ILLUSTRA
TION:
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OAKL
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NOTES FROM AN AUTHOR
I want my readers to feel
like they’re in the story
I’m telling. I want them to
feel the sun beating against
their skin. I want them
to have dirt under their
fingernails. That onlyworks
if you can slather them in the
world you’re creating
drivers, desperate to be places they couldn’t
reach. Beautiful skyscrapers clawed at the
smoggy sky, with the most incredible poverty
gathered in their shadows.
Normally, I’d have fled, but these details
are why I travel. I want my readers to feel like
they’re in the story I’m telling. I want them to
feel the sun beating against their skin. I want
them to have dirt under their fingernails.
That only works if you can slather them in the
world you’re creating. Being in Jakarta was
wonderful for that. An hour after landing, I
was soaked through with sweat, confounded
and alone, entirely lost in the din.
A cab took me to the old town, but with
preservation comes sterility. The canal
would once have been the primary method of
transport around the city. Nowadays, it’s a an
oblong of murky water with a sign detailing
these activities.
Grand buildings that once greased the
world’s economy are now quiet coffeeshops
and museums. Peak colonialism has become
peak tourism. After an hour of aimless
wandering, I asked a cab driver to show me the
older bits of the Jakarta.
For two hours, we crept through alleys
and lanes. Entire eras flickered into view,
before disappearing again as the architecture
changed; wrought iron lamps and rust-
coloured tiled roofs surviving amid brick
factories and rows of slumped houses. I asked
the driver why more of it wasn’t preserved,
but he just tutted at the idea. “This isn’t life
now,” he told me.
I left Jakarta with a notebook drenched in
sweat. My final flight took me to Lelystadt,
just outside Amsterdam, where they’ve built
a galleon like the Batavia. It’s a museum, its
holds full of history instead of spice. Even so,
it’s a menacing space, simultaneously huge
and cramped, sturdy and fragile.
And here, at last, was how I wanted my
book to feel: just like this menacing space
— simultaneously huge and cramped, sturdy
and fragile. A floating cathedral filled with
ghosts, at the mercy of the sea. The rest was
just writing.
A few years ago, I decided to write a murder
mystery novel set on a boat in 1634. I like
boats, and I like history, and I thought it’d be
fun. That’s as far as my thinking took me. I had
no idea that researching the story would drag
me from Australia to Indonesia and Europe.
The book is called The Devil and the Dark
Water, and takes place on a merchant galleon
transporting spices from Batavia to Amsterdam
on behalf of the Dutch East India Company.
The inspiration for the story came from an
exhibition in the Perth Maritime Museum.
A galleon called the Batavia was wrecked
off the west coast of Australia in 162 9. Most
of the passengers survived the wreck only to
find themselves trapped on a tiny island with
a psychopath, who proceeded to butcher the
majority of them.
Bleak, I admit. But I kill fictional folk for
a living, so bleak is my bedrock. The very
same day I saw the exhibition, I chartered
a ferry out to the Abrolhos Islands, where
the massacre took place. I expected rolling
thunder and moaning spirits, and instead
found one of the most beautiful places on the
planet. No fewer than 122 white-sand islands
dot the turquoise ocean, which churns with
turtles and schools of fish. Watching tanned
snorkellers, it was difficult to imagine what
these islands must have looked like to the
passengers of the Batavia, who had no water
or shade, and nowhere to run when they were
being hunted.
The truly awful thing is that, in a way,
most of them were dead the moment they
left Amsterdam. A third of everybody who
boarded those ships died of illness or accident,
which meant you had to be truly desperate to
risk the crossing in the first place.
As soon as we got back to land, I booked
myself a flight to Indonesia. I wanted to finish
the journey they never did and understand
why they’d risked it in the first place. Batavia
— their final destination — doesn’t exist
anymore. It became Jakarta in 1945 after
the Indonesians declared independence
from the Dutch, but a small chunk of the old
city has been preserved as a UNESCO World
Heritage Site. It takes 10 hours to fly from
Perth to Jakarta, but it felt like I’d landed on
another planet. After the natural beauty of
the Abrolhos islands, I was now drowning
in fumes and heat, honking horns and irate
A voyage to 17th-century Java inspires Stuart Turton
to write a historical murder mystery set on the high seas
INDIAN OCEAN
Stuart Turton is the author of The Devil and the
Dark Water, which is published by Bloomsbury
Publishing, £8. 99.
@stu_turton
SMART TRAVELLER
JUL/AUG 2022 45
