Imagining the Americas in Print: Books, Maps and Encounters in the Atlantic World [1 ed.] 9789004348035, 9789004348028

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Imagining the Americas in Print

Library of the Written Word volume 74

The Handpress World Editor-in-Chief Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews) Editorial Board Ann Blair (Harvard University) Falk Eisermann (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz) Earle Havens ( Johns Hopkins University) Ian Maclean (All Souls College, Oxford) Alicia Montoya (Radboud University) Angela Nuovo (University of Milan) Helen Smith (University of York) Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool) Malcolm Walsby (University of Rennes) Arthur der Weduwen (University of St Andrews)

volume 57

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lww

Imagining the Americas in Print Books, Maps, and Encounters in the Atlantic World

By

Michiel van Groesen

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Johannes Stradanus, “Lapis Polaris Magnes”, in: Nova Reperta. Florence, c. 1590, nr. 2. © Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp, PK.OPB.0186.003. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2019026744

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1874-4834 isbn 978-90-04-34802-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34803-5 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements  vii List of Chapters  viii List of Illustrations  ix

Introduction: Imagining the Americas in Print  1

1

The De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634): Early America Reconsidered  12

2

Patagonian Giants in West Africa? Two Versions of the First Dutch Attempt to Circumnavigate the World  32

3

Dierick Ruiters’ Manuscript Maps and the Birth of the Dutch Atlantic  53

4

A Brazilian Jesuit in Amsterdam: Anti-Spanish and Anti-Catholic Rhetoric in the Early Dutch Golden Age  74

5

(No) News from the Western Front: The Weekly Press of the Low Countries and the Making of Atlantic News  97

6

Visualizing the News: The Amsterdam Spin-Doctor Claes Jansz Visscher and the West India Company  121

7

Beyond Law and Order: Encounters at Arguin and the Beginnings of the Dutch Slave Trade, 1633–1634  144

8

The Printed Book in the Dutch Atlantic World  164

9

Arnoldus Montanus, Dutch Brazil, and the Re-emergence of Cannibalism  181

10

The Atlantic World in Paperback: The Amsterdam Publisher Jan ten Hoorn and His Catalogue of Popular Americana  205

vi 11

Contents

Heroic Memories: Admirals of Dutch Brazil in the Rise of Dutch National Consciousness  231 Bibliography  251 Index  267

Acknowledgements For the last fifteen years, my work has been generously supported by Het Scheepvaartmuseum, the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, the Samenwerkende Maritieme Fondsen, and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). I am grateful to all these institutions for their support. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following journals and publishers for their kind permission to reproduce the essays included in this volume: ­Taylor & Francis (for Chapter 3), Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu (­Chapter 4), The Sixteenth Century Journal (Chapter 5), University of Delaware Press (­Chapter  6), De Gruyter (Chapter 9), and Cambridge University Press (Chapter 11). Finally I would also like to express my gratitude to Andrew Pettegree for inviting me to put together this volume, and to Brill for once again turning a manuscript into a beautiful book. Michiel van Groesen Princeton, March 2019

Chapters Chapter 1 First appeared in: Journal of Early Modern History 12-1 (2008): 1–24. Chapter 2 Translated and revised version of: “Barent Jansz. en de familie De Bry. Twee visies op de eerste Hollandse expeditie ‘om de West’ rond 1600”, De zeventiende eeuw 21-1 (2005), 29–48. Chapter 3 First appeared in: Imago Mundi 71-1 (2019): 34–50. Chapter 4 First appeared in: Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu lxxx, fasc. 160 (2011): 445–70. Chapter 5 First appeared in: Sixteenth Century Journal 44-3 (2013): 739–60. Chapter 6 First appeared in: Christina Ionescu and Lauren Beck, eds., Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature (Newark: ­University of Delaware Press, 2017), 95–116. Chapter 7 Translated and revised version of: “Recht door zee: Ontvoering, muiterij en slavenhandel in Arguin, 1633–1634”, in: Michiel van Groesen, Judith Pollmann and Hans Cools, eds., Het gelijk van de Gouden Eeuw: Recht, ­onrecht en reputatie in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden (Hilversum: ­Verloren, 2014), 57–71. Chapter 8 Appears here for the first time. Chapter 9 First appeared in: Susanne Friedrich, Arndt Brendecke, and Stephan ­Ehrenpreis, eds., Transformations of Knowledge in Dutch Expansion (Berlin & New York: De Gruyter, 2015), 93–120. Chapter 10 Appears here for the first time. Chapter 11 First appeared in: Michiel van Groesen, ed., The Legacy of Dutch Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 207–28.

Illustrations 0.1 Johannes Stradanus, “America”, in: Nova Reperta. Florence, c. 1590, nr. 1  1 0.2 Johannes Stradanus, “Lapis Polaris Magnes”, in: Nova Reperta. Florence, c. 1590, nr. 2  3 0.3 Romeyn de Hooghe, Battle of Tobago, March 1677. [Amsterdam], 1677  7 1.1 Theodore de Bry, “Kiwasa”, in: America, vol. I. Frankfurt, 1590, ill. 21  24 1.2 Theodore de Bry, title-page of America vol. I. Frankfurt, 1590  25 1.3 Johan Theodore de Bry (?), “The religion of the native Americans”, in: America, vol. IV. Frankfurt, 1594, ill. 24  26 1.4 Johan Theodore de Bry, title-page of America vol. IV. Frankfurt, 1594  27 1.5 Johan Theodore de Bry, “How Mexican priests do penance for the sins of their people”, in: America vol. IX. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 7  29 1.6 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Native American sheep carrying gold and silver from Potosí”, in: America vol. IX. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 4  30 2.1 Zacharias Heyns, Wijdtloopigh verhael. Amsterdam, 1600, title-page  35 2.2 Johan Thedore de Bry, title-page of America vol. IX. Frankfurt, 1601/2  36 2.3 Anon., “Sebald de Weert meets the King of Congo”, in: Zacharias Heyns, Wijdtloopigh verhael. Amsterdam, 1600. [C3r]  38 2.4 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Sebald de Weert meets the King of Congo (1)”, in: America vol. IX. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 18  39 2.5 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Sebald de Weert meets the King of Congo (2)”, in: America vol. IX. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 19  41 2.6 Anon., “Patagonian woman and her children”, in: Zacharias Heyns, ­Wijdtloopigh verhael, [G1r]  42 2.7 Anon. “Patagonian men”, in: Zacharias Heyns, Wijdtloopigh verhael, [E1r]  45 2.8 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Patagonian men encounter Dutch sailors”, in: America vol. IX. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 22  46 2.9 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Patagonian woman and her children encounter Dutch sailors”, in: America vol. IX. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 23  48 2.10 Anon., “Two Patagonian giants”, in: Zacharias Heyns, Wijdtloopigh ­verhael, [H2v]  49

x

Illustrations

2.11 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Patagonian giants”, in: America vol. IX. ­Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 24  50 3.1 Dierick Ruiters, Toortse der Zee-vaert. Vlissingen, 1623, title-page  57 3.2 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara Bay, Brazil, c. 1620  61 3.3 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Salvador and All Saints’ Bay, Brazil, c. 1620  62 3.4 Claes Jansz. Visscher, Description of the invasion of Salvador and All Saints’ Bay in Brazil. Amsterdam, 1624  64 3.5 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Punta de Araya, Venezuela, c. 1625?   67 3.6 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Valdivia and Corral Bay, Chile, 1627  68 3.7 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Pernambuco, with Olinda and ­Recife, c. 1620  70 3.8 Anon., Representation of the conquest of Olinda, in Pernambuco, s.l., [1630]  71 3.9 Anon., Representation of the conquest of Olinda, in Pernambuco, s.l., [1630]  72 4.1 Claes Jansz. Visscher, Steyger-praetjen [‘Chat on the wharf’]. Amsterdam, 1624  79 4.2 Anon., German copy of ‘Chat on the wharf’, s.l., [1624]  83 4.3 Nicolaes van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. VII. Amsterdam, 1625, title-page  85 4.4 Salomon Savery (after Gerard van Honthorst), Portrait of Maria de’ Medici, [Amsterdam, 1638]  95 5.1 Jan van Hilten, Coranto from Germany & Italy &c. Amsterdam, 27 April 1630, verso  108 5.2 Abraham Verhoeven, Weekly Tidings. Antwerp, 30 August 1630, p. 1  112 6.1 Claes Jansz. Visscher, Representation of the exploits of Piet Heyn in All Saints’ Bay, Brazil. Amsterdam, 1627  127 6.2 Claes Jansz. Visscher, The conquest of the town of Olinda in Pernambuco. Amsterdam, 1630  129 6.3 Claes Jansz. Visscher, Representation of the town and fortifications of Paraíba, Brazil. Amsterdam, 1635  134 6.4 Jan van Hilten, Authentic story of the siege of Porto Calvo, Brazil. ­Amsterdam, 1637  139 6.5 Johan Blaeu, Siege and Capture of Povaçon de Porto Calvo, Brazil. ­Amsterdam, 1637. Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam, nr. 1794  140

