LAST EDITED ON Sep-10-20 AT 08:33 PM (EDT)
 
Oh, I missed this.

>"Is it too much to hope Van Zaandt was later tossed overboard in a
>mutiny and eaten by sharks?"

Nothing much ever went right for friend Van Zandt after the 1789-90 voyage of the Dageraad. Always a hotheaded, arrogant man and a bit of a gambler, he lost the respect of those both above and below him in the Company's power structure, along with every bet he ever made thenceforth, after that vessel made port in the spring of 1790.

Van Zandt was dismissed from the ship and the VOC over certain accounting inconsistencies the following year, halfway back to Batavia, and found himself stranded in Cape Colony, where he was only able to find irregular work as a dock laborer. In 1795, after four years of constantly failing to recoup anything like his former position in life, he perished under unclear circumstances during the Britannian conquest of the Cape—some say in a fight with an English officer over, what else, a gambling debt.

An impartial biographer, if such a marginal historical figure ever would have had one, would be struck by how sudden and complete his turn of fortune was in May of 1790. It was almost as though, a particularly dramatically-minded historian might say, he had been cursed by a particularly skillful and unforgiving sort of witch. Say, the kind who comes from a wealthy family in Bruges, and pretends, as a matter of form, to be far less interested in the personal lives of her household staff than her notoriously soft-hearted husband is.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.