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The Wreck of the Batavia: A True Story (Hardcover)

by Simon Leys (Author) "For three hundred years - from the end of the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth -Western navigators explored the world and developed..." (more)
Key Phrases: former apothecary, great cabin, Beacon Island, Seal Island, East Indies (more...)

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From Publishers Weekly
This lackluster hybrid by novelist Leys (The Death of Napoleon), a winner of France's Prix Femina, consists of two undernourished essays. The title piece summons the shipwreck of the Batavia, a vessel of the Dutch East India Company that in 1629 smashed up on a coral archipelago en route from the Netherlands to Java. Leys came up with the idea to write about the shipwreck more than 18 years ago, but never put pen to paper until after the 2002 publication of Mike Dash's Batavia's Graveyard, which "hit the bull's eye and left me nothing more to say." Nevertheless, the author adds his two cents as he details how a psychopathic crewmember instituted a reign of terror resulting in the slaughter of 200 of the 300 castaways in the three months it took a rescue ship to arrive from Java. The second essay, "Prosper," documents the author's experience more than 45 years ago aboard a Breton tuna-fishing boat. It's a hardscrabble life for the close-knit crew, including an aging skipper who recaptures his youth at sea; an alcoholic who views his mates as one large family; and a 62-year-old survivor of throat cancer and his dutiful, depressive nephew who hangs himself not long after the voyage. Illus. (Feb.)
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Product Description

In 1629, the ship Batavia, pride of the Dutch East India Company, was wrecked on the edge of a coral archipelago, some fifty miles from the western coast of the Australian continent. Most of the nearly three hundred men, women and children on board escaped from drowning only to become victims of a psychopath who, with the help of a dozen followers, organized a methodical massacre of this hapless community. Acclaimed sinologist and author Simon Leys traveled to the site of the disaster and learned that, paradoxically, the natural environment of these islands could have afforded the survivors fairly decent living conditions; the massacre therefore appears all the more aberrant. In fact, in its gratuitous absurdity, it seems to present a microcosm of the totalitarian atrocities that are perpetrated by various ideologies seeking to establish Paradise on earth. Leys' elegiac essay, Prosper, is also included in this volume. In this deeply personal piece, Leys recalls a summer when he joined the crew of a tuna-fishing boat from Brittany, one of the last boats still working under sail. This remarkable narrative preserves Leys' memories of his sailing companions and pays tribute to their unique world—a world that no longer exists.

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