'I, Jeronimus, am a man of phials, a measurer of powders on bronze scales, a potion brewer, an opium and arsenic merchant. The primped and perfumed Amsterdam burghers came to me in droves requiring cures for fevers, love balms, the miscarriage of a bastard child and, of course, poisons. Ah, poisons...'
So speaks Jeronimus Cornelisz, thirty-year-old apothecary and uppermerchant... and seriously deranged man.
The Company is a novel based on the true story of the Dutch East India flagship, the Batavia, which foundered off the coast of western Australia in 1629. Jeronimus Cornelisz, a man with mutiny, murder, rape and torture on his mind, assumes command of the survivors. With Cornelisz in control, however, those who survived begin to wish they had gone down with the ship...