Finally, all of this information has been compiled into three databases – of all the murdered individuals (Appendix I), of all who died in Australian territory (Appendix II) and of all named individuals involved in the Batavia tragedy (Appendix III) – excerpts of which are included as appendixes. Furthermore, it also lists those people who survived and whose human remains definitely will not be found. This paper provides an estimate of how many graves may be found, where they could be and who they might belong to. So far, only ten of these have been discovered and tentatively identified. Depending on how many of the 200 deceased were buried, the islands may have preserved a significant number of human remains from the Batavia castaways. When Batavia wrecked on Morning Reef on 4 June 1629, its castaways soon spread out over the islands of the Wallabi Group. Each of these sections can be read independently. This paper is presented in two sections the first concerns Batavia and the second focuses on Zeewijk. Western Australia now possibly possesses a large number of Dutch human remains from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those who died or were murdered in the Houtman Abrolhos may have left their mark in other ways. Their journals and stories have survived in archives.
Some of the castaways from both of these shipwrecks, although faced by many difficult challenges, managed to reach Batavia, the headquarters of the VOC in the Indies. Even so, the VOC is known to have lost two ships here, Batavia and Zeewijk. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) made sure to mark this island group on its maps and skippers had strict instructions to avoid coming into contact with these reefs. The reefs surrounding the Houtman Abrolhos in Western Australia were a notorious hazard to shipping in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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