Traces the harrowing 1629 shipwreck of nearly three hundred survivors on small islands off the coast of western Australia who found themselves at the mercy of a visionary psychopath and his team of supporters, a group that brutalized the survivors before eventually slaughtering them in an organized massacre. synopsis may belong to another edition of this title.
Synopsis:
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