Leendert Hasenbosch, The Homo Castaway
DUTCH DUDE DUMPED ON DESERT ISLAND, 1725
Ahoy! Raoul de Jong rewrites an 18th century account of castaway Leendert Hasenbosch, turning an anti-sodomy saga into a celebration of sisterhood. First the facts…
Leendert Hasenbosch was born in 1695 in The Hague, in what is now the Netherlands.
At 18 he enlisted as a soldier for the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company.
In 1714 this company shipped Leendert from the Netherlands to Asia, where for 10 years he would function as one of the little cogs in an enormous machine whose main task was to oppress the Indonesian population. He worked as an accountant.
In October 1724, Leendert left Jakarta on a ship called the Prattenburg.
Between 19 March and 11 April 1725, the ship was docked in Cape Town.
On 5 May, 1725, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Leendert was “set ashore as a villain” on an uninhabited island for committing the act of sodomy. This island had been “discovered” in 1501 by a Portuguese navigator on Ascension Day — the day Jesus’s body had supposedly ascended into heaven, without leaving a trace — and named Ascension Island. European visitors later placed an enormous wooden cross on the top of a 270-meter-high hill.
In January 1726, British sailors discovered Leendert’s diary, which detailed his survival on the island, but mysteriously, his body seemed to have disappeared into thin air, just like the enormous wooden cross.
An English version of his journal was soon published as ‘Sodomy Punish’d: Being a True and Exact Relation of what Befel to one Leondert Hussenlosch, a Dutch Man, who by Command of the Dutch Fleet, was put on Shore on the Desolate Island of Ascention. Faithfully Translated from a Journal wrote by Himself…’
Two other versions of Leendert’s diary were published in the following years — ‘An authentic Relation’ (1728) and ‘The Just Vengeance of Heaven Examplify’d’ (1730).
All of these versions edited and exaggerated Leendert’s original text, which has since gone missing, and expanded it with new passages — nightmares, Devil apparitions — that read as a warning to people like ourselves: this is what happens if you follow your desires.
Dear Leendert,
This was not the first time our powers were underestimated by people like your publishers. We are magical — maybe that’s why people fear us so often. It’s time we use our magic to fix what went wrong in the past, to erase the anti-sodomite propaganda and replace it with what could and should have been. If your publishers were allowed to rewrite your diary for their own purposes, so am I. After all, I’m your family. Let’s begin with a better title: ‘Sodomy Celebrated, or The End of Guilt: a true story about what happened to Leendert Hasenbosch on Ascension Island in 1725, with magical interventions from Leendert’s family from the future’.
According to ‘Sodomy Punish’d’, on your first evening on the island, you wasted no time and wrote this diary entry. I’ll leave it unchanged:
5 May 1725
By order of the Commodore and Captains of the Dutch fleet, I was set ashore on the island of Ascension, which gave me a great deal of dissatisfaction, but I hope almighty God will be my protection. They put ashore with me a cask of water, two buckets, and an old frying pan, etc. I made my tent on the beach near a rock, wherein I put some of my clothes.
Your colleagues probably laughed when they left you, calling you nasty names. Like you were nothing, trash. While their ship disappeared in the distance, you closed your eyes and remembered the handsome man you met in Cape Town who got you into this situation. I imagine him with the same face as the beautiful boy working behind the bar of the café where I’m writing this. Sweet, light brown, with soft, sad eyes, thick eyebrows, blushing cheeks and beautiful full lips. You saw flashes — the two of you kissing in an alley, his open fly, your hand in his pants, you looking into his eyes, begging him to get bigger and harder, to be excited, to surrender, to long for you, to increase his fire, to give you more!
The sad thing is that while you were sitting on that deserted beach, you probably believed this was what you truly deserved. You had surrendered to desires that you’d always been taught were unnatural. And that was what had brought you to a deserted beach, with an endless, wild ocean in front of you and a barren, unfriendly island behind you. Maybe you intuitively knew that through writing down your story, you’d take back control of it. And of course, Leendert, you were right.
6 May 1725
I went upon the hills to see what there might be on the other side of the island proper for me, or any greens or other things to subsist on, but to my sorrow found nothing worthy of notice. I sincerely wished some accident would befall me to finish these my miserable days: in the evening I walked very melancholy back to my tent and with difficulty found the way, and as I was walking, I prayed to God Almighty to put a period to my days, or help me off from this island; when I came to my tent, I secured it the best I could with stones, and a tarpaulin from the weather: then went and killed three birds called boobies, which I skinned and salted and put in the sun to dry; these were the first I killed on the island; at night I killed two more.
