Mutiny's bloodiest hour

In the early hours of 4 June 1629 the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia struck a half-hidden outcrop of coral reefs 50 miles off the west coast of Terra Australis Incognita (Australia). Almost all the 322 souls on board survived the wrecking of the merchantman, but soon after the skipper and most of the officers set off in the ship's longboat northwards to Java to get help, a dozen or so sailors - who had been planning to mutiny anyhow - took the opportunity to unleash a 16-week orgy of violence and arbitrary murder.

Why they did it, and how a tiny minority of cut-throat desperados managed to intimidate the far larger group of loyal survivors, forms the basis of this utterly absorbing investigation into group psychology, human nature and the survival instinct. It also provides an uncanny parable for what so much of the world was to suffer three centuries later at the hands of dictators such as Hitler and Stalin.

The charismatic leader of the mutineers, Jeronimus Cornelisz, acted from a variety of motives, neatly summarised by the author Mike Dash: "As the owner of a failed business, with an abandoned child and a dead child, he had no particular desire to see the United Provinces [Holland] again. As a near-bankrupt seeking to make his fortune in the Indies, he was engaged in an enterprise that left him not much more than a 50/50 chance of coming back alive even if he was successful. And as an East India Company officer with ready access to the great cabin in the stern, he had seen the dozen chests of money there and knew they contained a fortune that would allow anyone who seized it to spend what was left of his life in consummate luxury."

To complete the picture, Cornelisz was an Anabaptist, part of a particularly vicious sect that lived by completely different moral precepts to the rest of humanity. This entrancing book, an adult version of Lord of the Flies that is, moreover, entirely true, is as well researched as it is impressively written. It comprises torture, illicit sex in the skipper's closet, several horrifically cold-blooded executions, scurvy, lice, rape, 3,500 cockroaches, a watch-keeper named Half-Awake, breathtaking treachery, and St Fiacre the patron saint of haemorrhoids.

As the Batavia's survivors quickly ate their paltry food stores and drunk the only water immediately available, they tried to work out how they could possibly survive on "a barren strip of coral rubble, 500 yards long, less than 300 yards across with no hills, no trees, no caves and little undergrowth". Nor were there any water-pools, wells or land animals to be found, so once the officers' boat was out of sight Cornelisz resorted to a series of brilliant machiavellian manoeuvres to reduce the numbers of mouths to feed.

After small groups were rowed off to adjoining islands to look for water he knew was not there, with vain promises of being picked up later, Cornelisz's men began killing the rest. Some were judicially executed, others murdered in secret, but after a while the killings became arbitrary.

Dash brilliantly conveys the horror on the island that became known as Batavia's Graveyard as the realisation of Cornelisz's intent dawned on those who were left.

At first Cornelisz's followers "mur-dered because the alternative was to become one of the victims, and because the favour of the captain-general meant improved meat rations and access to the island's women". Yet fairly soon after they had finished killing to settle scores or to punish dissent, the mutineers began decapitating cabin boys and strangling women simply for the pleasure of it.

Like a good whodunit, this enthralling, thought-provoking book ends with an exciting, unexpected finish. It is obviously the product of a great deal of archival research, but it would also make a superb movie - Treasure Island meets Deliverance.

Andrew Roberts's Napoleon and Wellington has been published recently.