:05:53]No water of their own, very little food, no shelter from the sun, and no way to leave.

[00:06:01]They were stranded on bare rock, surrounded by open ocean, and the few things that could keep them alive, the boats, the salvaged food, the weapons pulled from the wreck, were all about to fall under the control of one man.

[00:06:17]So, two days after the wreck, the commander Pelsaert made a decision that would change everything that came next.

[00:06:25]There was no water on these islands, people were already in trouble. So, Pelsaert, the skipper Jacobs, and around 48 other people took the ship's longboat and set out to look for some fresh water.

[00:06:37]First on the islands nearby, then on the Australian mainland itself.

[00:06:43]They didn't find any. So, they made an extraordinary decision. They would take that open longboat and sail it all the way to Batavia. That's modern-day Jakarta, and bring back a rescue ship.

[00:06:57]That's a journey of around 3,000 km in an open boat across the Indian Ocean.

[00:07:04]And here's the thing. They actually made it. After about 33 days at sea, every single person on that longboat reached Batavia alive. As a feat of survival and navigation, it's actually quite astonishing. But, back on the islands, the survivors didn't know any of this.

[00:07:23]They didn't know that the longboat had made it. All they knew was that one morning, their commander had climbed into a boat and sailed away into the horizon. They felt abandoned, and they were now leaderless and stranded, and had no idea if help was even coming. The most senior man left on those islands was the junior officer of Harlem, the man with the debts and the dangerous ideas, Jeronimus Cornelisz. Cornelisz takes control. With Pelsaert gone, Cornelisz is in charge of everybody left on this island. And Cornelisz had a problem. He was part of the mutiny plot on that ship. When a rescue vessel finally arrives, there might be a good chance that the plot would come to light and the punishment for mutiny was death.

[00:08:14]So, Cornelisz worked out a plan and it was a cold one.

[00:08:18]If he could capture the rescue ship when it came, he could escape. He could turn pirate, take the Batavia's treasure, and vanish before anybody in the wider world knew what he had done.

[00:08:31]But, you can't seize a rescue ship with 300 frightened survivors around you.

[00:08:37]Most of them would side with the rescuers the moment that they arrive.

[00:08:42]Cornelisz needed a small group, loyal and armed. He needed much less people on that island.

[00:08:49]So, he made a very big decision. He decided to start reducing the number of survivors on purpose.

[00:08:58]First, he gathered a group of young soldiers and cadets around him. He gave them weapons and better food. He gave them a feel of power. He made them loyal to him. Then, he took control of everything that mattered. He took the boats and the salvaged weapons. He took the food and the little water that they had. And then, he began moving people around.

[00:09:21]>> [music] >> He split the survivors and sent groups off to other islands. On the surface, it looked sensible, spreading people out so the food would stretch further. It wasn't sensible, though. It was a good strategy. He He dividing the survivors so they could never stand together against him, so they would be easier to control >> [music] >> and easier to take out. One group of around 20 soldiers was led by a man named Wiebbe Hayes. Cornelisz sent them off to a large island to look for water and sent them without weapons. He expected them to find nothing there and quietly die.

[00:09:59]It was the worst mistake he would ever make. The killing started quickly. At first, the deaths looked like accidents.

[00:10:08]A group sent off on a raft and simply never came back. They were people that just supposedly drowned or they just weren't there anymore. Cornelisz himself mostly didn't do the killing. That's one of the coldest details of the entire story. He was just giving the orders. He made some young loyal men and those guys carried it out.

[00:10:30]Then, it stopped looking like accidents.

[00:10:33]The killings became open, organized. The mutineers moved through the surviving camps, often at night. They used knives and swords, whatever came to hand. They worked quietly, so people not targeted yet wouldn't panic and they wouldn't band together.

[00:10:52]And this is where the islands themselves become a part of this horror. Just think about where these people actually were.

[00:10:59]The islands were tiny and flat, [music] a few hundred meters of bare coral.

[00:11:05]There was nowhere to hide. There was no trees, no high grass. It was just flat, open rock.

[00:11:12]You could see a man walking towards you from the other side of the island and there was nothing you could do about it.

[00:11:19]>> [music] >> There was nowhere to run. The killers controlled the water and the boats.

[00:11:24]>> [music] >> They controlled every weapon on these islands. If the mutineers decided you were going to die that day, you were going to die that day, and you might watch it coming towards you from across the sand for a long time before they actually got to you. That would be terrifying.