The internet, Leendert, tells me that a booby is a type of bird that looks like a seagull with bright blue feet. The Spanish named them after the word “bobo”, meaning stupid, because of how easy they were to catch. You could rather call them “trusting” and, in fact, they’re the perfect vehicle for my first intervention…
In your sleep, I call out to the spirit of writer Sobonfu Somé who appears in the form of a booby. While you’re on this island, Sobonfu’s ancestors are being kidnapped from their villages, pushed onto ships and transported across the Atlantic by the Dutch West India Company, the sister corporation of the one that abandoned you on this island. The friendly little bird reads you a passage from her book ‘The Spirit of Intimacy’ (2002). Sobonfu belongs to the Dagara, an ethnic group living in Burkina Faso and according to their belief system, our way of being is not a sin — it’s a special power:
“The words gay and lesbian do not exist in the village, but there is the word gatekeeper. Gatekeepers are people who live a life at the edge between the worlds – the world of the village and the world of spirit… And gatekeepers have the capacity to take other people to those places.”
You wake up, drenched in sweat. Was it just a dream? You don’t know for sure, but you have been given the first inkling that not everything on this island is as it seems.
On 7 May you plant a white flag on a hill near the sea, hoping that passing ships will spot it. Over the next few days you kill a turtle, cut it into piece and dry it in the sun. You look for traces of animals and edible plants, but find little to eat. You don’t locate a single water source and no ships appear on the horizon. By 12 May you’re about to lose hope again and decide to read the Bible.
In the Bible, the book of Leviticus has this to say about homosexuality:
“If a man sleeps with a man as with a woman, they have both committed a detestable act. They must be put to death; their death is their own fault.”
But as soon as you open your Bible, something strange happens — the letters and words on the page rearrange themselves and instead of the Word of the Lord you see a message from the future, written by the Black, Surinamese writer Anton de Kom from his book ‘We Slaves of Suriname’ (1934):
“It has often been stated in Christian books, that the Negro was not human, because man was created in God’s image and, according to these scribes, God is not Black… So let us, as Negroes, give you the assurance that indeed, we ourselves do not believe that we are created in the image of a God, whose blessing was always invoked by the white people of those days when they seized the land, life and property of other colored peoples.”
‘Strange,’ you think, ‘and’ – looking back on all the suffering you helped cause on behalf of your former employer with the excuse of a god who said only white, heterosexual men are truly human — ‘also very true.’
Leendert, before I can help you further I need you to realize that the Bible is just a fairytale and to make sure that no more fairytales will come between us, I light a fire on the afternoon of 22 May. That evening you write:
22 May 1725
In the afternoon, took my line and fished from the rock, but caught nothing. At my return to my tent, to my great surprise, found it full of smoke, after some recollection I remembered, I had left my tinder alight on my quilt, but the smoke smothered me so, that I could not enter, till I had quenched it with a bucket of water. I return God Almighty my hearty thanks, that all my things were not burnt, having lost nothing but a Bayan shirt and my Bible.
Without the Bible, you have time to dream…
9 June 1725
Found nothing, meditated on a future state.
But it’s not the future you see, but the face of the strapping guy and his throbbing cock that got you here. Startled, you open your eyes and are overwhelmed by a wave of shame and scream, ‘This is not allowed!’ But around you there’s nothing but an empty beach, cheerful birds, the lapping sea and for the first time you realize that being an outsider comes with an advantage: the freedom to stop pretending to be “normal”.
Of course the publishers of ‘Sodomy Punish’d’ could not accept this moment of liberation, so they cut it out. In the diary entry listed for 16 June, they go all out with anti-sodomite propaganda. Here’s just a bit of the passage to illustrate how viciously the people who wrote history fought against people like us:
16 June 1725
About eight or nine o’clock at night, I was surprised by a noise of the most horrid and dreadful swearing and cursing, mixed with such blasphemous discourse, that no human creature can express, nor do I dare write it with my pen, it seemed to me as tho’ all the devils had broke out of Hell… I think it my duty to discover these things… as a warning to all wicked people how they give ear to the Devil; and that they ought to put their trust firmly on God Almighty our Lord and Savior, who died on the cross for our sins, and was buried and rose again, assuring themselves, that if he will protect them, all the devils in Hell can have no power over him blah blah blah, et cetera et cetera et cetera…
These, of course, are not your own words. Sure, maybe a spirit visited you that night. Maybe your horny thoughts summoned him! This spirit is often mistaken for the Devil, but only by the uninitiated. In West African Vodún and Haitian Vodou he is known as Papa Legba. Since slave ships pass your island on their journey to the New World carrying Africans and their gods, it only makes sense that Legba appears in your story. He comes in peace. He’s the spirit that guards the gate between the human world and the world of the gods, just like us, you see? The cursing you heard was Legba summoning writers from the future to help you step across the threshold.
