The Ol’ VOC

It felt like a pleasant day in March or even April. Wish I’d had more time to go outside, since it looks like winter is going to come back Friday night with big snow.

Finished Devil in the White City (See January 6). Say what you want about capital punishment, hanging H. H. Holmes, who killed dozens of people, was the thing to do. He committed his murders a little too early to go to the electric chair, which I learned from the book was first exhibited at the Columbian Exposition, along with such familiar products as Cracker Jacks and Shredded Wheat.

Still in the mood for time travel, I then picked up a book called Batavia’s Graveyard by Mike Dash. It takes me even further back, to even rougher times, because late 19th-century Chicago seems like Easy Street when compared to life in the service of the Dutch East India Company (VOC, using Dutch initials). The book is about the shipwreck of the VOC East Indiaman Batavia in 1628 off the coast of Australia--then an unknown quantity, including the reef that got the ship. A shipwreck and then a mutiny among the survivors. A harrowing tale, well told so far.

Even in the best of voyages, travel from the Netherlands to the East Indies counted as harrowing. If I remember right from what Dash wrote, the odds of returning were anywhere from 2 in 3 to 50/50, even for the officers. What kind of enterprise, at least in the developed world of today, would be allowed with those odds of survival for its participants? Better then to read about the 17th century than to live it.