Illustrations

7.1 7.2 8.1 9.1

xi

Johannes Vingboons, View of the castle at Arguin from the sea  145 Anon., manuscript map of the castle at Arguin, c. 1633?  150 List of books in a warehouse in Recife, 9 June 1645  170 Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, title-page  182 9.2 Anon., “Inhabitants of Brazil whom Cabral encountered”, in: ­Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, p. 359  192 9.3 Anon., “Tapuya Indians roasting human flesh”, in: Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, p. 370  193 9.4 Anon., “Aimoré Indians”, in: Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en ­Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, p. 383  196 9.5 Anon., “Cannibalism in Brazil”, in: Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, p. 534  202 10.1 [Alexander Exquemelin], De Americaensche Zee-roovers. Amsterdam, 1678, title-page  210 10.2 “An African man points Henry Morgan to the place where he can find his booty”, in: [Alexander Exquemelin], De Americaensche Zee-roovers. ­Amsterdam, 1678, pp. 98–99  214 10.3 “Gruesome cruelties performed by the robbers”, in: Edward Melton, Zee- en landreizen door verscheide Gewesten des Werelds, Amsterdam, 1681, pp. 206–7  215 10.4 “Bringing Christian slaves ashore”, in: Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen, en des zelfs zee-roovers. Amsterdam, 1684, pp. 146–47  217 10.5 “Reyning and several of his comrades off the coast of Aruba”, in: David van der Sterre, Zeer aenmerkelyke reysen gedaen door Jan Erasmus ­Reyning, meest in de West-Indien. Amsterdam, 1691, pp. 94–95  218 10.6 Simon de Vries, Wonderen soo aen als in; en wonder-gevallen op en ­omtrent de zeeën. Amsterdam, 1687, title-page  221 10.7 Adriaen van Berkel, Americaensche voyagien naar Rio de Berbice en ­Suriname. Amsterdam, 1695, title-page  223 10.8 De wonderlyke historie der Mensche-Eeters. Amsterdam, 1696, title-page  224 10.9 [Alexander Exquemelin], Historie der Boecaniers, of vrybuyters van America. Amsterdam, 1700, title-page  226 10.10 Jan Lamsvelt, “Fight between a buccaneer and a crocodile”, in: Historie der Boecaniers, of vrybuyters van America. Amsterdam, 1700, I, p. 138  228 10.11 Hendrik Smeeks, Beschryvinge van het Magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes. Amsterdam, 1708, title-page  229

xii

Illustrations

11.1 Herman Padtbrugge, Piet Heyn enters the Forte do Mar in All Saints’ Bay, 1624, in: Lambert van den Bosch, Leeven en daden der doorluchtighste zeehelden. Amsterdam, 1676, pt. 2, p. 50  242 11.2 Anon., Piet Heyn conquers the city of St. Salvador, 1624, in: Nederlandsche reizen, tot bevordering van den koophandel, na de meest afgelegen ­gewesten des aardkloots. Amsterdam and Harlingen, 1787, XIV, p. 4  243 11.3 Jan Frederik Christiaan Reckleben, Conquest of San Salvador, 1624, in: J.P. Arend, Algemeene Geschiedenis des Vaderlands, van de vroegste tijden tot op heden. Amsterdam, 1863, III, pt. 4, p. 40  244

Introduction

Imagining the Americas in Print In his catalogue Nova Reperta made around 1590, Johannes Stradanus (1523– 1605), an artist from Bruges in the Low Countries, depicted twenty new ‘discoveries’ which represented the major new achievements of the Renaissance. Testimony to a society obsessed with hierarchizing knowledge, the album’s opening engraving gave pride of place to the European encounter with America, personified by the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci (Figure 0.1). The image presents the encounter as the ultimate self-congratulation of sixteenthcentury European civilization, visualizing the ship which Vespucci had sailed on, and the cross and the compass he held in his hands as the three distinctive instruments of Old World ingenuity. These sophisticated tools – representing European courage, belief, and knowledge – served to explain the stark difference with the New World Vespucci encountered, allegorized as a featherornamented­yet otherwise naked woman in a hammock flanked by scenes of

Figure 0.1 Johannes Stradanus, “America”, in: Nova Reperta. Florence, c. 1590, nr. 1 museum plantin-moretus, antwerp, pk.opb.0186.002

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_002

2

Introduction

cannibalism and exotic quadrupeds against a backdrop of paradisaical quality. These were all trusted stereotypes of the Americas since Europeans had identified the fourth continent as the final piece of their harmonious worldview.1 Stradanus would include representations of printing and copper engraving in Nova Reperta as two other major new achievements, but the power of print was implicit in the opening image as well: Vespucci, not Columbus, was singled out for his endeavours, a direct consequence of the former’s reputation that was established by the printing press. Whereas Columbus’ letters of his four voyages to the Caribbean reached the European audience only gradually, carefully filtered by the court in Spain, Vespucci’s accounts were translated and appeared in print in at least five different European languages within ten years of his return to Italy. In 1507 the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller labelled the New World ‘America’ after, at the time, its most famous visitor. Almost a century later in Florence, Stradanus still followed suit.2 The second image in Nova Reperta once again depicted a ship and a compass, as if to construct an ongoing narrative (Figure 0.2). The engraving, the short textual caption confirms, is meant to celebrate the discovery of the compass by the thirteenth-century inventor Flavio Gioia from Amalfi and its application. By being able to measure distance and trace (and change) direction, the compass presented Renaissance Europe with the tools to understand and ultimately dominate the world. The ship hanging from the ceiling of the scholar’s study reminds viewers of the means by which this was subsequently achieved, but the main implications of the discovery of the compass are all on the table. With the hourglass and the globe to Gioia’s right, the mastery of both time and space are literally within touching distance, waiting only for the man here personifying European civilization to apply his knowledge. Yet the image shows us more. Inadvertently, Stradanus emphasizes also the limitations of the late medieval and early modern European perspective of the world. What Gioia is doing, one could argue, is clearly juxtaposed (some might 1 Lia Markey, “Stradano’s Allegorical Invention of the Americas in Late Sixteenth-Century Florence”, Renaissance Quarterly 65.2 (2012): 385–442. Alongside this image of Vespucci, and ­another one elsewhere in Nova Reperta not discussed here, four other contributions by Stradanus to the iconography of the Americas can be found in his Americae Retectio series from the late 1580s. On Stradanus’ career, see Alessandra Baroni and Manfred Sellink, Stradanus (1523–1605): Court Artist of the Medici (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). 2 For the popularity of Vespucci’s observations in the years 1505 and 1506 alone, see John Alden and Dennis C. Landis, European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1776 (6 vols.; New York: Readex Books, 1980–1997), vol. i, pp. 9–10. Waldseemüller included an edition of Vespucci’s Quatuor navigationes as an integral part of Cosmographiae introductio (1507) which also included his famous map.

Imagining the Americas in Print

3

Figure 0.2 Johannes Stradanus, “Lapis Polaris Magnes”, in: Nova Reperta. Florence, c. 1590, nr. 2 museum plantin-moretus, antwerp, pk.opb.0186.003

say overshadowed) by what he is not doing. As a true Renaissance scholar he is not looking outside, not gazing through the window into the real world where, as Stradanus allows his readers to see, ships are ready to depart. Instead of joining the readers in gazing outside, however, the scholar prefers to acquire his knowledge from the books spread out on his table, leaving the experiences of the mariners in the background for what they are. It is these two elements of the European encounter with the Americas from 1550 to 1700, presented so prominently by Johannes Stradanus in his Nova Reperta, that the essays in this volume attempt to understand, focusing both on the ‘actual’ confrontation between the Old World and the New embodied by Vespucci, and the representations that were created in the minds (and for the minds) of different generations of European readers. The essays, presented here in more or less chronological order, pick up the story where A ­ nthony Grafton’s New Worlds, Ancient Texts (1992) and Karen Kupperman’s brilliant edited volume America in European Consciousness (1995) have stopped, at a time when early modern Europe, having recovered from the initial shock of ‘discovery’, became fully aware of the scope and the potential of the

4

Introduction

­Americas.3 Political ambition came to supplant the wonder and amazement of the first generations of navigators and armchair travelers. Building on scholarship by the likes of Grafton and Kupperman, Atlantic history has emerged as one of the main guises of early modern history in the twenty-first century, where it has now established itself as a mature subdiscipline. The essays in this collection proceed from studying the New World’s blunted impact to the ‘public’ Atlantic world which generated wide interest in early modern Europe, and in which the countries with imperial aspirations gradually displaced traditional centres of learning like Italy and Germany.4 In illustrated books and maps – not very different from Stradanus’ Nova Reperta in outlook sometimes – texts and images went hand in hand to shape a lively print culture of which some representations persisted until (and at times beyond) the rise of independence in the Americas around 1800.

From the New World to the Atlantic World

The European imagination of the New World, characterized by first curiosity and then stereotypes, gradually evolved into the Atlantic world in which print more often than not served a clear political purpose. One of the central characters in transforming Europe’s image of the Americas around 1600 was the Frankfurt publisher Theodore de Bry (1527/28–1598). De Bry was by no means as learned as the typical scholar in Nova Reperta’s second engraving, but he was certainly focused more on the world in the immediate vicinity of his atelier than on the distant new lands he so monumentally and lastingly depicted. Born in the Low Countries in the same generation as Stradanus, the two men’s visions of the New World overlapped to a significant extent. Having both lived through the religious wars ravaging sixteenth-century Europe, both Stradanus and De Bry emphasized the contrast between Europe and the Americas, employing what Joan-Pau Rubiés has termed “the languages of Christianity

3 Anthony T. Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Karen O. Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 4 John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), memorably explored what he called the ‘blunted’ impact of the New World on Renaissance Europe. His ideas have inspired at least two generations of scholars. The notion of the ‘public’ Atlantic world is launched in Michiel van Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and will be examined in several of the essays in this volume.

Imagining the Americas in Print

5

and civility”.5 For Volume iv (1594) of his celebrated America-series, De Bry even copied two of Stradanus’ designs to visualize the feats of Columbus and ­Magellan – two lingering traces of sixteenth-century European iconography that did not feature elsewhere in the collection of voyages. Part of the reason that Stradanus’ other American images did not recur was that Theodore de Bry’s oldest son Johan Theodore, who coordinated the making of most of the volumes, preferred the ready-made illustrations of Dutch travel accounts instead. Hence, with a change in generation, new worlds came into focus.6 The De Bry collection was so exclusive that few early modern Europeans outside the courtly and mercantile elite were able to enjoy its textual and visual representations of the Americas. Hardly anyone at the time must have been sufficiently privileged to understand the custom-made differences between the German and Latin translations in the De Bry collection which presented Protestant and Catholic readers with substantially different narratives of European achievements in the Western hemisphere. But its images of America, and ­especially native Americans, were an important reference for artists in seventeenth-­century Europe. The De Bry designs resurfaced, often contextualized differently yet again, on paintings, in the borders of maps, and in other ­travel accounts which originally contained no illustrations. For geopolitical purposes, however, the collection of voyages was not particularly useful. Although the main message it contained – that America was utterly uncivilized yet receptive to the assets of Europe’s superior culture – helped to legitimate colonialism in the seventeenth century, the information it disseminated was too unspecified to facilitate Europe’s political expansion of the seventeenth century. The De Bry collection contained a number of maps, but none of them were detailed enough for navigators. Specialized maps of the Americas provided the first step in Europe’s mental transition from curiosity to control. The two leading cartographers of early modern Europe, Gerhard Mercator (1512–1594) and Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), also came from the Low Countries. Mercator’s eponymous projection, depicting sailing courses around the globe as straight lines, and Ortelius’ production of the first atlas (Theatrum Orbis Terrarum) 5 Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Christianity and Civilization in Sixteenth-Century Ethnological Discourse”, in: Idem and Henriette Bugge, eds., Shifting Cultures: Interaction and Discourse in the Expansion of Europe (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1985), pp. 35–60. 6 On the De Bry collection, see my The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden: Brill, 2008). For specific information on the tense relationship between Theodore and Johan Theodore de Bry, see p. 71. On Stradanus and De Bry, see Markey, “Stradano’s Allegorical Invention”, and Henry Keazor, “Theodore de Bry’s Images for America”, Print Quarterly 15.2 (1998): 131–49. The two engravings De Bry copied from Stradanus are America iv, ill. 6 (Columbus) and ill. 15 (Magellan).