[00:11:42]That's the part that can kind of stay with you in these stories, something that just seems absolutely insane if you were in that situation.

[00:11:51]Not only that these people were murdered, but they were getting murdered slowly in a place with no exit by the people that they knew. The victims were chosen coldly as well, the sick and the injured. Anyone Cornelis decided was using up supplies and giving nothing back to the crew. Families were targeted, too. The ship's minister had most of his family killed in a single night. When the mutineers came to his tent, he survived. One of his daughters survived. The rest of his family did not. The women were also kept alive and separated out to mutineers.

[00:12:31]Lucretia Jans, the same woman that was attacked back on the ship, was taken by Cornelis himself.

[00:12:38]And Cornelis made his men sign their names to written oaths of loyalty. Just think about how clever, but also cruel that was.

[00:12:48]Once a man had signed his name, once he had killed someone, he was bound.

[00:12:54]He was as guilty as everybody else.

[00:12:57]There was no going back, no standing apart. Every man was tied to Cornelis with ink and with blood. By the time the worst of the killing had slowed down, about 120 people had been murdered out of roughly 300 who had made it off of the wreck alive. And just remember, it wasn't just soldiers or sailors that were getting killed. It was women, it was children, and it was done with some weapons, some with bare hands. This was absolutely horrifying and it was all getting done by the survivors on their own shipwreck.

[00:13:34]And there was one thing now standing between Jeronimus Cornelisz and complete control of those islands. And it was a group of about 20 soldiers that he already had written off as dead. Wiebbe Hayes was just a common soldier, not an officer, not a man anybody had paid any attention to. He and his group of around 20 men had been sent to West Wallabi Island to look for water. Sent without weapons. Left there, in Cornelisz's mind, to fail and quietly die.

[00:14:10]But instead, they found water. They searched the island and they dug and they found fresh water. They found food, two wallabies and birds, things that they could catch and eat. The island Cornelisz had sent them to as a death sentence turned out to be the one place in the whole group that could comfortably keep people alive. Then, survivors started arriving. People that were escaping some of the massacres.

[00:14:38]They'd slipped away on rafts. Some were swimming. And they brought the news of what was happening back on Beacon Island. Hayes and his men understood the situation very quickly. Cornelisz would come for them eventually and they were not going to sit there and wait to be murdered. So, they got ready. They built a fort with almost no proper tools. They stacked limestone blocks into low walls and built defensive positions across that island. And here is what is genuinely remarkable.

[00:15:12]Those stone structures are still standing there today. They're considered some of the oldest European built structures anywhere in Australia. You can go and see what those frightened men built to stay alive. They also made some weapons as well, clubs and pikes built out of parts of the shipwreck. Whatever they could put together, they made it.

[00:15:35]And when Cornelis's mutineers finally came for them, armed by boat, Hayes' men were ready. They fought them off. Mutineers attacked more than once as well. Every single time, Hayes' men held. They had water and food. They had walls and the high ground. And every one of them knew exactly what they were fighting for. Cornelis couldn't break them. So, he switched tactics. He decided to go to Hayes himself on that island under a flag of truce and talk to make a deal. Really, it was just to trick him though.

[00:16:14]It was the last decision he would ever make as a free man. When Cornelis walked onto Wiebe Hayes' island to negotiate, Hayes' men seized him.

[00:16:24]Just like [music] that, the leader of the mutiny was a prisoner.

[00:16:28]But, it wasn't over. The mutineers still had numbers and weapons back on the other islands. One of Cornelis's lieutenants took over and started preparing one final all-out attack on Hayes' fort. And then, out on the horizon, a sail appeared. It was the Sardam, the rescue ship. Palisser had made it to Batavia, reported the wreck, and come back. After 3 months, rescue finally arrived. And it set off a race because both sides realized the same thing at the same moment. Whoever reached that ship first would take control of what happens next. If the mutineers got to Palisser first, they could board the Sardam and take it by force. Exactly the plan Cornelis had wanted the entire time. They could kill Pelsaert and sail away as pirates. But, what if Wiebbe Hayes got there first? He could warn them. Both sides ran for their boats and started a race to the Sardam. And here is something that people are probably going to quite like.

[00:17:36]Hayes got there first. He climbed on board and told Pelsaert everything, the mutiny and the massacre that had killed around 120 people while the commander was away. But, then the mutineers' boats came up alongside the Sardam soon after.

