The Traitors is inspired by a dark true story and it starts with a 1629 shipwreck

More people than ever tuned into the first episode of Celebrity Traitors this year, but did you know the entire TV show is actually inspired by a true story? I’ve been an avid Traitors watcher ever since it started, and I had no idea. 

The social deduction game, which first launched in the UK in 2022 and sees Traitors try to deceive their fellow Faithfuls, is inspired by a real-life Dutch sailing ship called the Batavia, which wrecked off Western Australia in the 1600s. Things quickly turned gruesome as its passengers started being killed off one by one.  

Here’s the full fascinating, and very dark, story. 

Credit: BBC

The true story behind The Traitors 

The Batavia was part of a fleet of ships sailing for the trading company, the Dutch East India Company. While heading to Batavia, now known as Jakarta, it struck a coral reef and became stranded on the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, just off Western Australia, on 4th June, 1629.

A junior merchant called Jeronimus Cornelisz took control of the survivors and started ordering his mutineers to kill off the other passengers one by one. Before the ship became stranded, he had already come up with a plan to steal the Dutch East India Company’s treasure and turn the boat into a pirate ship.

When it wrecked, he decided to continue with his plan and kill off any potential opposition. Cornelisz and his helpers murdered around 125 men, women, and children in total, cutting their throats in the night, drowning them in the sea or beating them to death. He didn’t end up stealing the treasure and was captured and executed.

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Credit: ANP/Shutterstock

The Traitors was going to have a different name 

Jasper Hoogendoorn, who helped with the show’s development in the Netherlands, has revealed The Traitors was originally going to be called The Mutineers, and it was going to be set on a ship, but the production costs were just too high. 

“It was an old Dutch story. In 1629 300 Dutch people went to Indonesia with big treasure on the ship. There were some people who became mutineers and they were shipwrecked on a very small island off the coast of Australia. It’s a story about people who murder each other, backstab each other, betray each other. It’s a horrible story. But it was such a fascinating story and I was thinking it’s also exciting. It’s so exciting to read that story and that’s where the whole idea came to create the show,” he said at the he Edinburgh TV festival. 

They toyed with the idea of setting it in the Moroccan desert, but Dutch broadcaster RTL then asked for it to be filmed in a castle instead. And The Traitors was born. The reality show first aired in the Netherlands in 2021 and was called De Verraders, which directly translates to The Traitors in English. 

Credit: BBC

Then, Belgium, France, Norway, Australia and Russia all released their own version in the same year, before the UK one launched on 29th November, 2022. Who knew it had that much history?

For all the latest news about The Celebrity Traitors, like The Holy Church of The Traitors on Facebook.Featured image credit: ANP/Shutterstock and BBC