6

Introduction

transformed the disciplines of geography and cartography around 1570, and confirmed the central position of the Southern Netherlands in these developments. When Antwerp fell into the hands of Spanish troops in 1585, many of the elite merchants, and the cultural industry that thrived under their wings, departed for Holland and Zeeland, the maritime provinces in the north where Calvinism had established itself as the public Church. Decorative world maps by Petrus Plancius, and navigational treatises with coastal profiles for practical use by Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer, confirmed to contemporaries that the balance of Netherlandish cartography had shifted to the north.7 Throughout the seventeenth century, several major Amsterdam publishing houses determined ­Europe’s worldview. The globes and atlases made by Johan Blaeu in the 1650s and 1660s even exported the Dutch view of the world to non-European cultures, as the Dutch East India Company (voc) used his produce as a sophisticated instrument of cultural diplomacy. It was in the Atlantic world, however, that the predominance of the Dutch worldview in the seventeenth century acquired a distinctly political flavour. With the establishment of the West India Company in June 1621, a clash with Habsburg Spain for power in the Americas attracted the attention of almost all of early modern Europe. For the first time, what happened across the ocean had an immediate effect on the balance of power at home. Reports of the impending arrival of silver from New Spain and Tierra Firma, already avidly awaited by allies and enemies of Spain alike because it determined whether the monarchy could continue to finance its military strategy in Europe, were now accompanied by coverage of the struggle for control over the very territories that had brought the Habsburgs their riches. Newspapers and other printed news media began to carry reports from the Americas and create Atlantic storylines for a European audience. None of these narratives would generate more attention in early modern Europe than the battle for the sugar-rich colony of Brazil between the West India Company and the Luso-Spanish monarchy – a battle that quickly extended to the slave markets of West Africa, and decisively changed shape midway through when the Portuguese managed to restore their political autonomy in December 1640. This so-called Dutch ‘moment’ in Atlantic history reconfigured the European power balance in the Americas, although the Dutch themselves were ultimately not the main benefactors.8 In the mid-1640s, the transatlantic empire of the West India Company began to disintegrate as 7 Günter Schilder, Early Dutch Maritime Cartography: The North Holland School of Cartography (c. 1580–c. 1620) (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 8 Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

Imagining the Americas in Print

7

a planters revolt in Pernambuco shook the Dutch to the core. In quick succession, they lost control over Angola (1648), Brazil (1654), and the Hudson Valley (1664), and obtained only Suriname (1667) in return. As Portuguese power in the South Atlantic was restored, the English and French positioned themselves as the long-term competitors of Spain in the Caribbean, and created a colonial duopoly in North America. The Dutch were left with mostly memories. Visual representations of the Americas had substantially changed since the days of Stradanus, as now geopolitics rather than curiosity commanded the attention of European audiences. One image suffices to show how the iconography in the Old World had shifted from allegorical and abstract to deliberate and distinct. In 1677 the famous Dutch engraver Romeyn de Hooghe d­ esigned a news map of the Battle of Tobago in March of that year (Figure 0.3). French forces under Vice-Admiral Jean, Comte d’Estrées attacked a Dutch fleet under Jacob Binckes. The battle was part of the ongoing Franco-Dutch War, and thus formed an American extension of European antagonism. The fact that the Dutch managed to repel the French onslaught enabled De Hooghe to present

Figure 0.3 Romeyn de Hooghe, Battle of Tobago, March 1677. [Amsterdam], 1677 rijksmuseum, amsterdam, rp-p-ob-79.438

8

Introduction

the skirmish as a victory (nine months later, the French would return with a larger fleet and capture the island at the second attempt). The image depicted the different stages of the first encounter, at sea and on land. De Hooghe emphasized the tools of empire – fortifications, naval formations, troop ­movements – without placing any emphasis on the American scenery other than the palm trees in the foreground. Several slaves featured in the image, not as living testimonies of a different, New World society, but as ordinary participants in Franco-Dutch hostilities. Native Americans, a staple item of sixteenth-century European representations of the Americas, were nowhere to be seen. De Hooghe completed the composition by adding practical maps of the island of Tobago, Rockly Bay where most of the fighting took place, and the Sterreschans fortress erected by the Dutch at the bottom of the main image. News images such as this one by Romeyn de Hooghe were of a passing interest, certainly in comparison to the timeless curiosity that was visualized by Johannes Stradanus some eighty years earlier. Consequently, many memories of political junctures and breaks in the Atlantic world that were important at the time have become extinct in society today. In the Netherlands, the process of oblivion was catalyzed by the singular focus on the Netherlands East Indies in the era of emerging nationalism. Ironically enough, only Dutch New York, arguably the most insignificant province of the Dutch Atlantic empire in its seventeenth-century heyday, still strikes a chord. In the current ‘Age of Globalization’, more than ever, it is fitting to trace the connections established in centuries past, as well as to lay bare the dynamics that contributed to the lasting inequality between Europe and parts of the Americas as well as Africa. The present volume will argue that European books and maps helped to shape and canonize this persistent imbalance, adding to the disparity established by the actual encounters.

The Essays Explained

My interest in the New World of the sixteenth, and the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century can be explained by the conviction that print – or its ­absence – conditions our gaze. This volume of essays, then, contains contributions on all the topics discussed above, and traces how the imagination of the Americas gradually changed in European print culture. Throughout the volume, there is a strong focus on representations from the Dutch Republic where many of the new genres of the early modern book market – from ephemera and maps to catechisms and coffee-table books – experienced nearly unlimited success. It opens with two chapters on the De Bry family, members of the

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extensive Antwerp diaspora that brought so many innovations to the book market across early modern Europe. Johan Theodore de Bry in particular relied on the output of fellow Calvinist publishers in Holland and Zeeland for many of the works he issued. Chapter 3, on the manuscript maps of the Zeeland mariner Dierick Ruiters, serves the purpose of demonstrating how publishers in Dutch port towns acquired their information, and how arbitrarily knowledge about the Americas was selected and distributed in the Old World. In the first half of the seventeenth century, for example, European publishers remained susceptible to confessional rhetoric. This was never more evident than in the aftermath of the first successful Dutch invasion of Brazil in 1624, when an avalanche of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic Schadenfreude betrayed the anxiety in Dutch society that accompanied the West India Company’s first naval campaigns. The Jesuits in particular, as Chapter 4 shows, were subject to collective ridicule if circumstances allowed it. As geopolitical ambitions in the Atlantic world became a regular feature of the Dutch Republic’s ongoing struggle with the Habsburg monarchy, and many ‘ordinary’ people invested in the West India Company’s designs to open a second front in the war against Spain in the Americas, news of events across the ocean became a regular feature in European print culture. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss two distinctive genres of printed news: newspapers and news maps. Newspapers rapidly developed into one of the economic pillars of the seventeenth-century European book market, and bulletins from the Atlantic world routinely featured in the press both in the Dutch Republic and beyond. ­Especially if European readers had reason to believe that the information ­likely to arrive from the Americas would be good, there was a catharctic quality to breaking transatlantic news. Publishers, seeing the commercial potential of this sudden ‘culture of anticipation’, started changing their editorial strategies to printing books old and new on the Americas as everybody awaited news of major developments from beyond the horizon. For the authorities, as several initial reports on the misconduct of Dutch soldiers in Brazil reveal, collective anticipation and uncertainty over what had really happened in the Americas presented a problem. In the 1630s, the solution the authorities came up with was to bend the Atlantic narrative in their own favour by participating in the discussion culture. The news map became their medium of choice, and the trusted combination of text and image attained considerable reliability in what was occasionally perceived as an ocean of rumours. Some things still remained unsaid, despite the openness. The moral question whether the Dutch were supposed to enter the transatlantic slave trade led to deep divisions, especially within the realm of the Reformed Church, but only very few of these discussions reached a wider audience. Chapter 7, a study

10

Introduction

of a calamitous Dutch expedition to Arguin, an island on the northern border of West Africa’s slave trading region, demonstrates how high the tension was regarding the trafficking of black labourers even among regular sailors and soldiers. Around 1640, when the West India Company had pragmatically sidestepped most of the moral objections, the Dutch Atlantic world reached its zenith. The obvious next step, for Company and colonists, was to transport the finest elements of Europe’s rich print culture to the Americas. Chapter 8, however, reveals that the Dutch never succeeded in exporting the notion of Le  magasin de l’universe to Dutch Brazil, Elmina, Curaçao or Suriname. The book world of the Dutch Atlantic empire was almost as empty as the ocean that separated the colonies from the world of print at home. Curiously enough, and counterintuitively perhaps, only when the imperial ambitions of the Dutch Republic had finally receded did colonists succeed in assembling reading matter that was a little more varied than the staple of catechisms and Bibles that characterized the first half of the seventeenth century – and even then this pertained only to New York, where a sizeable group of Dutch colonists continued to live under English rule. The volume’s final three chapters deal with the collective (national) memory of the Dutch Atlantic moment. They are separated thematically: Chapter 9 emphasizes the creation of an increasingly exoticized narrative of a forsaken empire in monumental books like those by Arnoldus Montanus, which in some ways resembled the round-ups of the New World encounters in the De Bry collection a century before. Chapter 10 chronicles the shift away from imperial ambitions towards works about piracy for a lower segment of the European book market. The final chapter traces the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century solidification of Atlantic episodes from the Dutch Golden Age that testified to the process of selective amnesia in the era of cultural nationalism. By then, the Americas north and south had managed to lay off the shackles of European control, but the rise of independence movements, I would argue, was a more marginal shock to European confidence than the surprising encounter with the New World three centuries earlier. Together, the eleven chapters operate on the intersection of Atlantic history and book history which has been the subject of my scholarly interest for the last fifteen years. Moreover, they are some of the fruits of an approach to primary sources that at all times attempts to combine the textual with the visual. Collectively, the essays betray the conviction that the European imagination of the Americas can be understood properly only through the combination of different types of genres in early modern print culture – from the cheapest single newssheets to the most expensive illustrated folio books of the time. Seven of the eleven chapters in this volume have been published before. To these essays

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I have made only minor adjustments, adding occasional cross-references and silently correcting typos and other mistakes. In Chapter 3 I changed the order of two images to create a more natural flow for the explanation of Dierick Ruiters’ project. The portrait of Maria de’ Medici in Chapter 4 is new, as the very similar one included in the original article was available only in low resolution. Chapters 2 and 7 appear here in English for the first time. For these chapters I have made significant modifications to articles in Dutch from 2005 and 2014 respectively, mainly to make them better reflect my current understanding of the themes they discuss. Chapters 8 and 10 are newly written for this volume in an effort to fill the most obvious gaps in the storyline describing the European imagination of the Americas from the later sixteenth century to the turn of the eighteenth.

