Chapter I: Introduction I INTRODUCTION Does power corrupt, or are corrupt people drawn to power? Are entrepreneurs who embezzle and cops who kill the outgrowths of bad systems, or are they just bad people? Are tyrants made or born? If you were thrust into a position of power, would new temptations to line your pockets or torture your enemies gnaw away at you until you gave in? Somewhat unexpectedly, we can start to find an answer to those questions on two forgotten, faraway islands. Far off the western coast of Australia, a little speck of land called Beacon Island barely rises above the surrounding sea. Scrubby green grass covers its surface, skirted by beige sand on its triangular coastline. You could just about throw a baseball from one side and hit the ocean on the other. It seems unremarkable, an uninhabited blip of an island with a bit of coral peppering the shallows offshore. But Beacon Island holds a secret. On October 28, 1628, a 160-foot-long spice ship called the Batavia set sail from the Netherlands. The trading vessel was part of a fleet owned by the Dutch East India Company, a corporate empire that dominated global trade.
The Batavia carried a small fortune in silver coins, ready to be exchanged for spices and the exotic riches that awaited in Java, part of modern-day Indonesia. It carried 340 people. Some were passengers. Most were crew. One was a psychopathic pharmacist. The ship was organized into a strict hierarchy, "in which the accommodation got more spartan as one moved toward the bow." In the stern, the captain held court in the great cabin, chewing on salted meat as he barked orders to his officers. Two decks below, soldiers were crammed into an unventilated, rat-infested crawl space that would be used to hold spices on the return journey.
All on Batavia knew their rank. A few rungs below the captain was a junior merchant named Jeronimus Cornelisz, a down-and-out former apothecary. He''d signed up to sail in desperation after losing everything through a series of personal calamities. Shortly after the sails were first unfurled, he set in motion a plan to reverse his misfortunes. In conjunction with a senior officer, Cornelisz plotted a mutiny. He steered the ship off course in preparation for seizing control in isolated waters. If all went according to plan, he''d take control of the Batavia and start a lavish new life, bought with the silver coins in the hold. It didn''t go according to plan.
On June 4, 1629, the wooden hull of the Batavia splintered as it crashed full speed into a coral reef in the low-lying Abrolhos Islands off the Australian coast. There''d been no warning, no call to change course. In an instant, it was clear that the boat was doomed. Most of the passengers and crew tried to swim ashore. Dozens drowned. Others tried to cling to what was left of the Batavia . Realizing that nobody would survive unless they were rescued, the captain took control of the emergency longboat and most of the salvaged supplies. With forty-seven others, including the entire senior leadership of the crew, he set off for Java.
He promised that they''d soon return with a rescue party. Hundreds were abandoned, with little food, almost no water, and only a faint hope that, someday, someone would return. Nothing grew or lived on the barren island. It was obvious: the survivors were running out of time. Cornelisz, the would-be mutineer, was among those left behind. There was no longer a seaworthy ship to take over. But he didn''t know how to swim, so standing on what remained of the sinking Batavia seemed preferable to plunging into the water and frantically splashing his way to the island. For nine days, seventy men, including Cornelisz, occupied a shrinking territory of dry wood.
They drank as they contemplated the inevitable. On June 12, the ship finally broke apart. The surf bashed some of the remaining men against the sharp coral, giving them a quicker end than others who flailed for a few minutes before drowning. Cornelisz somehow survived. He eventually "floated to the island in a mass of driftwood, the last man to escape Batavia alive." When he reached the refuge of soggy sand on what is now Beacon Island, the anarchy and chaos of survival instincts reverted to the established order of hierarchy and status. Though Cornelisz washed ashore ragged and weak, he was still an officer. That meant he was in charge.
