Greta van der Rol

…did all this happen? The Houtman Abrolhos archipelago is a straggling chain of islands for the most part barely above the water line, 30 miles or so off the Western Australian coast. Even now, it’s little known. Cray fishermen base themselves there in the summer catching season, including on Batavia’s Graveyard, now known as Beacon Island. There’s even an airstrip on the High Island (East Wallabi).

The satellite images on Google Earth show it all; the relative sizes of the islands, the shallows, the channel. Search for the Houtman Abrolhos and the Wallabi group.

Henrietta Drake-Brockman, in her book "Voyage to Disaster" describes the Abrolhos Islands. "The whole atmosphere of the Wallabis is one of elusive form, the spray cast up on the great reefs acts like gauze in a theatre, everything is remote and mysterious, sometimes enlarged, sometimes diminished, never altogether clearly defined. Having seen the islands, it is not difficult to imagine an unforeseen wreck on Noon Reef or Morning Reef, at night, in moonlight." (p272)

Back off a little. Where is Australia? There. A desolate, windswept coast, lined with cliffs that plunge into the sea anything from thirty to two hundred and fifty metres (about one hundred to eight hundred feet). The desert reaches the sea along most of that stretch. Endless ridges of ancient dune, covered with tough, sparse vegetation. Even the Aboriginal people didn’t go there much. If you're following on Google Maps, don't get the wrong idea from any bits of blue on the mainland. It's salt water.

Back off a little further. That’s Batavia up there (now known as Djakarta), through the Sunda Strait which separates Sumatra and Java. The longboat left the Australian mainland from North West cape (that last cape jutting north before the coastline turns irrevocably east. And then Pelsaert in the Sardam had to find these tiny specs in the ocean, all unknowing that murder and mayhem had been let loose and that two camps of Batavia’s survivors eyed each other across a few miles of ocean.