Bird mites and torture techniques of the Dutch Golden Age

For the last two weeks and three days, as I have scratched frantically at the seemingly invisible mites, it occurred to me in my sleep deprivation and following applications of recommended (and non-recommended) treatments, there were no mites left alive on me or in the nest or indeed within a kilometre radius thanks to a smorgasbord of poisons.  I was certain I was still home to some recalcitrant arachnids.  And I was in a psychologically fragile state although not quite insane since the itching had eased. 

     However, perfectly normal phenomena - the brush of a strand of hair against my neck, a loose thread along my thigh, an ant on my foot, a lost beetle tangled in my hair, a fly resting on my calf - still sent a hot flush through my body and my heart racing as I fear a mite.  I don’t know if it is anticipating the soft, tickling crawl on my skin and scalp is the problem or the fact I’ve had little sleep for over two weeks.  I am being tortured either by these creatures or my own mind.  If I wanted to torture or punish someone, I would unleash upon them mites.  And so I thought of Batavia’s Graveyard.

     Batavia’s Graveyard is more suspenseful than any fiction by Stephen King and Dean Koontz.  I’ve read it three times.  And it’s all the more thrilling because it is the factual narrative by historian Mike Dash of the passage to Java of the Dutch VOC flagship, Batavia: The charismatic, bankrupted and heretical psychopath Jeronimus Cornelisz plans a mutiny, but is disrupted when the ship runs aground on a tiny, unchartered cay in the Abrolhos Islands off the coast of Western Australia.  The Merchant-in-Command then sails for help in Java 1800 miles away and Cornelisz is free to execute not only his desire for power, but also each of the 200 survivors, one by one.

     Part of the allure of the account is the background of Holland’s Golden Age in the 17^th century and how someone so depraved as Cornelisz could have become so influential.  I was struck by the cruelty of the Dutch at the time and their use of torture to extract confessions and the punishments in general. 

     Readers are introduced early to being stretched on the rack.  Torrentius the painter was accused of being a black magician, a heretic and a Rosicrucian (a member of an illegal secret society).  He had joked that his paintings were created by spirits and he also turned his nose up at religion.  The verdict; a court ordered stretching on the rack because, “the magistrates of Haarlem had grown weary of Torrentius’s obduracy …” and failure to confess to the main charge of being a Rosicrucian.

     “Heavy weights were tied to the painter’s legs while four men hauled him into the air by ropes that had been attached to his wrists, he was left hanging in this way while more questions were put to him.” 

     After three sessions, Torrentius’s limbs had been pulled from their sockets and his jaw so damaged he was unable to eat.

     Water torture didn’t require the expensive and cumbersome equipment of the stretching rack nor a trained torturer. All that was needed was a funnel to force water into the mouth of the victim who wore a canvas collar and was strapped, spread-eagled, to an upright frame such as a door.

     Water kept being poured into the collar if the man refused to confess to the point that drinking was the only way to make breathing possible. Then more water was poured into the collar. The man became hideously bloated, his body “swollen twice or thrice as big as before, his cheeks like great bladders, and his eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead.”  Naturally he would become dizzy and weak and often faint. The prisoner was then cut down and forced to vomit so the torture could continue and then he was prepared to confess to anything put to him.

     When at sea, environmentally appropriate methods were in order.  Minor offences resulted in imprisonment for weeks in a matchbox-sized cell “at the forepart of the gun deck where the wind whistled maddeningly through the slats.” 

     The shipping company rules decreed, “Anyone pulling a knife in anger shall be nailed to the mast with a knife through his hand, and shall remain standing until he pulls his hand off.”

     Mutiny attracted 200 lashes of the whip, the man often being doused in sea water first to ensure the salt intensified the agony.

     Being dropped from the yardram involved a man’s arms being tied behind his back and a strong rope around his wrists and lead weights were bound to his ankles.  He was dropped 15 or so metres toward the sea till the ropes tightened and dislocated his shoulders.  Twice more he was hauled to the top and dropped again, this part more painful than the fall.

     My favourite in terms of creativity was keelhauling where a man’s arms were tied above his head and his ankles bound.  A long rope was passed under the keel of the moving vessel and the ends secured to the man’s wrists and ankles. He was then pulled from one side of the keel to the other and if he didn’t drown, he was either macerated by the barnacles or decapitated as he smashed into the hull. 

     With the overwhelming majority of crew being male, homosexual relations were inevitable.  Detection could result in the lovers being “sewn together into a sailcloth shroud and thrown alive into the ocean.”  Therefore most of the affairs were between officers since they had private cabins and the status and influence over lesser sailors.

     So, two weeks and two days after first being consumed by the mites and thinking that the Dutch should have included in their repertoire of torture and punishment, an application of mites to an offender’s person, I was driving home on the Herberton Highway on dusk.  A black and white flutter in the second lane caught my attention.  I pulled over and picked up an injured bird, a native peewee.

     Squawks and shrieks erupted from the trees in the middle verge of the road, its parents warning me away. I considered the young bird's fate if I left it on the side of the highway – roadkill - so I tucked it under my shirt (it was instantly calmed) and drove home to call Tableland Wildlife Rescue.

     That night, as I was about to drift off to sleep, the tell-tale creepy crawly sensation started – in my scalp, in the crook of my knee, along my bikini line, my armpit - worse than the last few nights.  I broke out in a hot flush and my heart beat furiously.  It occurred to me that rescuing the peewee had reinvigorated the mite lifecycle.  I groaned out loud.  Could I change my order for the torture and have 200 lashes?  I’d even go for the solitary confinement in the shoebox and savour the maddening wail of the wind.  Stretching on the rack was finite.  Please!  Not mites, not more mites.