"The Batavia was a highly hierarchical society," the historian Mike Dash says, "and that survived on the island as well." The hundreds marooned on the sparse grasslands of the pitiful island rushed to help their superior. They''d live to regret it. Or at least some would. Once recovered and replenished, Cornelisz did some quick calculations. The situation was dire. The food, water, and wine that had survived the wreck wouldn''t last. The supply wasn''t going to expand, he figured, so it was necessary to reduce the demand.
The survivors needed fewer stomachs to fill. Cornelisz started to consolidate power by eliminating potential rivals. Some were sent on foolhardy missions in small boats and then pushed overboard to drown. Others were accused of crimes, a pretext used to sentence them to death. Those grisly executions asserted Cornelisz''s authority. But they also provided a useful loyalty test. Men who would kill on his orders were useful. Men who refused were a threat.
One by one, the threats were eliminated. Soon, the pretexts disappeared, too. A boy was decapitated to test whether a sword was still sharp. Children were murdered for no reason. The killings were done on Cornelisz''s orders, but he didn''t murder anyone himself. Instead, he displayed his dominance by dressing himself in fine garb from the ship: "silk stockings, garters with gold laces, and. suchlike adornments." The others wore soiled rags as they waited their turn to be murdered.
By the time the Batavia ''s captain returned with a rescue mission months later, more than a hundred people had been killed. Cornelisz finally got a taste of his own island justice: He was sentenced to death. His hands were cut off. He was hanged. But the gruesome episode raises a disturbing question about humanity: If Cornelisz hadn''t been on board, would the massacres have been avoided? Or would they just have been led by someone else? Four thousand miles east of Beacon Island, on the other side of Australia, lies another deserted island, in the Tongan archipelago, called ''Ata. In 1965, six boys, ages fifteen to seventeen, ran away from their boarding school. They stole a fishing boat and started sailing north. On the first day, they only made it five miles before they decided to drop anchor and rest for the night.
As they tried to sleep, a strong storm tossed around their twenty-four-foot boat, ripping away the anchor. The gale-force winds soon snapped the sail and destroyed the rudder, too. When daylight broke, the boys had no way to steer, no way to navigate, and were adrift on the mercy of ocean currents. For eight days, they coasted south, completely unaware of which direction was home. As the six teenagers began to lose hope, they spotted a looming splash of green in the distance. It was ''Ata, a craggy island covered with dense vegetation. With limited ability to steer their damaged fishing boat, the boys waited until they drifted near the shore and abandoned ship. They swam to save their lives.
It was their last hope before they were swept out to the unforgiving open ocean. At last, they made it, cut up from the rocks, but alive. The cliffs that lined ''Ata had made it challenging to clamber ashore, but they turned out to be the young castaways'' saving grace. The jagged rocks made perfect roosts for seabirds, and the boys began working together to trap them. With no fresh water to be found, they improvised and drank seabird blood. After foraging around their new home, they upgraded to coconut juice. Eventually, their meals went from raw to cooked as they started their first fire. The boys agreed to keep constant watch over the simmering flames, ensuring that it would never die out.
Each boy took his turn tending the embers, twenty-four hours a day. This lifeline allowed them to cook fish, seabirds, even tortoises. Their living standards improved further through collaboration. The boys worked together for four days to tap into the roots of one of the island''s larger trees, collecting fresh water one drip at a time. They hollowed out tree trunks to collect rainwater. They made a primitive house out of palm fronds. Every task was shared. There was no leader.
There was no gold lace or stockings. There were no barked orders, no plots to consolidate power, no murders. As they conquered the island, their successes--and failures--were divided evenly. Six months into being castaways, one of the boys, Tevita Fatai Latu, slipped and fell during his daily seabird hunt and broke his leg. The other five boys rushed to help him, using the traditional Tongan method of heating coconut stalks to create a splint, immobilizing the bone back in place. For the next four months, Tevita couldn''t walk, but the other boys took care of him until he could again help with daily chores. At times, there were disputes. (Tempers will occasionally flare whenever you stick six people together 24-7 with a menu that largely consists of seabirds and.