Chapter 1

The De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634): Early America Reconsidered On 19 July 1593, the Antwerp bookseller Jan Moretus sent several crates of books to his old friend Benito Arias Montano in Seville.1 Many recently published titles, which Moretus had purchased at the Easter Fair in Frankfurt, had arrived in his office only a few days earlier, and before his regular customers would come to the Golden Compasses to enjoy the new supply, those who had made their wishes known before the fairs, like the Spanish humanist, were delivered the titles they had ordered. The printed material that was shipped to Seville – a mixture of theological treatises and botanical works – neatly reflects what one would consider to be the core interests of a learned reader in late sixteenth-century Europe. Inconspicuous if not for its relatively high price of fourteen Brabant guilders was a work to which Moretus referred as “Virginia, Florida et America fol”. The sequence of New World provinces, in combination with the format and the price, enable us to identify it as the first three volumes of the America-series published by Theodore de Bry and his two sons Johan Theodore and Johan Israel in Frankfurt am Main. This collection had quickly made an impression on booksellers and their customers alike after its first volume appeared in 1590, combining translated travel accounts with high-quality copper engravings newly introduced to the German book market. Moretus, after purchasing his first copies rather tentatively, was clearly persuaded of their saleability when he visited the Easter Fair in 1592, buying no less than eight copies of each of the first three volumes. At the September Fair, he obtained a further six copies of each, as the books were selling with a considerable profit in Antwerp. Arias Montano is one of many customers whose purchase of the De Bry collection of voyages is documented in the records of the Officina Plantiniana in Antwerp.2 More than four centuries since Moretus dispatched the crates to Spain, the collection has lost little of its appeal, and is still well-known to anyone interested in early America. Its wonderful copper engravings formed the cornerstone of 1 For Arias Montano’s list of purchased books: Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp, Arch. nr. 70, fol. 97v. 2 Museum Plantin-Moretus, Arch. nos. 969–1029 for Moretus’ purchases at the Frankfurt fairs; Arch. nrs. 67–75, 171–80, 216–27 for the copies customers bought in the Antwerp bookstore in the period 1590–1620. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_003

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pictorial representations of the New World for the best part of two centuries after the voyages’ initial appearance between 1590 and 1634. Traditionally, the collection has been thought of as both reflecting and shaping a Protestant representation of early America, and the procuring of the books by a Catholic scholar like Arias Montano may come as a surprise. When he placed the order for the De Bry volumes, after all, he was still responsible for cataloguing the library of King Philip ii at the Escorial and purging its books according to inquisition guidelines.3 Bernadette Bucher, whose Icon and conquest was long the only monograph on the collection, used the American iconography to develop her Levi-­Straussian argument working from the assumption that it aimed to ­disseminate a Protestant agenda. While recent studies by Anna Greve and the participants of the University of Basel-based research project Translating seen into scene, led by Susanna Burghartz, have been less categorical, they have by no means discarded the collection’s anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish nature.4 Scholars writing more general studies of the representations of early America, from Anthony Grafton to Benjamin Schmidt, have ensured the wider dispersion of the De Bry collection’s Protestant perspective.5 One can easily see where this assumption acquired its persistent strength. The collection’s conception was inspired by the Oxford minister and Tudor court geographer Richard Hakluyt, who provided Theodore de Bry with the 3 Ramiro Flórez, “Felipe ii, Arias Montano, y fray José Sigüenza en la ordenación de los saberes de El Escorial”, in: Felipe ii y su época. Actas del Simposium (5 vols.; San Lorenzo del Escorial, 1998), ii, pp. 549–91; Bernard Rekers, Benito Arias Montano 1527–1598 (Groningen: Wolters, 1961), pp. 193–97. 4 Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest. A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of the De Bry’s Great Voyages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Anna Greve, Die Konstruktion Amerikas. Bilderpolitik in den “Grands Voyages” aus der Werkstatt de Bry (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2004); Susanna Burghartz, ed., Inszenierte Welten. Die west- und ostindischen Reisen der Verleger de Bry 1590–1630 / Staging New Worlds. De Brys’ Illustrated Travel Reports, 1590–1630 (Basel: Schwabe, 2004). 5 The list of publications depicting the De Bry collection as reflecting and conveying an essentially Protestant message is of course more extensive. The studies mentioned here are two of the most influential works in the field: Anthony T. Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 128–29, and Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad. The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 40, 44. Other studies exploring the Protestant achievements of the De Brys include: Michèle Duchet, ed., L’Amérique de Théodore de Bry: une Collection de Voyages Protestante du xvie siècle (Paris: crns, 1987); and Pol-Pierre Gossiaux, “Hiérarchie du monde sauvage et eschatologie protestante selon l’Iconographie des Grands Voyages des de Bry”, in: Protestantisme aux frontières. La Réforme dans la duché de Limbourg et dans la Principauté de Liège (Aubel: Libre Ancienne et Moderne, 1985), pp. 99–169.

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Virginia watercolors by John White in the late 1580s. De Bry made White’s material available for an international readership, translating Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report into Latin, German, and French, before publishing the accounts alongside twenty-eight copper engravings, thereby reinforcing English claims to the province of Virginia, and dispersing the Protestant belief in a type of colonialism that was at the same time morally pure and economically fruitful.6 After publishing Harriot’s text and White’s images in combination for their opening volume, the De Bry family continued the America-series with the accounts of Huguenot expeditions to Florida and Brazil, written by René de Laudonniere and Jean de Léry, and attached to the former the illustrations of the London-based Huguenot artist Jacques le Moyne de Morgues. Hans Staden’s gruelling testimony of cannibalism in Brazil, and Girolamo Benzoni’s canonical condemnation of Spanish cruelties in Peru completed the first six volumes of De Bry’s America.7

The De Bry Publishing House

A closer look at the collection, however, presents us with an alternative interpretation closer aligned to the objectives of a contemporary publisher like De Bry. Having been trained as goldsmiths in Liège and Strasbourg, the Reformed De Brys had specialized in making prints during an eight-year stay in Antwerp 6 Among the numerous publications on the earliest Elizabethan expansion in the New World, see the recently published exhibition catalogue of the British Museum: Kim Sloan, ed., A New World. England’s first view of America (London: British Museum, 2007). Older publications include The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590: Documents to illustrate the English Voyages to North America under the Patent granted to Walter Raleigh in 1584, ed. David Beers Quinn (2nd ed.; London: Hakluyt Society, 1967); Paul Hulton, ed., America 1585: the Complete Drawings by John White (London: British Museum, 1984); and Shannon Miller, Invested with Meaning. The Raleigh Circle in the New World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 7 These first six volumes have received disproportionate attention, their representations consequently being considered representative of the America-series as a whole. On the shortlived Huguenot settlements in the New World, see Laura Fishman, “Old World Images encounter New World Reality. René Laudonniere and the Timucuans of Florida”, Sixteenth Century Journal 26.3 (1995): 547–59; Andrea Frisch, “In a Sacramental Mode: Jean de Léry’s Calvinist Ethnography”, Representations 77 (2002): 82–106, John T. McGrath, The French in Early Florida: In the Eye of the Hurricane (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); and, most importantly, the numerous excellent studies by Frank Lestringant, including Le Huguenot et le Sauvage. L’Amérique et la Controverse Coloniale, en France, au temps des Guerres de Religion (1555–1589) (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1990); and “Geneva and America in the Renaissance. The Dream of the Huguenot Refuge 1555–1600”, Sixteenth Century Journal 26.2 (1995): 285–95. On Hans Staden, see Franz Obermeier, “Hans Stadens Wahrhafftige Historia 1557 und die Literatur der Zeit”, Wolfenbütteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 27.2 (2002): 43–80.

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at the time of the Calvinist Republic (1577–1585), and had subsequently introduced the technique of including copper engravings into printed books to Germany. The collection of voyages, twenty-five folio volumes comprising the America-series and the lesser known, but largely similar India Orientalis-series, was the first of many illustrated publications of the De Bry firm. The voyages were crucial for the publishing house’s prosperity straight after its foundation in 1590, and for decades continued to be the backbone of the family’s business strategy. Despite other impressive publications, like Jean-Jacques Boissard’s compendium of Roman antiquities (6 vols.; 1597–1602) and Robert Fludd’s hermetical treatises on the microcosm and macrocosm (4 vols.; 1617–1621), and smaller, cheaper works like emblem books, the voyages consistently accounted for more than half of the firm’s revenues, even in the 1610s when the collection was barely extended. For such an essential product, ideological considerations took a back seat to commercial incentives.8 Frankfurt, as a city at the crossroads of traditional trade routes, twice annually attracted merchants from all over Europe to the fairs, where they purchased and sold their newest produce. From 1560, when the trade in printed books started to professionalize, until the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, the fairs culminated into crucial dates in the calendar for anyone who liked to read, regardless of his religious background. An ever increasing number of booksellers from Germany and beyond ensured the wholesale of large numbers of copies. The local magistrates issued catalogues listing the newly published books to create even more interest. For the De Brys, settled in Frankfurt after leaving their temporary domicile in London in 1588, the fairs were highly meaningful events, judging by their efforts to finish each of the volumes of voyages just in time to have them included into the fair catalogues. The fluent distribution of these fair catalogues was particularly important for the sale of De Bry’s Latin versions of the accounts, which were aimed at an international readership. Since the practice to translate the narratives into French and English had been abandoned after the first volume, and all subsequent parts were printed in German and Latin only, the volumes in Latin were to serve readers from ­Portugal to Poland, and from England to Venice. Such a large and diverse potential market required careful editing on the part of the publishers. In order to sell the voyages in the Southern Netherlands, in parts of France and the Holy Roman Empire, throughout Italy, and even on the Iberian peninsula, 8 Van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World, Appendix 1, includes a full list of the family’s publications between 1590 and 1623. For the only surviving catalogue of the De Bry publishing house, see Günter Richter, Verlegerplakate des xvi. und xvii. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1965), nr. 20.