Two days later, you meet your first friend on the beach:
18 June 1725
After noon I took my hatchet, going along the strand, found a tree that was lately thrown on shore by the sea. I cut it in two that it might be easier to carry it home, I took it down, and rested myself on it at which time appeared to me the resemblance of a man…
The man is sitting, very friendly, with his legs casually crossed. He wears a yellow shirt, a red pirate scarf. He smokes a cigarette and looks at you challengingly but lovingly, with large, slightly bulging eyes. We, your family from the future, recognize him immediately — it is the Lord Savior James Baldwin. He recites from his novel ‘Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone’, a passage about a young boy named Leo who ends up in bed with his older brother Caleb and decides to follow his desires:
“I hoped that God was watching. He probably was. He never did anything else. I knew, I knew what my brother wanted, what my brother needed, and I was not at all afraid — more than I could say for God, who took all and gave nothing; and who paid for nothing, though all his creatures paid. I held my brother very close, I kissed him and caressed him and I felt a pain and wonder I had never felt before… And I thought, Yes. Yes. Yes. I’ll love you, Caleb, I’ll love you forever, and in the sight of the Father and the Son and the fucking Holy Ghost and all their filthy hosts, and in the sight of all the world, and I’ll sing hallelujahs to my love for you in Hell.”
James closes his book and looks up at you, smiling mischievously — ‘Do you understand what I mean? Yes, you do.’ And so, you walk across the beach, climb the rocks and clamber to the top of the tall peak where a white wooden cross looms over the island.
That evening you light a bonfire and watch the flames slowly turn the symbol of your oppressor into ashes. In the middle of this sea of fire appears the face of our great writer friend, the Merciful Allen Ginsberg. He radiates light and shouts the following words from his poem ‘Footnote to Howl’ (1955):
“Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!”
You take off your clothes, close your eyes, fall back into the warm sand, press your body against the earth and cover it with mud in honor of the creator of everything that’s alive, including you.
Sorry, Leendert, but from here on out, it will be tough for you. Not as a punishment of course, but because we need to get your body and mind in the right state for the final phase of this ritual. You’re running out of water, there’s no rain. On 21 August, you drink your own urine. On 22 August, you drink the blood of a turtle. On 24 August you make tea from your own urine. On 26 August you finish your reserve of drinking water. On 27 August you write that you are almost dead:
27 August 1725
I laid my head on a stone, and rested myself a little, then went quietly down the hills, and came to my tent, but went as if I were going to my grave.
In September you become very ill. You vomit, barely sleep and keep hoping for rain or a passing ship, in vain.
These are your last three diary entries:
7 October 1725
I was again obliged to drink my own urine, I likewise ate raw flesh.
8 October 1725
This day I got a great number of eggs.
9 to 14 October 1725
I lived as before.
This is where your diary ends. After writing these last words, you push your journal aside and curl up, groaning in pain. Everything becomes silent – the birds and the insects and the sea, as if the whole universe is holding its breath. A haze passes over the sun, the sky turns a deep dark blue, full of flickering white stars. At that moment a song plays from heaven. It’s the same one the hot bartender put on in the café where I’m writing this (and I’m not making this up, this is really happening, which proves that this magic is real) – Pink + White by Frank Ocean:
“If you could die and come back to life
Up for air from the swimming pool
You’d kneel down to the dry land
Kiss the Earth that birthed you
Gave you tools just to stay alive
And make it out when the sun is ruined”
The sea suddenly calms and a sexy demigod appears, wading through the water, towards the beach. It’s a minute before you recognize him. He’s more handsome, taller than the last time you saw him in Cape Town. He’s completely washed of guilt and shame, covered in seaweed and gold dust. He breathes life back into you with a kiss.
‘Is this real?’ you ask.
‘This is real,’ he says. ‘I found you again.’
His cock is hard and he knows you want it. He rubs his dick on your forehead, across your lips, down your chest and between your legs, then lies behind you and presses his whole body against yours. You moan as he pushes himself inside you.
With his arms around you he says, ‘Baby baby baby, are you ready for the rest?’
He carefully wipes the sand off your body, brushes the hair out of your eyes. He stands and extends a hand to you, pulls you up and walks you into the sea to a boat where the rest of us are waiting. Baldwin and Ginsberg are here, also Claude McKay, Christopher Isherwood, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Edward Carpenter, Gerard Reve, Édouard Louis, Langston Hughes, Tom Lanoye, Virginia Woolf, Anna Blaman, Edmund White, Edgar Cairo, Alan Hollinghurst, Truman Capote and many many others whose voices were only recorded in soft whispers.
We’ve come from far away. Our ship is not a yacht, but a rickety raft that we’ve put together ourselves from wooden crosses and sticks and stones and whatever else has been thrown at us. We applaud you, shower you with flowers and thank you — your survival has made things a bit better for all of us.
Then there is I, your distant descendant, standing at the front of the boat, dressed in a sailor suit. ‘Ahoy!’ I shout, ‘The fun has just begun!’ Ascension Island slowly disappears from view as we dance our raft across the ocean, through the gate, to the land of the gods.
Originally published in BUTT 36