The Aagtekerke was constructed for the Zeeland Chamber of the Dutch East India Company in 1724. On May 27^th 1925 she sailed her first voyage to Batavia under the command of Jan Uitenboom, with a crew of 212. The cargo consisted of merchandise and a consignment of bullion and specie amounting to about 200,000 guilders. After touching at Benguela, a port in Angola, the Aagtekerke sailed to the Cape and anchored off Capetown on January 3^rd 1726. 16 men died during the voyage and 45 of the sick were put ashore.

Fresh provisions and crew replacements came aboard and the Aagtekerke took voyage again on January 23^rd, never to be seen again.

In October 1726 the Company in Batavia wrote to the Directors in Amsterdam notifying them that the Aagtekerke was considered missing. It wasn’t until after the wreck of the Zeewijk, however, that any further information regarding the possible fate of the ship could be sent. In October 1728 the Governor General and Council of the Indies, in a despatch principally relating to the loss of the Zeewijk, suggested that the Aagtekerke was probably wrecked in about latitude 29^o south on an outlying reef of the southern islands of the Houtman Abrolhos.

The Zeewijk was wrecked on the Half Moon Reef in latitude 28 degrees 50’ south. The survivors of the wreck lived on the Abrolhos for about 10 months, and during excursions in search of water explored a number of the islands in the southern group. They reported having seen:

some signs of a Dutch ship, probably wrecked on the above mentioned reef, which might have been the Fortuyn or Aegtekerke, whose crew may have died at sea on their way there.

The first material was reportedly found soon after the ship struck. A contemporary transcribed copy of the journal of Adriaen Van Der Graeff, one of the crew, reads:

then they were 22 persons on the reef who hauled the boat and scow as high as they could on the reef near the rigging where they also found a filled handgrenade, also old rope and rough skin being of a ship or ships, struck here by the same fate.2 Months later some of the seamen visited Pelsart Island, to the south-east of the campsite on Gun Island, and Van Der Graeff on August 27^th:

They found there our gig, which was lying astern of the wreck by an iron cable on July 16, which cable was broken, so that the gig was thrown over the reef by the surf and floated away out of sight to the N.E. on the W. side of the same island they found a piece of a ship or wreck, finding the figurehead lying under a cliff, of which they could discern that it had been the figure of a woman.

A week later more information about Pelsaert Island was given:

At about 9 o’clock in the evening the 2 scows which had departed from here on the 30^th ult., returned bringing the gig after which they had gone, having stayed at the island of which we spoke more extensively on the 27^th ult., for 4 days and nights, when the master found a wreck, as he told me upon his arrival, as noted on the 27^th ult. They also found there our gig and 2 rafts with half the awning from our late ship, which they demolished....

They also found on that island a piece of grating, the upper chimney and some empty casks, a binnacle, some blocks, a wheel of a gun carriage and some more trifles, all new and hence from our late ship.

More material was found on Middle Island, between Gun Island and Pelsart Island. On January 28^th 1728 the journal read:

in the large island (Middle Island) they also found a pair of scissors which were not yet completely perished, but which, in our opinion, must have been exposed too long for them to be from our ship.

On the same island the Zeewijk men found a well, dug by previous sailors. The material certainly indicates that a vessel had been wrecked, but the questions of where and when, and which ship, are not so easily answered. Certainly some of the material came from the wreck of the Zeewijk. In addition, the currents in the area were such that material coming in over the reef at any point might easily wash ashore on Pelsart Island, as indeed happened to the gig. Similarly the ‘figurehead’ could easily have come from anywhere in the Indian Ocean, or even further afield.

For example in 1871 the figurehead of the American clipper ship Blue Jacket was washed ashore on Rottnest Island. The Blue Jacket had been destroyed by fire off the Falkland Islands (in the Atlantic) in 1869. On the West Australian coast Vlamingh found in 1696 wreckage near Fremantle which possibly belonged to the Vergulde Draeck wrecked in 1656 some 100 km north of Fremantle. Thus the heavy timbers found on Pelsart Island in 1727 do not necessarily indicate a wreck in the near vicinity. The scissors and the well found in January 1728 could also have been left by visiting survivors of a vessel wrecked hundreds of miles away.

For example the Vergulde Draeck survivors, left behind with a broken boat near Ledge Point, may well have reached the Abrolhos on their way north, only to be stranded on the Abrolhos reefs and linger trying to find water and repair their boat. Scissors left on Gun Island by the Zeewijk survivors in 1727 were collected in reasonable condition by Broadhurst’s guano diggers in the 1890’s, and it is quite likely that the scissors found on Middle Island in 1728 had been lying there a considerable time prior to their findings.