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overemphasizing­the Protestant nature of early modern Europe’s overseas expansion would be ill-advised. The De Brys, then, decided not to alienate a large number of prospective customers, and modern claims that the collection of voyages formed a vehicle of Protestant representations are therefore not only wide of the mark, but also to some extent counter-intuitive. Contemporary scholars did not need reminding of a publisher’s habit to make the contents of books subservient to commercial imperatives. JeanJacques Boissard, who issued almost all his works in co-operation with the De Brys, nevertheless complained about their lack of interest for the way in which he wanted to see his material published. The De Brys, he wrote repeatedly to the botanist Carolus Clusius, turned his manuscript of ancient Roman inscriptions into six separate volumes, which undermined the work’s cohesion. They also exaggerated the significance of engravings, and made mistakes that more educated publishers would not have committed. What Boissard did not know, and what would have certainly infuriated him further, was that the De Brys attempted to make Justus Lipsius contribute to the volumes to enhance the status of the antiquarian work in the Republic of Letters. Clusius, himself a close friend of the De Brys who co-operated to the first three volumes of voyages, was embarrassed when, on behalf of the publishers, he had to ask Lipsius for this favor. His letter at least enabled him to voice his own opinion of the De Brys. To his scholarly friend Clusius groaned that “you know these Germans: money is the only thing they care about”. Lipsius, understandably, rejected the chance to contribute to Boissard’s books.9

The Case of Jean de Léry’s Histoire

Who needs enemies with friends like these? But personal incongruencies aside, the reputation of the De Brys as shrewd booksellers was undisputed. 9 Michiel van Groesen, “Boissard, Clusius, De Bry and the Making of ‘Antiquitates Romanae’, 1597–1602”, lias. Sources and Documents relating to the Early Modern History of Ideas 29.2 (2002): 195–213. The original set of six letters can be found in the University Library in Leiden, ms. Vulc. 101. Many years later, in 1615, another author, Johan Jacob Wallhausen, echoed Boissard’s complaints, stating that his book had not turned out to be the way he wanted because Johan Theodore de Bry had been too occupied with other matters to oversee the printing and the making of the engravings to his book; see Johan Jacob Wallhausen, Kriegskunst zu Fuss. Darinnen gelehret und gewiesen werden: i. Die Handgrieff der Mussquet und dess Spiesses, jedes insonderheit … (Oppenheim, 1615) [)(4r]. On Clusius’ letter to Lipsius, see Jeanine de Landtsheer, “Justus Lipsius and Carolus Clusius: a flourishing friendship”, Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome 68 (1998): 273–95, and Iusti Lipsi Epistolae, ed. Jeanine de Landtsheer et al. (multiple vols.; Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1997), vii, pp. 241, 293.

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The collection­of voyages, as the most valuable asset of the firm, required exactly this type of commercial astuteness and, more urgently still in a religiously explosive era, a sense of prudence. Calculations based on the archival material at the Museum Plantin-Moretus show that the collection accounted for roughly sixty per cent of the Moretus spendings at the De Bry bookstore in Frankfurt for the period between 1590 and 1623, even in years when the De Brys produced no new volumes of the collection.10 Publishing testimonies of activities overseas, moreover, brought specific delicacies around 1600. After the initial dominance of the Iberian monarchies, Protestant rivals like the Dutch, the English, and the French Huguenots had entered the fray, and had not hesitated to report of their overseas successes in bellicose terms, at the expense of the Spanish and the Portuguese. Inevitably these accounts, often best-sellers in Northern Europe, were used as pamphlets in the ongoing religious controversy, and were subsequently placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Holy Office in Rome, or by inquisitors in Spain and Portugal who were especially sensitive to Protestants reporting from Africa, Asia, and the New World. ­Although the effectuation of this form of censorship was problematic, an entry on the Index could significantly hamper a publisher’s chance of selling his copies in Catholic territories. Meanwhile Protestant readers expected a monumental collection like the America-series to include the most popular narratives which were not readily available in a familiar language. Jean de Lery’s Histoire d’un voyage, describing his mission to “Antarctic France” in the late 1550s, was one such example. Printed many times after its first edition of 1578, the report had gathered momentum in Protestant circles when the Genevan theologian Urbain Chauveton had added sharp polemic commentary. Hence the Latin version of the account, issued in 1586 in Geneva, was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by the Portuguese Inquisition, ever alert to reports on their colony in Brazil. Six years later, in 1592, the De Brys nonetheless relied heavily on this very edition for Volume iii of their America-series. Since an unchanged Latin version would automatically have resulted in a further ban, however, they modified the text – common practice before incorporating accounts into their collection. The passages that Catholics would consider most aggravating were mitigated or simply omitted. The German edition of 1593, not recognizable as different from the Latin version on the outside, did not invite the same amount of editing. Intriguingly, however, despite retaining more of its antagonistic character than the corresponding Latin edition in the editorial process, the most controversial 10

The years 1590 and 1623 mark, respectively, the first publication of the firm and the death of the last of the De Brys, Johan Theodore. After 1623 the firm was continued by two sonsin-law, Matthaeus Merian the Elder and William Fitzer.

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passages were also omitted from the German translation. Clearly both translations were carefully adjusted and censored by the De Brys, but in different ways, taking into account the difference in what they estimated to be the most likely group of customers. A few examples taken from America iii should demonstrate this point. The Geneva edition of De Léry’s Histoire, or Historia in Latin, had opened with a substantial number of poems, psalms, and other preliminary material. Several of the most momentous alterations took place here. One of the most visible elements of De Léry’s preface was Psalm 107, under the heading “To have experience is better than to have money and goods”. The psalm was one of the underpinnings of Calvinist theology, elaborating on Divine providence and on the need for all humans to respect and fear God. Its seventeen verses occupied no less than five pages in the German De Bry edition, but were absent altogether from the Latin volume, almost certainly considered too partial for inclusion.11 All multi-page excerpts enclosed in the German edition, yet omitted from the Latin translation are connected through their aggressive Reformed tone. Another text withheld from readers of the Latin volume was a letter from Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, the colony’s leader, to Calvin, written in Brazil in 1560.12 After a group of fifteen Huguenot ministers, including De Léry, had arrived at Fort Coligny near Rio de Janeiro in 1557, Villegagnon, initially a Huguenot sympathiser, had denounced Genevan beliefs, calling Calvin a “frightful heretic”. De Léry had used the letter in his preface to substantiate his claim of Villegagnon’s tyrannical and fraudulent rule, and thus to support the Reformed efforts in the New World. Here and elsewhere in America iii, in the main body of De Léry’s account, references to Villegagnon’s rejection of Calvinism were left out of the Latin version, ranging from a sentence on Villegagnon’s brutal murder of three Huguenots to the better part of a paragraph which contained the observation that Villegagnon had “abandoned the pure [i.e. Calvinist] religion”.13 11 12 13

De Léry, Historia navigationis in Brasiliam, quae et America dicitur. Qua describitur autoris navigatio, quaeque in mari vidit memoriae prodenda … (Geneva, 1586) [****6r-****7r]; America iii (Ger.) [D1r-D3r]. De Léry, Historia, [**4r-**6v]; America iii (Ger.) [A4r-B1v]. De Léry, Historia, pp. 103–4; America iii (Ger.), p. 149, half a paragraph was omitted from America iii (Lat.), p. 174, including the phrase “… wo nicht der Villegagno von der reinigkeit der Religion abgefallen were”. The single sentence on the murder on one of the three Huguenots: De Léry, Historia, p. 155; America iii (Ger.), p. 176: “denn er deren einer war, die der Villegagno, wegen der Bekandtnuß der Reinigkeit deß Worts, liesse in das Meer werffen” / (Lat.), p. 198. Villegagnon, according to De Léry and modern historians like Frank Lestringant, had converted to Calvinism before returning to Catholicism while in French Brazil; but see for a different point of view: John T. McGrath, “Polemic and History in French Brazil 1555–1560”, Sixteenth Century Journal 27.2 (1996): 385–97, esp. pp. 385–91.

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Other careful omissions in this volume corroborate the confessional reasoning behind the editing process. In the first few pages of his report, De Léry paid ample attention to the sending of missionaries from the “Genevan church” to Brazil, devoting some five pages to the religious objectives of the operation in which he took part. The German De Bry translation copied this statement of intent, the Latin volume did not.14 A little further on, Chapter Six of the ­Huguenot’s account was missing in its entirety in Latin. This chapter discussed the growing rift between Villegagnon and De Léry’s party, included a prayer by the colony’s leader, and recorded a detailed theological debate between the Genevan ministers and Villegagnon, who, according to De Léry, was still in the fold of the Reformed Church: And not long hereafter, [Villegagnon et al.] started disputing several matters of religion, particularly regarding the Last Supper. For they rejected the Papist transsubstantiation, and also totally discarded the consubstantiation: they were however, of a wholly different opinion, as they had been trained by ministers of God’s word. Namely that bread and wine could by no means be changed into the body and blood of Christ, and also that the body and blood of Christ could not be one with bread and wine, but that Christ’s body was in heaven. Still on the same page, De Léry then drew the personal conclusion, based on these theological disputations, that: Doctor Calvinus is the most learned person since the age of the Apostles, and I have never read a teacher who better and more purely explained the Scripture.15 Confrontational commentary like this, so divisive throughout the sixteenth century, was not available to readers of the Latin America-volume. Yet controversy 14 15

De Léry, Historia, pp. 2–6; America iii (Ger.), pp. 93–96 / (Lat.), p. 145. De Léry, Historia, pp. 42–71; America iii (Ger.), pp. 118–33 / (Lat.), p. 162. Both quotes from the German De Bry volume, pp. 123–24: “Und nicht lang hernacher, fiengen sie an umb etliche Puncten der Religion, insonderheit vom Nachtmal, zustreitten, Denn ob sie wol die Papistische Transsubstantiation verwarffen, und improbieren auch gantz unnd gar die Consubstantiation: Jedoch waren sie weit einer anderen meynung, denn sie von den Ministris auß Gottes Wort gelehret wurden, Nemblich, daß das Brot unnd Wein in den Leib unnd Blut Christi in keine weiß könne verwandelt werden, Und widerumb könne der Leib und Blut Christi nicht im Brot und Wein eyngeschlossen werden, sondern Christi Leib sey im Himmel”; (Ger.), p. 124: “Es ist Doctor Calvinus der gelehrtsten einer, so je nach der Apostel zeit gewesen sind, Und ich hab keinen Lehrer jemals gelesen, der besser und reiner die Schrifft außgelegt hatte”.

