MARITIME West Australiana
While this is a fictional account of the events surrounding the 1629 wreck of the Batavia, the known facts and sequence of events have not been changed and little has needed to be added to flesh out the story.
One person who was caught up in the worst of its terrors was Lucretia, a high-class passenger seeking to join her husband in the East Indies. Her ‘diary’ gives us an insight into what it was like to live through one of the most astonishing sagas of shipwreck, massacre, survival, rescue and retribution in maritime history.
These events occurred in the first pages of Australia’s European-linked history – one hundred and forty years before James Cook sailed anywhere near the east coast and two hundred years (almost to the day) before the Swan River Colony was established on the west coast of Australia.