I barely slept last night. A combination of weird dreams and the tent flapping kept me awake. I tried to read my book and ended up finishing it. It was Down Under. After realising I was at Hamelin Pools because of Bill Bryson I thought I should read it again. He also went to Kalbarri. It is the last story of the book. He describes the wreck of the Batavia. I've been reading about it on Wikipedia. I'll summarise what happened.
The Batavia left Batavia, which is now Jakarta, in 1629 and headed south to catch the favourable winds. The skipper had hatched a plan to raise a mutiny as the ship was carrying a lot of silver, he didn't like the captain and he was batshit crazy. He arranged to have the ship go off course and blame it on the captain. Then he arranged to have a female on board anonymously molested, causing the captain to punish the crew, who would then join the mutiny.
The second part of the plan failed because the molested lady recognised her attackers, so only they were punished. The first part of the plan kind of worked. The ship did go off course, hit a reef and sank. About 40 people drowned while the remaining 300 or so made it to a nearby island in the Abrolhos Islands.
They were fairly stuck. The Captain took some blokes and decided to row back to Batavia. The city, not the ship. The skipper was left in charge and resumed the mutiny. He essentially had a witch hunt. He'd make up crimes a manipulate others into carrying out punishments (always murder). Eventually he started getting bored so would find interesting ways to murder people. He also had the women rounded up into "rape camps". His ultimate aim was to reduce the number of survivors so the supplies would last longer. And also to rape people, I suppose.
A group of survivors eventually took off to the next island and prepared defences against the skipper. I think about 200 people had been murdered by that stage,including a baby the skipper failed to poison, so just strangled instead.
Meanwhile, the captain had miraculously made it to Jakarta. It took him 33 days. Everyone was really cross with him. The Batavia was the flagship of the Dutch East India Company. He got another ship and was ordered back to rescue the survivors and perhaps salvage some of the enormous wealth from the downed ship. Somehow that took him 3 months.
When he got back, the two groups of survivors spotted the rescue ship at the same time and literally raced out to be the first to tell their side of the story. The captain eventually chose the right side. All of the mutineers were executed in gloriously creative ways, except for two, who he rowed to the mainland and abandoned with quite a lot of provisions at a place called Red Bluff.
That's where I went today. The internet is terrible, but in the photo looking south from yesterday's blog, the big headland is Red Bluff. Those two blokes were the first European inhabitants of Australia.
There are stories of blonde haired blue eyed Aboriginals that just might be their descendants.
After Red Bluff I carried on down the coast. I went past an old convict buying yard and studied it carefully David Mitchell style. From the road at 110km/h. I also got quite a shock when off to the right a mass of pink water appeared. I knew there was a pink lake (Hutt Lake) but I really didn't expect it to be pink. I almost went off the road staring at it. It was really pink.
Even more remarkable was that there was almost nowhere to stop for a closer inspection. When I did find somewhere the flies were insane. I'll point out that the captain of the Batavia also noted that when he was shipwrecked. I snapped a terrible photo and almost ran back to the bike. There were literally hundreds of flies swarming around me.
I kept going to Horrocks beach. It was crowned the best beach in Australia last year or the year before. It isn't the best beach in Australia by a long shot but made for a refreshing swim. I continued to Northampton then took a back road around to Geraldton. The landscape has improved dramatically. It is hilly and green in a way I haven't really seen anywhere else in Australia. It is not unlike Moravia in the Czech Republic, although the hills here are gentler.
I'm now camped at an overpriced caravan park at a place called S-Bend. The park is nice despite being named for a toilet part. Should've called it Z Bend. The Asian lady that checked me in keeps checking I'm not "stealing electric".
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