13/11/25 Fremantle Museums #1: The Plate; The Mutiny; The Engine.

Having done my work penance, I was keen to act like a tourist for the few days we had left in Fremantle. 

Off we went to the West Australian (WA) Shipwreck Museum.

Rusting anchors featured large in the Shipwreck Museum's grounds, each one of them representing a shipwreck.

I spent hours at the Shipwreck Museum, staying long after Roger had to take his complaining back home.

Ship's bells are apparently very useful in identifying ship wrecks, as they (usually) have the ship's name on them.

The museum was full of stories: here's the tales of one plate, a ship wreck, and an engine as told by the museum with a little bit of help from my friend Google.

The Plate:

Back in the 1600s the Dutch developed trade networks all over the then known world.  Bless their little trader hearts, they weren't the slightest bit interested in empire building in the manner of some of their neighbours (I'm looking at you England, France, Spain, and Portugal).  They figured out how to use the Roaring 40s to blow them across the bottom of the world and up the West Australian coast to Indonesia where they loaded up with spices and other good stuff and sailed back to Europe to make tidy profits.  On the way they popped in to the WA coast to check out any trading prospects.  They didn't see any indigenous people, which was not to say that the indigenous people didn't see them only to quite sensibly keep out of sight.  The Dutch didn't find anything valuable enough to trade, didn't find any water or other necessities of life, and found the coastline to be generally lacking in the attributes they considered necessary for a comfortable lifestyle.  They mapped and moved on, except for when they ran aground and variously drowned, perished, or were either killed or assimilated by the natives.  

All the while the English and French were sniffing about looking for opportunities to colonise and side-eyeing each other to see who would get there first.  "Good Heavens," said the Dutch.  "Why would you want to colonise there?  It's awfully hot and there's no water."

In 1616 Dirk Hartog left the oldest known Europan artefact on the continent.  He inscribed a pewter plate basically saying 'I was here.'  He nailed it to a post on what came to be known quite imaginatively as Dirk Hartog Island.

Eighty-one years later (1697) along came Dutch explorer Willem de Flamingh who found the plate, installed a replacement with his own "I was here" added to Dirk's, and took the original home.  

Time passed.  

In 1801, a mere 104 years later, a party from the French ship Naturaliste found the plate and took it back to their Captain, Jacques Hamelin.  Jacques was horrified, seeing the removal of the plate as sacrilege, and sent them packing back to the island to return it.  He wasn't entirely without a desire for recognition however: he had a plate with his details made and put it in place beside Flamingh's.

Traffic was hotting up on the WA coastline.  It was a mere 17 years until Louis Freycinet, who had been in Hamelin's expedition, came back and did some switchery, leaving a lead plate and taking the pewter one(s?) with him.  He was prone to switchery, having already brought aboard a 'cabin boy' who miraculously morphed into his wife Rose once they were safely out to sea and she couldn't be ditched.  What followed was the old story of shipwrecks and shuffling about and everyone lost track of the plate until it turned up in the bottom of someone's drawer in 1940.  In 1947 it landed back in Australia and lo and behold there it was for viewing in the Shipwreck Museum in Fremantle.

The Museum volunteer turned off the lights and used a torch to make it easier to see the inscription.  I promise the words are there.

The ship wreck: Back we go to 1629 for the Batavia, one of the best known wrecks on the West Australian coast.

The Dutch East India Company ship Batavia was wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos in 1629 on her maiden voyage to Batavia. 300 people survived the wreckage and made it to nearby islands and Captain Pelsaert decided to sail to Batavia to seek help, leaving senior Dutch East India Official Jeronomis Cornelisz in charge.  Pelsaert nipped off in the middle of the night and doesn't appear to have been the best communicator when it came to his plans, so that wasn't helpful to the mental state of those who were left behind. 

One of the Batavia's cannons, and behind it a sandstone arch which was part of its cargo and originally intended to be part of the grand entrance to the city of Batavia.  

As it turned out Cornelisz was a nasty man who had already been planning mutiny.  He packed some remaining soldiers off to other islands without their weapons, under the pretext of sending them to search for water.  He then staged his mutiny anyway and massacred anyone who didn't want to join him or wasn't useful to him.  Inconveniently for Cornelisz, the banished soldiers found water and survived, repelling Cornelisz' attempts to invade their island and eventually taking him prisoner.  Inter-island war continued with Cornelisz' henchmen and was only interrupted by the return of Pelsaert who was, to put it mildly, quite displeased at the shenanigans that had gone on in his absence.  He was also not at all inclined to take Cornelisz back to Batavia to face justice, fearing with good reason that Cornelisz had nothing to lose and everything to gain by fostering further mutiny.  A gallows was set up on Seal Island, Cornelisz and his heinous gang gaining the dubious honour of being the first Europeans to be executed in Australia.  Two mutineers were abandoned to their fate on the mainland, and the lesser trouble makers were taken back to Batavia to be executed there.

Marine accretions covered the wreck of the Batavia, preserving parts of the hull and the cargo and in 2023 mass graves from the massacre were found by an archaelogical expedition on the island.

Part of the Batavia's hull.

Skeleton of a massacre victim, with evidence of a traumatic injury to the skull.  I didn't think skeletons could be removed from mass graves, but here we are.  Or more precisely, here he is bearing silent witness to Cornelisz' nastiness all those years ago.

Time moved on and sail began to give way to steam while the WA coast continued to be treacherous, bringing us to the engine.  Owned by one Charles Broadhurst, a entrepeneur who possibly lacked a little bit of common sense when it came to shipping, the SS Xantho sank in 1872 near Port Gregory.  It lay at the bottom of the sea, almost forgotten, for over a hundred years until it was relocated in 1979 by the Maritime Archaelogical Association of WA.  Then began a whole work of restration with removal of over 2500kg of concretions and the total disassembly of the engine. The end result was that by 2006 the engine was able to be reconstructed and manually turned over, and this was a really big deal because it was really quite rare in the world of steam engines, being a horizontal engine from a former RN gunboat.

Head stuffed full of shipwrecks and WA maritime history, I trundled home through Fremantle's streets.  Fremantle had a lot of museums and I had to decide which one I would see tomorrow.

Stay tuned.

More anchors.

Details from a cannon.