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The curse of the Dutch sodomite Gay history is a litany of condemned men

'His punishment, then, was an extension of his crimes.' (Credit: 'Marooned' by Howard Pyle)

'His punishment, then, was an extension of his crimes.' (Credit: 'Marooned' by Howard Pyle)


October 25, 2023   5 mins

Spare a thought for the sodomites. In Dante’s Inferno they are condemned to run for all eternity through rains of fire. At the Duomo in Florence, you can still see Giorgio Vasari’s immense fresco of The Last Judgment beneath the cupola, where a winged demon anally penetrates a sodomite with a flaming staff. According to Holinshed’s Chronicles, Edward II was murdered in the same way, a form of retribution that cruelly mimicked his sexual relationship with Piers Gaveston.

It is no great leap to suppose that this kind of talionic thinking decided the fate of one Leendert Hasenbosch, a soldier and bookkeeper for the Dutch East India Company, who was marooned on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean on 5 May 1725 as a penalty for sodomy. Hasenbosch had committed an act that was deemed contra naturam — against nature — and had thereby removed himself from the domain of human society. His punishment, then, was an extension of his crimes. He was to live out his days in isolation and despair.

While doing so, Hasenbosch kept a diary. It was discovered by British sailors in an abandoned tent in January 1726. The first of three English translations, Sodomy Punish’d, was published that very year. Its prelude anticipates cynicism on the part of the reader. “I know there are some People who are naturally credulous,” writes the publisher, “and it is probable such will pay but little regard to the Veracity of this Narration.”

The tradition of authors dressing up fiction as fact has never fallen out of fashion. The entire second half of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), for instance, is presented as a document that the author has found. Similarly, in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), an epilogue tells us that the book has been transcribed by historians from cassette recordings. Most germane is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which is presented as autobiographical.

But if Sodomy Punish’d is part of that tradition, the author has taken great pains to conceal it. The sheer banality of his quotidian activities — the text includes regular updates on how he secures his tent with stones — would surely be off-putting for readers seeking the thrills of another Robinson Crusoe. Furthermore, we know from corroborating documentation from the Dutch East India Company that an officer called Leendert Hasenbosch was indeed sentenced “to be set ashore, as a villain” on Ascension Island. The original diary has not survived, but the most likely conclusion is that Hasenbosch did keep an account of his final days, even if it was subject to fictionalised embellishments during translation.

Sodomy Punish’d makes for uncomfortable reading. Many of the diary entries recount Hasenbosch’s ongoing search for drinkable water. He was unaware that Ascension Island had two natural springs, and the one source that he happened upon soon dried up. He resorted to drinking his own urine and killing turtles in order to drink their blood. And even those contemporary readers who baulked at his “obnoxious Sin to God and Nature” would surely have been moved by Hasenbosch’s desperate yearning for rescue:

“It would be endless to take Notice, how often my Eyes are cast o the Sea to look for Shipping, and how my Imagination forms every Trifle for a Sail, then look till my Eyes dazzle, and immediatley [sic] the Object disappears.”

The captain had assured him that ships often passed by Ascension Island at this time of year. Was this a harmless lie to comfort a condemned man, or an added cruelty — an attempt to stir hopes that could only ever be dashed?

No specific details of Hasenbosch’s crimes survive in the records. “I was a Sodomite,” he tells us in his diary, but this designation is unclear: “Sodomy” did not necessarily connote sex between males, but had since the medieval period operated as a kind of catch-all term that could encompass infidelity, bestiality, and a variety of other transgressions. John Boswell, author of an excellent book on Christianity and homosexuality, discounts the term as “so vague” as to be “virtually useless”.

Even usury could be deemed a form of sodomy. In Thomas Pie’s Usuries Spright Coniured (1604), we are told that “to make money breed… is against nature: for money hath no such gendring, or procreating nature, being naturally barren”. The usurer finds a method to make money reproduce, whereas the sodomite removes the reproductive possibility from the act of sexual intercourse. “Therefore,” Pie writes, usury “is called a kinde of Sodomie.” It is no coincidence that Dante depicts the sodomites and the usurers as occupying the same sub-circle of Hell.

