The buccaneer hid in a hole in the floor
The TIME magazine article recounts the dramatic capture of Captain Raymond "Turk" Westerling at a country house near Amsterdam after Dutch police discovered him hiding beneath the floorboards. It outlines his role in leading an anti-Indonesian guerrilla force following Dutch recognition of Indonesian independence, his years as a fugitive, and the surprising decision of a Dutch magistrate to release him despite government efforts to keep him in custody.
TIME, the Weekly Newsmagazine
A score of Dutch policemen surrounded Baronia House near Amsterdam before dawn one day last week. Seven others, led by Amsterdam Police Chief Jeremias Posthuma, knocked at the front door.
The master of the manor, Count van Rechteren Limpurg, appeared.
"We have come for Westerling," announced Chief Posthuma.
"My guest left last night," said the Count icily.
The Chief and his men went inside to see for themselves.
After poking into corners, crawling under beds and tapping walls, the police were just about ready to leave when one found that a guest-room bed, while neatly made, was warm between the sheets.
The room's carpet was loose in one corner.
The cops pulled it up, yanked away some loose planking.
There, in a two-foot-deep nook, lay a burly man dressed only in underwear.
"The jig's up," he said calmly. "I knew you were bound to find me some day."
At last they had captured the notorious Captain Raymond "Turk" Westerling, international buccaneer and soldier of misfortune.
For nearly two years Turk Westerling had been a fugitive from his own countrymen and from the Indonesian Republic, wanted by both for homicide and other crimes committed in Indonesia after the islands won their independence from the Netherlands.
When the Dutch gave up their effort to hold on to Indonesia in 1950, Turk didn't.
He organised a private guerrilla army of some 10,000 East Indies Muslims and Dutch deserters, terrorised a large area of West Java before the young Indonesian Republicans checked his army, "The Heavenly Host."
He battled round the world, dodging extradition to Indonesia, and in 1950 found grudging asylum in Brussels.
In Amsterdam the day after his capture, Turk Westerling appeared before Magistrate Johannes Knotenbelt, apparently quite resigned to a stretch in prison.
The magistrate blandly ruled that there were no grounds for holding Turk Westerling and freed him on his promise to the cops that he would not go back into hiding.
The Netherlands Minister of Justice promptly protested the ruling.
But, with the police trailing him at a discreet distance, the buccaneer swaggered to freedom, at least for the present.