[00:17:52]Pelsaert's crew was waiting though. The mutineers had come armed. They'd come to take the ship. Instead, they were stopped and captured before they could get on board. The plan to seize the Sardam was finished. Cornelis was already in chains. Now, the rest of the killers were as well.

[00:18:13]After 3 months of murder on those islands, it was finally over. But, this amazing story isn't even over yet.

[00:18:23]Pelsaert held a trial right there on the island. The mutineers were questioned.

[00:18:30]And in the 1600s, questioning prisoners meant torture. It was simply a normal part of confessions and how they were taken back then. Under it, the men confessed. They named each other. The full scale of what happened on those islands finally came out. Jeronimus Cornelis was sentenced to death. And his punishment was specific. Before he was hanged, both of his hands were cut off.

[00:18:57]Several other of the worst killers as well were also executed in the exact same way. Alongside him, their hands taken first, then the rope. Seven of the mutineers were hanged there on the islands. By the accounts that survive, Cornelis never truly admitted what he had done. He argued and he blamed other people. He went to his death insisting that none of it had really been his fault.

[00:19:24]But not every mutineer was executed. Two of the youngest and least guilty were given a different sentence, a strange one. Instead of being hanged, they were taken to the Australian mainland, put ashore, and simply left there. Marooned.

[00:19:41]One of the young men was named Wouter Loos and the other was a cabin boy named Pelgrom de Bye.

[00:19:49]They were never seen again.

[00:19:52]Nobody knows what happened to them. They may have died just within a few weeks, or maybe they were taken in by Aboriginal people living along the coast and lived for years.

[00:20:02]But what we can say is that those two abandoned mutineers were almost certainly the first Europeans ever to live permanently on the Australian continent. Their punishment, by complete accident, turned them into a strange little footnote in the history of the entire country.

[00:20:19]The rest of the surviving mutineers were taken back to the city of Batavia.

[00:20:24]More of them were hanged when they got there.

[00:20:27]And Wiebbe Hayes, the common soldier nobody noticed, the man Cornelis had sent away to die, was promoted and well rewarded. He was treated as a hero. He had arrived on those islands as a nobody. He had left them as one of the few people who came out of the entire story with his name worth anything. For more than 300 years, the Batavia story survived mostly as words on a page.

[00:20:53]Pelsaert's journals were published. The tale became infamous across Europe, a grim, almost unbelievable story of a shipwreck and a slaughter.

[00:21:03]But that's all it really was, a story on written page. But then in 1963, divers found the wreck of Batavia on Morning Reef, exactly where the old records say it would be.

[00:21:17]Archaeologists went to work on the site.

[00:21:20]They raised a section of the ship's hull. You can see it in a museum in Western Australia today.

[00:21:25]They brought up cannons and silver coins and even a heavy prefabricated stone gateway the ship had been carrying as cargo.

[00:21:34]>> [music] >> And then they started digging on Beacon Island. They found the dead. They found graves, skeletons buried fast and shallow. They found men and women. They found the small bones of the children.

[00:21:48]At least a dozen people were recovered from the ground uh and some of them were buried together in the same grave.

[00:21:55]And the bones told the exact same story Pelsaert's journal had told for 400 years. Cutlass wounds and sword marks that marked the skulls.

[00:22:06]Bone crushed by heavy blows. The injuries on these skeletons matched the written accounts for the massacre almost exactly. When we do research for these topics, you don't usually have the story match up with the real world findings exactly. So this is crazy.

[00:22:24]The science confirmed it. The massacre wasn't an exaggeration or a legend that had grown to the retelling. It happened.

[00:22:32]It happened to real people and there was proof still in the ground. This was a mass grave. These people in these graves had survived a shipwreck. Then they were murdered and finally after four centuries, they have been found.

[00:22:49]The thing that unsettles most people about Batavia isn't the number of the dead though. It's [music] just how ordinary the killers were, not monsters from somewhere else. They were sailors and soldiers, some barely more than boys, no different from the people that they would go out and kill. Cornelis gave them permission and a reason and a frightening number of them simply just said yes and became murderers. Zeeburg Haze's stone fort still stands on Westwall by on the Beacon Island.

[00:23:18]Archaeologists are still lifting the dead out of the ground. Those people survived a shipwreck together. They should have all come home. Instead, most of them are still there. And that's it for me guys. Thank you so much watching.

[00:23:31]My name is Joe. This Bare Earth video was so much fun to make. On screen right now, two videos I think you're going to absolutely love. Drop us a comment as well. What topics would you love to see us do a video on next? And what did you think of the story of Batavia?