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dictated De Léry’s treatise. The De Brys consequently must have made long hours in order to prepare the text for the presses. Another large chunk of text withheld from the Latin edition was dedicated to the Bartholomew’s Day ­Massacre of 1572. Although De Léry did not hurl abuses at Catholics using the stinging rhetoric which many other Protestant authors had employed in the 1570s, he could or did not avoid – and probably did not want to avoid – ­references to the confessional tension which had resulted in the Parisian bloodbath. The description of the massacre and the confessional hostilities in France filled no less than nine pages in German.16 Adding up all the omissions, some twenty-two “German” pages of De Léry’s preliminaries and report were missing from America iii in Latin, making this volume significantly less hefty than its counterpart in the vernacular.17 The addition of nine extra engravings only partly compensated for this, the plates merely being second printings of illustrations already featuring elsewhere in the book. The De Brys, although not exclusively for this reason presumably, therefore decided to add another narrative, written by another traveller, to the Latin volume. Hence the Latin collection incorporated two letters by the French navigator Nicolas Barré, first published in Paris in 1557, and translated into Latin by Carolus Clusius.18 Barré was a member of the order of Minim brothers, an order of friars closely related to the Franciscans which had a sizeable following in sixteenth-century­ 16 17

18

De Léry, Historia, pp. 206–19; America iii (Ger.), pp. 204–12 / (Lat.), p. 220. For De Léry’s anti-Catholic dedication to William of Hesse, see Historia, [*2r-*4v]. It was missing entirely from both Frankfurt translations. Only the final six pages of the Huguenot’s “praefatio” – forty-two pages in the Geneva edition (Historia, [**1r-****5v]) – were re-issued in the Latin De Bry version, and not in their entirity: America iii (Lat.), pp. 141–43. The Latin edition, markedly, picked up the preface where the focus switched from anti-Catholic to anti-pagan. Hence the first words of the Latin De Bry caption read “Religionem inter ea quae diligenti observatione digna censentur primum obtinere locum nemo unquam negavit” (p. 141). The German edition contained passages excluded from the Latin edition on [A3r-C3v], and [D1r-D3r]. The German preface also omitted the most fiercely anti-Catholic passages, for instance: De Léry, Historia, [**1v-**2r], [**7v-**8v], [***2v], and many selected single phrases. America iii (Lat.), pp. 285–95. Clusius’ name is mentioned on the separate title-page, America iii (Lat.), p. 285. The letters, written in 1555 and 1556, were originally published as: Nicolas Barré, Copie de quelques letres sur la navigation du cevallier de Villegaignon es terres de l’Amerique oultre l’Aequinoctial, iuseques soubz le tropique de Capricorne: co[n] tenant sommairement les fortunes encourues en ce voyage, avec les meurs & façons de vivre des sauvages du pais (Paris, 1557), re-printed in 1558. The De Brys applied the same editorial method for America vi, where they added to the Latin edition a report by the French carpenter Nicolas le Challeux. Both additions may be further explained by a large estimated readership of the Latin volumes in France after the ambition to also publish the collection in French was shelved in 1591.

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France. Barré’s version of events in French Brazil in the late 1550s substantiated the claims made in Villegagnon’s omitted letter to Calvin of the same period, thus neutralising De Léry’s bitter criticism ventilated elsewhere in the volume.19 In the Latin version of America iii, then, and in contrast to the ­German volume, the De Brys not only watered down the strong Calvinist nature of De Léry’s report on French Brazil, but also decided to include the testimony of a Catholic traveller who put the credibility of De Léry’s claims under serious scrutiny. There were also parts of the Huguenot’s original account that the De Brys regarded as too contentious for both translations. Although many potential buyers of the German editions were probably Lutherans or Calvinists, and the publishers must have been well aware of this, the De Brys did not want to spoil the market for their books in Southern Germany, where many affluent people had remained loyal to Rome. With this diversity in mind, and possibly with an eye on the pending censorship by the Frankfurt magistrates – not always a routine procedure as the De Brys would find out only three years later when one of their books did not receive the stamp of approval by the authorities and had to be issued elsewhere – the publishers opted to be prudent and erase the most strongly phrased anti-Catholic rhetoric from the German edition as well. While in preparing the introduction to their Latin edition of De Léry’s narrative in 1592, the publishers had omitted as many as thirty-six of the original octavo-volume’s preliminary pages, several of these passages were considered just as unacceptable for the German edition. The explicitly religious climax to one of De Léry’s rhetorical outbursts, occupying almost two full pages in the Geneva version for example, was omitted entirely. The subsequent juxtaposition of “the Roman Church” and “we the Reformed” was also deemed too strong for inclusion into the German edition.20

The Success of the Editorial Strategy

The success of the De Brys in avoiding the wrath of the Catholic readership can be determined by looking at the collection’s entry on the Spanish and Portuguese Indices. The Iberian inquisitory tribunals, unlike the Holy Office in Rome, were not only in the position to forbid books altogether, but could also impose the expurgation of selected passages in order to allow the sale of

19 20

McGrath, “Polemic and History”, p. 391. De Léry, Historia, [**7v-**8r]: “Ecclesia Romana” vs. “nos reformatos”.

22

Chapter 1

the books. While the De Brys managed to include narratives such as De Léry’s Histoire without inflaming Rome’s Congregation of the Index to the point where America iii, or even the collection as a whole by association, was forbidden, the Iberian friars were more alert to works describing their colonies. The Portuguese Index Librorum Prohibitorum proscribed De Léry’s Histoire in the Geneva edition of 1586. The corresponding version issued in Frankfurt merely rendered the expurgation of selected passages, but, crucially, not the harmful prohibition of the entire work. The textual modifications made in the De Bry workshop successfully neutralised the unacceptable excerpts to achieve a more lenient inquisitorial assessment, in both Portugal and Spain.21 Hence the sale of the volumes in the Iberian monarchies – to customers like Arias ­Montano – remained possible, albeit conditionally. At the same time, the Iberian Indices attracted a different type of attention north of the Pyrenees, where Northern European readers were eager to find out which passages had angered inquisitors in Madrid and Lisbon. Identical editions of the Indices re-appeared in Protestant strongholds like Geneva and Oxford, dedicated to champions of Protestantism like the Elector Palatine and “Winter-King” Frederick v.22 Thus the De Brys had the best of both worlds. Their books remained on the shelves of the Iberian bookstores, while those harboring anti-Spanish sentiments were even more prepared to buy the controversial literature. So who purchased the volumes? The pattern of the De Bry collection’s readership can be established in the records of Jan Moretus, the Antwerp bookseller, as many affluent people – a blend of humanists, merchants, noblemen, magistrates, and Counter-Reformation clerics – bought the De Bry volumes in his bookshop. Handwritten testimonies of ownership in surviving copies of the volumes and contemporary library and auction catalogues complement the archival material, and confirm that Catholics and Protestants in other parts of Europe were just as eager to possess the collection. Hence we can trace the voyages to the private libraries of Protestants as well as to prominent Catholics such as cardinal Francesco Barberini, the nephew of pope Urban viii, and the 21

22

Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum (Madrid, 1612) 2nd section, pp. 49–52; Index Auctorum da[m]natae memoriae, tum etiam librorum, qui vel simpliciter, vel adexpurgatione[m] usque prohibentur, vel deniq[ue] iam expurgati permittuntur (Lisbon, 1624), pp. 226–29. Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum illmi. ac R.D.D. Bernardi de Sandoval & Rexas Card. […] auctoritate et iussu editus … (Geneva, 1619), pp. 52–56; Th. James, Index generalis librorum prohibitorum à pontificiis, una cum Editionibus expurgatis vel expurgandis juxta seriem Literatum & triplicem classem. In usum Bibliothecae Bodleianae, & Curatoribus eiusdem designatus (Oxford, 1627), [A4r]. See: Georges Bonnant, “Les Index prohibitifs et expurgatoires contrefaits par des Protestants au xvie et au xviie siècle”, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 31 (1969): 634–38.

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long-time Spanish ambassador to England Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar. Several priests and bishops in the Southern Netherlands also possessed copies, as did the libraries of the Jesuit colleges in Paris and St. Omer. Likewise, public libraries in Catholic areas like the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome also contained the De Bry collection. Some copies, like the one in the monastery in Huerta in northern Spain, were expurgated according to the rules of the Spanish Index.23 The confessional diversity of the international readership in early modern Europe also presented the De Brys with a problem concerning their engravings. Copper engravings were expensive, as their addition to printed books required a second pressing using a different type of press. A strategy of variation according to the different expectations of different readerships, in line with textual adjustments, was therefore out of the question. The De Brys found a solution to this problem by emphasizing the alterity of the overseas peoples, and paid particular attention to the heathen rituals performed abroad in an effort to enhance the contrast with Europe’s shared Christian traditions. The construction of new engravings of pagan practices can be observed throughout the America-volumes. I shall illustrate the diversity of the additions with three examples. In the first volume of the collection, based on John White’s watercolors of the lost colony at Roanoke Island, one illustration was not based on the original drawings of Virginia. The De Brys designed an engraving of the pagan idol named Kiwasa, whose distinctly Floridian outlook suggests that the publishers may have derived their composition from an illustration by Jacques le Moyne also in their possession (Figure 1.1).24 The addition of this pagan idol to a travel account conceived by Harriot and Hakluyt to attract English settlers to the New World was a clear break with the original iconography. Some Protestant readers may even have recognized familiar features of unreformed Christianity in the engraving of the idol. This composition and others betray the artistic education of Theodore de Bry and his two sons in the Netherlands and in Strasbourg, where Protestant influences were rife. Yet the engraving was certainly acceptable to a Catholic audience as well, and the publishers stressed the pagan nature of the Algonquians by giving Kiwasa a prominent place on the titlepage of the first volume, his feet resting on a buffalo skull (Figure 1.2). Two natives were added in humble veneration of the idol, ensuring Kiwasa’s status as a representational instrument for pagan beliefs in Virginia. The inclusion of 23 24

Van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World, Chapter 10, presents an analysis of around 150 owners of the De Bry collection in the first half of the seventeenth century. America i, ill. xxi.

