Rachel van Kooij Der Kajütenjunge des Apothekers (The Cabin Boy) Verlag Jungbrunnen, February 2005. 288 pp. ISBN 3-7026-5765-7 The year is 1628 and the East India Company is about to set sail from Holland to Indonesia. On board the giant flagship Batavia is sixteen-year-old Jan. The ship will never reach her destination, but that of course is unknown to Jan, who, driven from the family home by the death of his father and the painful revelation of his own illegitimacy, was only too happy to sign up for service under Jeronimus Cornelis, a former pharmacist turned merchant. The voyage starts badly. Almost at once the ship encounters a violent storm, closely followed by an equally violent heat wave. It also suffers from rats, both animal and human. There is one very pleasant and companionable soldier, and a plain-spoken maid travelling in the service of the ship's minister and his family. All these characters are well-drawn. But most compelling of all are the seething mass of jealousies, rivalries and intrigues among the men at the top as they plot to get possession of the ship’s treasure and indeed the ship itself. Jan overhears these plans. But what can he do to thwart them and protect the passengers? Then the Batavia hits a reef and passengers and crew are cast ashore to survive on a group of barren and isolated atolls where Cornelis, always a loose canon, turns from moody and capricious plotter into a tyrant prepared to kill. Jan is horrified by the murderous excesses, but does he have the courage to defy Cornelis’s orders? Before long he too is caught up in the violence. By the end of the story both Cornelis and Jan have been sentenced to hang for mutiny. Has Jan made his final journey? Here is a rollicking, seafaring yarn that draws extensively on known facts to turn the troubled history of the Batavia into a stirring fiction. A book of real narrative power, with a youthful hero grappling with the unknown and only just coming out on top.