Theologians have never been able to agree on the original sins of Sodom that provoked God’s wholesale destruction of the city. While “sodomite” has long been established as a pejorative synonym for a male homosexual, passages in Genesis and Ezekiel suggest that the destruction of Sodom was due to a range of other sins, including pride, dishonesty and inhospitality. Besides, this story of an attempted gang-rape of two angels, and a father who offers his daughters as satiation for the mob, is surely too bizarre to qualify as a straightforward cautionary tale against the consequences of sex between men.

Especially because sodomites could be women. In the marginal gloss to Deuteronomy 23.17 in the King James Bible of 1611, we find the term “sodomitess” offered as an alternative to “whore”. A 13th-century French legal treatise (Li Livres di jostice et de plet) cites either castration or clitoridectomy as punishment for sodomy, depending on the sex of the perpetrator. Most strangely, the jurist Edward Coke (1552-1634) wrote that women who commit bestiality were guilty of sodomy and liable to execution in accordance with the Buggery Act of 1533, specifying the rather curious example of “a great Lady” who “had committed buggery with a Baboon, and conceived by it”.

For all these ambiguities, we can be fairly certain that Hasenbosch was punished for homosexual activities. An Authentick Relation, the second version of the diary to be published, clarifies that his sin was that of a homosexual nature:

“I hope this my Punishment in this World may suffice for my most heinous Crime of making use of my Fellow-Creature to satisfy my Lust, whom the Almighty Creator had ordain’d another Sex for”.

And although Sodomy Punish’d offers no explicit details, there are hints that he had been intimate with another man. He claims to be haunted by an apparition, “the Resemblance of a Man I had been well acquainted with”, who materialises so often that he soon becomes acclimatised to his presence. Hasenbosch is “afraid to mention” his name.

Hasenbosch is tormented not only by this apparition but also by various “devilish Spirits” throughout his time on Ascension Island. Of course, we must be alert to the possibility that such events are fictitious embellishments on the part of the publisher. But it is also possible that these were hallucinations brought on by severe dehydration and hunger, perhaps projections of a guilty conscience. In Sodomy Punish’d, one of these spirits identifies Hasenbosch as a “Bougre”, the Anglo-Norman root of “bugger”; like “sodomite”, this term was linked broadly with heresy and other abominations.

An Authentick Relation and Sodomy Punish’d read like translations of the same text, though we have no way of knowing which is the more accurate. It may be that the publisher of Sodomy Punish’d excised the direct references to homosexuality out of prudence. It is equally feasible that the publisher of An Authentick Relation invented such features as a warning against readers who shared Hasenbosch’s inclinations. Certainly, the added emphasis on ghosts and demons in the latter text would suggest that its editors were keen to capitalise on the diary’s moralising impact.

There was a third translation, too: The Just Vengeance of Heaven Exemplify’d. More judgemental than the other two, it insists that Hasenbosch’s skeleton was discovered along with his diary. For added dramatic effect, this version finishes mid-sentence, as though he perished in the act of writing. There is even an illustration of the skeleton splayed out on the shore. All of this was presumably to reassure the God-fearing reader that our narrator got his comeuppance. But it was a lie; Hasenbosch’s remains were never found. His eventual fate is unknown.

In some ways, the uncertainty is apt. Much of gay history is a patchwork affair, with the lives of same-sex attracted individuals often misrepresented or erased entirely. We are left mostly with intimations and glimpses, and the diary of Leendert Hasenbosch is one such example. An added note to Sodomy Punish’d speculates that he might have committed suicide, or that he might have been rescued by a passing ship. At the risk of incurring the wrath of God, I do hope that this particular sodomite lived to see another day.


Andrew Doyle is a comedian and creator of the Twitter persona Titania McGrath

andrewdoyle_com

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Simon Neale
Simon Neale
11 months ago

the destruction of Sodom was due to a range of other sins, including pride,

Yes, that’s understandable. Being gay is fine, and few people have real prejudices. But Pride Marches deserve retribution along Biblical lines.

Maurice Austin
Maurice Austin
11 months ago
Reply to  Simon Neale

Agreed. They don’t come more gay than I, but nothing would induce me to condone a Pride March.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
11 months ago
Reply to  Simon Neale

Kind of agree. The last one I was at featured a flotilla of girls with their breasts sawn off. While everyone was cheering at them, I had to turn away in horror.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
11 months ago
Reply to  Simon Neale

What self-respecting homo goes to a Pride March ?

Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
11 months ago
Reply to  Dumetrius

All those homo looking for a vir.

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
11 months ago
Reply to  Albert McGloan

Any self-respecting homo worth his chaps has one or two oven-ready viri tied up handily in the basement.

Sam Brown
Sam Brown
11 months ago
Reply to  Mike Downing

Would have fitted right in to the Coleherne …

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
11 months ago

I confess that I read this just past midnight last night, and half asleep, felt as if I’d fallen down an extraordinarily articulate, fact-laden, esoteric wormhole.

Where Andrew got the idea for, never mind the information to pen such an article is quite beyond me. But it gets my prize for the most unexpected piece of writing I’ve ever seen on Unherd.

I also commend all of his admirable work on Free Speech Nation.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
11 months ago

I always enjoy Andrew Doyle’s literary-laden excursions into the esoteric, or in this instance, the eroto-esoteric. There’s usually a term i’d not (erm) come across before; in this article it’s “talionic”. And, i’m now reassured that if someone is referred to (as we English are wont to do) as a “little b****r” * that it derives from the Anglo-Norman “bougre” with a wider meaning than might have been thought more recently.

How the author finds his way towards researching these articles is known only to himself; i’ll be buggered if i know how he does it.

*Once again, asterisks provided by kind courtesy of Unherd.

Last edited 11 months ago by Steve Murray
Arkadian X
Arkadian X
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

That word had me puzzled as well, but then I remembered that it was referring to the law of talion (also of biblical memory).

Maurice Austin
Maurice Austin
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Teeny bit puzzled why “b****r” needed to have UnHerd-supplied asterisks, and yet “buggered” did not.
…and now even more puzzled, since exactly the s*me thing ha**ened to me,

Last edited 11 months ago by Maurice Austin
Steve Murray
Steve Murray
11 months ago
Reply to  Maurice Austin

Yep, it’s a right buggeration.

Geoff W
Geoff W
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Sod it!

Ok Nayre
Ok Nayre
11 months ago

If the person he “used to satisfy his lusts” was allowed to stay on the ship it suggests it may have been rape, the possibility of which would change the tone of sympathy somewhat.

William Amos
William Amos
11 months ago
Reply to  Ok Nayre

A very intersting point. Well meaning writers and thinkers in this aspect of our culture seem to have an unfortunate habit of regularly choosing shoddy martyrs and unworthy exemplars.
Even so, with reference to the article, Dante never uses the term ‘Sodomite’ or ‘Sodomita’ in the Divine Comedy but instead refers inexactly to the ‘sin of Sodom’. Those suffering in the seventh circle of Hell (named The Circle of Violence) are those who accompanied their lust with violence. it is sodomitical rapists that are in the seventh circle. So perhaps I am reluctant ‘spare a thought’ for them.
For the sake of context, Dante puts incontinent heterosexuals and adulterers in the second circle of Hell.
Relatively few people read on from Inferno the Purgatorio where you will find another group of sinners who’s ‘Sodomy’ is actually in the process of absolution. And these individuals are guilty of a non-violent excess or misdirection of love.
Here Dante meets and identifies his esteemed forerunner Guido Guinizelli and lauds him with the highest praise, calling him ‘my father’.
So for Dante, it seems, (and I have only read the Divine Comedy in English) the sin which warrants the Seventh Circle of Hell is in fact one of lust acompanied by violence.

Last edited 11 months ago by William Amos
Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
11 months ago
Reply to  Ok Nayre

You make an excellent point here. Given the dearth of verifiable facts in this case, it is wise to reserve judgement. If it was consensual, why was the other person not also marooned, either with their co-sodomite or perhaps somewhere else if the captain was being particularly stern in his judgement and didn’t mind wasting time finding another deserted island? Perhaps it happened in a port and was only later discovered? Perhaps it was something told in confidence to a friend, a tale of something that had happened years ago and this false friend then reported it to the captain? Or perhaps as you say, he raped the handsome cabin boy. All are equally possible. Rape would certainly explain the harshness of the punishment. Given what he likely suffered on the island, he would have been better off had they tossed him into the ocean to drown.