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Chapter 1

Figure 1.1 Theodore de Bry, “Kiwasa”, in: America, vol. i. ­Frankfurt, 1590, ill. 21 special collections, university of ­a msterdam, otm of 63–731 (1)

a pagan idol on the collection’s first frontispiece was a significant decision in terms of marketing. Booksellers used title-pages to attract customers to their publications, and the beautifully engraved title-pages of the voyages almost certainly served this purpose.25 The De Brys made paganism an instrumental part of their commercial strategy. Another type of iconographic rhetoric geared to enhance the otherness of the New World inhabitants can be found in the final engraving to Volume iv of the America-series.26 The illustrations to every volume except America iii and the abridgements of the late 1620s were attached to the translated account in a separate segment, after the text had finished. Hence the cycles of illustrations can be read as illustrated summaries of the travel accounts they accompany, with captions that were taken from the original narratives. In this ­sequence, the first and last engravings were of prime importance as they ­offered a first impression and a potentially lasting climax of European experiences respectively. America iv was the first of three volumes devoted to Girolamo Benzoni’s critical account of Spanish brutalities in the New World, but the De Brys reserved the final slot in the cycle of twenty-four engravings for an illustration under the rather indiscriminate title “The religion of the I­ ndians”. 25

26

For an analysis of the De Bry title-pages, see: Maike Christadler, “Die Sammlung zur Schau gestellt: Die Titelblätter der ‘America’-Serie”, in: Susanna Burghartz, ed. Inszenierte Welten. Die west- und ostindischen Reisen der Verleger de Bry, 1590–1630 / Staging New Worlds. De Brys’ illustrated travel reports, 1590–1630 (Basel: Schwabe, 2004) pp. 47–93. America iv, ill. xxiv.

The De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634)

Figure 1.2 Theodore de Bry, title-page of America vol. i. Frankfurt, 1590 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–731 (1)

25

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Chapter 1

The plate, invented by the De Brys in Frankfurt, showed a parade of half-­naked native Americans worshipping unattractive idols in the shape of a five-­headed deer with two tails, and two images with unmistakably diabolical features (­Figure 1.3). Once again, the volume’s title-page adopted these native beliefs at the expense of the more numerous depictions of Spanish conquistadors elsewhere in the account. A gruesome idol, combining and expanding the charateristics of the three pagan statues in the final plate, was meant to capture the attention of potential customers across Europe (Figure 1.4). The fourth volume of the America-series is also instructive for understanding the prudence of the De Brys when compared to other German translations of Benzoni’s report which appeared at the same time. The last German edition to be published before the De Bry volume of 1594 had come off the presses in Helmstedt in 1590. A comparison with the De Bry volumes immediately reveals the more vigorous anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Helmstedt edition, introducing readers in its foreword to “the Catholic, Spanish outrage”

Figure 1.3 Johan Theodore de Bry (?), “The religion of the native Americans”, in: America, vol. iv. Frankfurt, 1594, ill. 24 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–731 (4)

The De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634)

Figure 1.4 Johan Theodore de Bry, title-page of America vol. iv. Frankfurt, 1594 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–731 (4)

27

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Chapter 1

and its inspiring force, “the whole anti-Christian, devil-founded Papism”.27 The preface as a whole was thoroughly anti-Catholic, much more condemnatory than De Bry’s interpretations which, both in Latin and in German, were unmistakable attempts to steer the collection away from unwelcome political controversy and from possible repercussions by censors across Europe. Several fragments of the preface in fact tried to take some of the supposedly inherently Spanish defects like tyranny and greed off the shoulders of the conquistadors and into the broader Christian realm. Theodore de Bry warned his readers that … in order to have nobody attribute these vices as dishonourable and slanderous to the Spanish people, everyone should think for themselves what other people in other nations do. […] Therefore we should not readily rebuke the Spaniards, but instead question ourselves if we are any better than they are, for I know many God-fearing and devout Spaniards, no fewer than in any other country. […] For who does not know how gruesome the French, the Germans, the Walloons, and others have behaved in all expeditions and wars?28 In this light the version in the Frankfurt collection was anything but judgmental, mitigating rather than exacerbating the report’s Black Legend tendencies. It certainly had a clear eye for other themes in Benzoni’s account, like heathendom and internal Spanish hostilities. Volume ix of the America-series, finally, offers an example of the remarkable selectiveness the De Brys applied to their collection. One of the two ­accounts 27

28

Girolamo Benzoni, Novae novi orbis historiae, Das ist Alles Geschichten, So in der newen Welt welche Occidentalis India, das ist India, nach Abendwerts genent wird, und etwa Anno 1492. von Christophoro Columbo gefunden worden … sich zugetragen (Helmstedt, 1590), [A3v]: “die Catholische, Spanische unthaten”, and [A2v]: “des gantzen antichristischen, vom Teuffel gestifften Babstumbs”. America iv (Ger.), [A4v]: “Aber doch damit nit jemand dieses dem Spanischen Volck zur unehr und schmacheit uffhebe, betrachte ein jeder bey im selbs, was ander Leut in andern Nationen thun […] Derwegen wir nit so schnell lauffend seyn sollen die Spanier zuschelten, sonder uns zuvor selbs wol prüfen, ob wir besser seyen, weder sie, denn ich viel unter den Spaniern kenne, Gottsförchtige und fromme Männer, nit weniger als in einiger andern Nation […] Denn wer weiß nit, wie greuwlich gehandelt haben, und noch täglich handeln die Frantzosen, Teutschen, Waalen und andere beynah in allen Zügen und Kriegen?” / (Lat.), [):():(3v]: “Veruntamen ne quis haec in Hispanicae gentis ignominiam trahat, expendat unusquisque quid ab aliis aliarum nationum hominibus fiat. […] Ne simus ergo tam praecipites in damnandis Hispanis, quin prios non ipsos serio examinaverimus, num ipsis meliores simus. Multos enim inter Hispanos novi viros pios & probos non minus quam in ulla alia gente. […] Quis enim ignorat quam multa crudeliter patrata sint atque etiamnum hodie patrentur a militibus Gallis, Germanis, Italis, & aliis in omnibus fere expeditionibus ac bellis”.

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included in this volume was the well-known Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), written by the Jesuit friar Jose de Acosta. Acosta comprehensively described the natural world, and used the work to launch his land-bridge thesis to explain the oriental roots of the native American population. Four of the work’s seven books were devoted to naturalia and to the land-bridge thesis. Since the original version and its first translations did not include illustrations – the De Brys used the Dutch translation of 1598 prepared by Jan Huygen van Linschoten and Bernardus Paludanus – the Frankfurt publishers had to construct the treatise’s iconography solely based on the text. Of the cycle of fourteen engravings they made, not a single image referred to passages in the first four books. Instead, the De Brys chose to focus on the alterity of the Amerindian populations once again, depicting the human sacrifices of the Aztecs and other brutal and violent pagan rituals (Figure 1.5).29

Figure 1.5 Johan Theodore de Bry, “How Mexican priests do penance for the sins of their people”, in: America vol. ix. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 7 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–732 (4)

29

America ix, ill. vii.

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Chapter 1

The adaptation of Acosta’s account also discloses the expansion of (near-) nakedness in the De Bry collection. The fourth illustration of the cycle of fourteen portrayed the relationship between humans and llamas in Peru, depicting the natives as barely dressed, supposedly based on the Jesuit’s observations (Figure 1.6).30 Acosta had nevertheless noted that these same llamas yielded wool, and that “the Indians made stuffs of this wool, which they used to clothe themselves”. The contrast between the original account and the illustration construed in Frankfurt was enhanced by the caption in the De Bry volume, which truthfully reported that the Inca manufactured wool products, before skipping the rest of the sentence that did not suit the objectives of the publishers.31 The potentially complicating statement that the llamas favoured cold

Figure 1.6 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Native American sheep carrying gold and silver from Potosí”, in: America vol. ix. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 4 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–732 (4)

30 31

America ix, ill. iv. Jose de Acosta, Historie Naturael ende Morael van de Westersche Indien, transl. Jan Huygen van Linschoten (Enkhuizen, 1598), fol. 209r: “De Wolle wordt van d’Indianen bereyt,

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a­ reas and were sometimes covered with ice and frost did not survive the De Brys’ editorial methods either, as this could have alerted knowledgeable readers to the textual discrepancies. Modifications to the texts and to the illustrations clearly reveal a co-ordinated effort to alter the representations of the New World. Readers of the collection, in this case, were left with the impression of nearly naked Andeans. Since nakedness, like paganism, was easily r­ ecognizable to all Europeans as uncivilised – and un-Christian – the adjustments to the original account eased the sale of the collection’s volumes throughout early modern Europe. Conclusion The combination of modifications, both to the texts and to the iconography, distinctly shaped the representation of the New World in the accounts published by the De Bry family. They enhanced the alterity of native Americans in various ways, by zooming in on topics such as nakedness and often gruesome pagan rituals. Hence the De Bry engravings can and should not be used in scholarly literature on early America in an uncritical fashion or, as so often happens, as attractive illustrations of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New World, without paying proper attention to the editorial strategy and to the changes made in the Frankfurt workshop. Likewise, to present the De Bry engravings as part of an anti-Spanish or anti-Catholic iconographic tradition recognized and embraced by Protestants across Europe misses the point. The De Brys were prudent publishers who relied on the sales figures of their magnum opus for the prosperity of the family firm, and thus attempted to meet the demands of a highly differentiated European readership. This balanced editorial strategy, fuelled by the estimated expectations of potential customers in early modern Europe, conditioned their representations of the New World. These publishing objectives and the resulting textual variations should therefore be taken into account when discussing the De Bry engravings or using them to illustrate scholarly contributions on early America. ende gewaet af ghemaeckt, daer sy haer mede cleeden”; America ix, ill. iv (Ger.): “… diese dienen in Indien […] daß […] auß der Wollen Tuch gemachet wirdt” / (Lat.): “… ex lana panni texantur”.