Finally the grenade, rope and skin found on the reef adjacent to the wreck must be considered. A number of grenades have been raised from the Batavia wreck. If the ‘skin’ referred to ship’s planking, and the grenade was attached to such floating timber, then it could have floated many miles. Otherwise a grenade could not be expected to have travelled more than 300 meters or so out of the deep water on the seaward side of the reef. That area has been searched thoroughly without finding any indications of a second wreck. The terminology ‘filled hand grenade’ is itself perhaps dubious. A second journal of the Zeewijk reads for June 16 pulled the boat and the scow on the reef where they also found the skeleton of a dog, filled up, and a piece of rough skin on the rope.

The mournful spectacle of the decomposing body of a seal (sea dog), caught up in the Zeewijk’s rigging and mistaken for a dog, would more easily attract the attention of the seamen than a ‘filled hand grenade’ lying under the water. In Dutch the 2 words ‘hand grenade’ (handgranaat) and ‘dog skeleton’ (hondsgeraamte) are somewhat similar, and it seems likely that the 18^th century Dutchman who transcribed Van Der Graeff’s Journal made a mistake.While as a whole the collection of wreck material described by the Zeewijk survivors may be considered circumstantial evidence that the Aagtekerke was wrecked on the Abrolhos, nevertheless when those items are considered individually there is little to support such a conclusion.

The evidence provided by the visit of the survey vessel Beagle in 1840 does nothing to support the argument that the Aagtekerke was wrecked on or near the Abrolhos. Commander John Lort Stokes found on Pelsart Island a large block of scoria (laval rock) which he presumed had been floated by the current from the volcanic island of St Paul (midway across the Indian Ocean), and nearby, the beams of a vessel. These Stokes thought to have come from the wreck of the Batavia. But probably drifted in from the Zeewijk wreck, as the gig had in 1727, or came from the raft dismantled there in 1728. Another member of the Beagle complement, Crawford Pascoe, wrote a book about his adventures, which was published in 1897.

Pascoe describes the finding, on the Southern Group of Abrolhos, of ‘a copper doit, coin of the Indian Netherlands Government, about half a penny value, bearing the date 1620, as though testifying to the period of the wreck of the Bataivia. But Pascoe’s description of the other events shows that his memory produced some distortions over the years, and it is likely that he was mistaken in regard to the date of the coin. In 1853, 13 years after the accident, Pascoe had been unsure of the circumstances, writing in a letter, ‘a doit bearing the date 1620.

A chart of the Southern Abrolhos, produced by the Beagle crew in 1840, shows a wreck to the west of Pelsart Island, but, as Stokes conjectured wrongly about other aspects of the Dutch visits to the Abrolhos, the pin pointed wreck site cannot be taken as firm evidence. In 1842 the barque Ocean Queen was wrecked on the same reef as the Zeewijk, and the survivors spent some time on Pelsart Island before setting out for Fremantle in a boat. Captain Daniel Scott, the purchaser of the wreck, visited the Abrolhos for salvage purposes. Scott was accompanied by John Gilbert, the ornithologist, who made use of the opportunity to examine the islands:

short of water ... we determined to try Middle Island, on which we eventually found an unexhaustible supply ... the well is merely a hole in the limestone on the lowest part of the island, and about 100 yards inshore from a sandy beach on the east side near the southern end. The circumstances of there being water on one of these islands during the driest part of the season, is not perhaps generally known, although I strongly suspect the Beagle watered from this very hole, from the circumstances of there being hoops and portions of casks lying about the immediate vicinity of the well. There were, besides, numerous portions of Dutch jars, and bottles, which have perhaps been lying there for the past 200 years - since the wrecks of the Zeewijk and Batavia, Dutch ships. On several of the islands of Pelsart’s Group may be seen portions of vessels, and on South Island (Pelsart) I found several cannon balls; also some iron bolts, rings, e.t.c, attached to portions of the timbers.

It is interesting to speculate as to the origin of the cannon balls found on Pelsart Island, but most likely source is the wreck of the Ocean Queen. A Museum party searching the dry reef top at low tide on the Ocean Queen wreck site in 1979 found a large cannon ball.From the 1840’s onwards visits to the Southern Abrolhos became quite frequent, and it may be expected that Dutch artefacts were moved from their original locations, and contaminated with later material.

The Aagtekerke belonged to the second class of merchant vessels, being 145 feet (47.5 meters) long, with a carrying capacity of 140 lasten, and an armament consisting of 36 cannon and swivel guns.