Thor Albro
Thor Albro
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

Maybe the other “person” was a goat. Or did sodomy not include bestiality?

Sam Brown
Sam Brown
11 months ago
Reply to  Ok Nayre

Or it may have been the captain covering his …arse….

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
11 months ago

I think I might know where the inspiration for this. He is trolling someone who has fallen vicitm to Gone Girl type of revenge for cheating on his girlfriend. He tells us in Par 9, about 1/3 through, that he is not realy talking about ‘Sodomy’, and that he could be talksng about infidelity. Par 11, that it is not a straightforward cautaionary tale about sex between men. He branches of into prostitution and how the homosexual does not produce. The woman who plays the prank in Belrin is allegedly a prostitute, with the help of lawers, friends and council workers, she convinces tha man that she has had his child.
I had heard about women targeteding Biritsh guys in Berlin, but I actually know this guy. He happend to publish a plea to family and friends on facebook just yesterday and he reads Unheard. They are trolling him. He told me this has happend before but I did not believe him. He claims he did not cheated on anyone and after years of harassment the women had to sexually assult him to pull of her ploy. However he knows that, ‘some people are natuarally incredulous and will pay littel regard to his narrative’ (Par 4), dressing up fact as ficiton. He hardly left his flat after 2 years after the alleged sexual assault ‘removed himself from society… to live out his days in despar’. (Par 2) However, when he tried to socialized after Covid he was attakced in bars.
There is a group chat on which bartenders and baristas announce his arrival and they spike his beer to show he is uwelcome. He is offered 1 bedroom flat, thinking he is lucky to jump the que of locals who wait years for a flat, literally hundreds of people turn up viewing. He is taken to a private viewing after his first viewing, and is given a flat were he is drugged, while going out to bars and cafe’s is not a solution. He is thus literally left “searching for drinkable water” (Par 6).
However, all his friends gas-light him about what is going on. Some friends he has not seen for years play along when he returns from Berlin, even if they do not spike him. He is guided to a flat via Spareroom.com and Gum tree where he will be harassed on returning to the UK. Most impressive of all, it is in the cathcment area of a mental health practice where the studen docter knows who he is before he walks in. He tells him everything that happened to him in Berlin did not happen. He tells him he will not get another appointment unless he agrees to something for anxiety, The docoter then prescribes him for something for delusion. Thereafter, if he collapses in a work place or in a bar and goes to A and E, they do not bother to blood test him when he says he has been spiked by a hate group on Telegram. They see his diagnoses, as will the police.
The group has a free hand to pspike this guys water supply in his flat while he is out, or spike him at work. His friends tell him that his stories of ‘devilsh spirits’ taking vengeance on him’ are probably halucinations brought about by severe dehydration… and perhaps projections of guilt’ (Par 14). The guy has claimed on his Substack (interpocula) that this group chat where the abuse is documented with photos serves to ‘warn readers’ and have amoralising impact (Par15)
The last sentence is ambiguous to be fair but perhaps he means to say that he hopes this particular sodamite lved another day’, but and not the real life sodomite suffering abuse by this type of Gone Girl Feminism.
It seems a strange coincidence that he has published this article about a sodamite punished the day after this guy asks for help on Facebook. Don’t you think?

Thor Albro
Thor Albro
11 months ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I don’t know where to begin…

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
11 months ago

Talion gone awry :

comment image
Witkowski’s sketch of the ‘Punishment of Sodomy’ in the Sistine Chapel.
Apparently the paint had faded, otherwise, as an art academic said ‘it looks like the punishment for sodomy, appears to be errr, more sodomy.’

Last edited 11 months ago by Dumetrius
Albert McGloan
Albert McGloan
11 months ago
Reply to  Dumetrius

Yes, whatever your sins were in life you will experience beyond toleration as punishment. Given what many gay men willingly endure one dreads to imagine their Tartarean torments.

Thor Albro
Thor Albro
11 months ago

Maybe it was sodomy with a goat? I believe I recall in one of Patrick O’Brian’s great Master & Commander books a sailor is secretly allowed to “escape” to an uninhabited island rather than be hanged on hoard for suspected intimacy with a pig or goat. I believe the term “buggery” was used.