Chapter 2

Patagonian Giants in West Africa? Two Versions of the First Dutch Attempt to Circumnavigate the World […] Each one may find here very diligently described How miraculously through storm and thunder In great peril, perhaps most through lack of supplies Captain De Weert was forced to return.1 These are the final verses of the sonnet composed by the Amsterdam publisher Zacharias Heyns intended to persuade his customers to buy his most recent book. The central topic of this work, however, suggests that few readers needed this kind of encouragement. Wijdtloopigh verhael van tgene de vijf Schepen […] wedervaren is (Comprehensive story of what happened to the five ships …) was the eyewitness account of the fateful first Dutch attempt to circumnavigate the world. Having departed from Rotterdam in 1598 under Jacques Mahu and Simon de Cordes, the small fleet of five vessels made brief visits to Cape Verde (where Mahu died of fever) and Cape Lopez – just south of the equator in modern-day Gabon – before heading for the Strait of Magellan in search of an alternative route to the Spice Islands in the Indonesian archipelago. One ship, de Liefde, succeeded in passing through the Strait of Magellan and ultimately ended up on Kyushu, Japan, establishing the first official connection between Dutch merchants and the shogunate. The other four ships were dispersed by strong adverse winds in the Strait, three of which were never seen again. Only one vessel, Het Geloof under Captain Sebald de Weert, eventually returned safely to the United Provinces in 1600. One of De Weert’s crew members, the ship’s surgeon Barent Jansz Potgieter, shared his story of the crew’s encounters with indigenous groups in West A ­ frica and Patagonia with Zacharias Heyns, who then turned it into a fashionable 1 Wijdtloopigh verhael van tgene de vijf Schepen […] wedervaren is (Amsterdam, 1600), [A1v]: Elck een hier vinden magh heel sinnelijck beschreven // Oock med’ hoe wonderlijck door onweer en tempeest / In groot ghevaer zijns lijfs, doch doort ghebreck wel meest / Den Capiteijn De Weert, weer werdt te rugh ghedreven. This chapter is based on an article which appeared in Dutch entitled “Barent Jansz en de familie De Bry: Twee visies op de eerste Hollandse expeditie ‘om de West’ rond 1600”, De zeventiende eeuw 21.1 (2005): 29–48.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_004

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publication. The interest in printed travel accounts was extremely high at the turn of the century, and Zacharias Heyns – a Southern Netherlandish publisher who in the 1590s had settled in Amsterdam – presumably hoped to use this narrative to break the de facto monopoly on spectacular travel accounts of his fierce local rival Cornelis Claesz.2 In order to do so, Heyns designed eight woodcuts to embellish Barent Jansz’ story, supposedly based on sketches made by Jansz himself, and emphasized the suffering of the Dutch sailors in a thinlyveiled attempt to copy the success of Gerrit de Veer’s spectacular account of the Dutch wintering at Nova Zembla that Claesz had published two years before. The title-page of Heyns’ attractive book promised readers “dangers and misery” so great that Captain De Weert had been forced to abandon the expedition and turn home. Because of Heyns’ efforts, Barent Jansz’ account became one of the canonical travel accounts of the early Dutch Golden Age, and would later be included in all the major compendia of early Dutch expansion.3 Interest in travel accounts of Dutch transoceanic adventures was not confined to the United Provinces. Across early modern Europe, readers – especially Protestant readers – were eagerly following Dutch efforts to damage Habsburg interests in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. In Frankfurt, the heart of the European book market, Johan Theodore and Johan Israel de Bry published a monumental collection of voyages, folio volumes containing travel accounts in German and in Latin. Their father Theodore de Bry had started publishing his America-series in 1590, and after his death in 1598, his two sons not only continued that series which by then had already expanded to seven books, but had also started their own India Orientalis-series in 1597 to reproduce the increasing number of Dutch travel accounts to the East Indies. Affluent readers across the continent cherished the De Bry collection for the high-quality copper engravings father and sons designed and included in a separate section at the end of each volume. In the highest echelons of early modern Europe – among princes and noblemen, clergymen and merchants – the collection of voyages became an important and influential coffee-table book.4 2 On Heyns, see Hubert Meeus, “Zacharias Heyns, Sometime Apprentice to Moretus, Becomes the First Merchant/Publisher in Amsterdam”, Quaerendo 38.4 (2008): 381–97; on Claesz, see Günter Schilder, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica vii: Cornelis Claesz (c.1551−1609): Stimulator and Driving Force of Dutch Cartography (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 2003); Elizabeth A. Sutton, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 21–51. 3 Barent Jansz’ account is included in Michiel Colijn’s and Gillis Saeghman’s collections of voyages (1617 and 1663 respectively), as well as in the famous compendium Begin ende Voortgangh (1648). 4 Michiel van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

34

Chapter 2

Johan Theodore and Johan Israel de Bry included Barent Jansz’ Wijdtloopigh verhael in Volume ix of their America-series, which appeared in Frankfurt in German in 1601, and in Latin in 1602.5 Not only did they arrange for the translation of Zacharias Heyns’ edition, they also made substantial and significant changes to the cycle of illustrations designed in Amsterdam. If possible, the De Brys for their collection relied on visual material in the original account, but as arguably the most talented copper engravers in early modern Germany, they invariably added engravings and modified existing ones. As a result, the De Bry collection painted a completely different picture of the first Dutch circumnavigation than the original printed account. This article explores how information from European eyewitnesses in the Americas underwent a complete transformation in a printing workshop in Frankfurt, why this was done and how it helped to legitimate European supremacy in the Atlantic world, and – perhaps most intriguingly – why indigenous inhabitants of tropical West Africa suddenly ended up in the cold and tempestuous climes of Patagonia.

Depicting the Other in West Africa

If contemporary readers of the De Bry collection would have compared the lavishly produced volumes to the original printed accounts (there is no reason to believe that they did), they would have noticed one major change right away. The title-page of Zacharias Heyns’ Amsterdam edition presented readers with a rather crude view of the five ships which had departed Rotterdam with high hopes in 1598, perhaps appealing to the collective awareness in Holland of Mahu and De Cordes’ maritime adventure at the turn of the century (­Figure  2.1). The title-page of the De Bry volume was strikingly different, as was the size of the book – more than twice the size of Heyns’ account. The attractive newly-invented image consisted of several figures which featured in the book, and was meant to be a preview persuading customers to purchase a copy (Figure 2.2). To the left and right of the extensive title in the middle of the classical tableau, two half-dressed native inhabitants can be seen, although from the title-page itself it is unclear which regions in the Atlantic world they represented. At the very top of the composition, usually reserved for deities or indigenous dignitaries, European readers were treated to a picture of the “king” of Gabon – one of the places the Dutch fleet visited on its way south towards the Strait of Magellan. The two penguins to the left and right of the African 5 Neundter und letzter Theil Americae … (Frankfurt, 1601); Americae Nona & postrema Pars (Frankfurt, 1602).

Two Versions of Dutch Attempt to Circumnavigate the World

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Figure 2.1 Zacharias Heyns, Wijdtloopigh verhael. Amsterdam, 1600, title-page special collections, university of amsterdam, otm o 60–571 (1)

ruler symbolized some of the “marvelous” aspects of nature the Dutch crew witnessed in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Only the llama at the bottom did not refer to Barent Jansz’ narrative, but to the other account in Volume ix of the America-series, José de Acosta’s Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias. The De Brys reserved the most meaningful modifications for the contents of the account. They began by putting the account’s paratextual sections to the service of their own commercial enterprise. This, for every volume of the collection, was a delicate affair. The De Brys decided they did not need the sonnet Heyns has used to announce the appearance of the travel account. Also, rather predictably, they omitted Heyns’ dedicatory letter at the start of the original printed account to the Amsterdam merchant Jan Andries de Jacomo, and replaced it with two dedications of their own – a German one to landgrave Ludwig of Hesse-Marburg, a Calvinist prince and trusted protector of the De Brys who were Calvinists themselves, and a Latin one to Elector Christian ii of Saxony, an important political figure in Lutheran Germany, to whom the De Brys also dedicated multiple books. The dedications were part of a careful editorial strategy intended not to alienate any confessional groups in the Holy Roman Empire that was characterized by religious tensions. Despite their Reformed

36

Figure 2.2 Johan Thedore de Bry, title-page of America vol. ix. Frankfurt, 1601/2 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–732 (4)

Chapter 2

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persuasion, the De Bry brothers even occasionally dedicated books to Catholic princes in order to keep their business afloat. In the case of ­Volume ix, the inclusion the Jesuit José de Acosta’s work probably meant the De Brys did not feel the need to include a dedication to a Catholic ruler as an explicit appeal to a Catholic readership.6 The changes to the actual travel account at first glance seem to be minimal. The De Brys shortened the text by indiscriminately omitting brief paragraphs, mainly in the Latin translation.7 The reason for this must have been a practical one. The amount of paper used was an important factor in determining the price of a printed book around 1600, and the De Brys probably tried to fit Barent Jansz’ account into as few pages as they reasonably could without disrupting the main story. In a few cases, however, the De Brys made significant changes to the text, occasionally with such surgical precision that these changes enable us to understand the intricacies of the Frankfurt publishers’ editorial strategy. The most remarkable examples are provided by two passages describing the encounters between Captain De Weert and several Dutch crew members and the inhabitants of Cape Lopez. Barent Jansz relates how the Dutch were received in a hospitable manner, and were given a place to sleep by the local ruler. When De Weert woke up the first morning, “meaning to return to the King, an old woman approached him, looking up to the sky, carrying a box”.8 In the workshop of the De Brys, the passage was altered to emphasize that the woman who approached the captain was “entirely naked”. Both the German and the Latin translation emphasized the woman’s nudity (gantz nacket / tota nuda), even though the original account did not provide any evidence for this – neither here nor elsewhere in the section on the Dutch visit to Cape Lopez.9 This small yet significant modification was not a coincidence. One of the woodcuts in Barent Jansz’ original printed account had depicted the highlight of the Dutch visit to Cape Lopez, a diplomatic encounter between Dutch and Gabonese dignitaries (Figure 2.3). The contrast between the well-attired European visitors, carrying their ceremonial trumpets, and the half-naked African “nobleman”, wearing feathered hats and sitting on the floor in a semi-circle, 6 For the two De Bry dedications, see Neundter und letzter Theil Americae, [(?)2r-3v]; Americae Nona & postrema Pars, [)(2r-3v]. 7 These sections are discussed, briefly and incompletely, in the modern edition of Barent Jansz’ account entitled De reis van Mahu en De Cordes door de Straat van Magalhaes naar Zuid-Amerika en Japan 1598–1600, ed. F.C. Wieder (3 vols.; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1923–25), vol. i, pp. 179, 188–89, 192, 204–5. 8 Wijdtloopigh verhael, [C4r]: “Des morghens de Capiteijn […] van meyninghe weder na den Koningh te gaen, quam tot hem een out wijf, sterrelinghs op ziende, met een dose …”. 9 Neundter und letzter Theil Americae, [2C3r]; Americae Nona & postrema Pars, [Cc1v].

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Figure 2.3 Anon., “Sebald de Weert meets the King of Congo”, in: Zacharias Heyns, Wijdtloopigh verhael. Amsterdam, 1600. [C3r] special collections, university of amsterdam, otm o 60–571 (1)

must have been quite emphatic for readers of the Amsterdam edition. For the De Brys, however, the contrast between civilized Europeans and uncivilized non-European inhabitants of the Atlantic world was not yet striking enough. In their copper engraving of the same encounter, the Dutch visitors were carrying weapons alongside their trumpets, and the Gabonese noblemen had been  – quite literally – undressed (Figure 2.4). Whereas in Heyns’ woodcut they had been covering their genitals with textile clothing, they were depicted stark naked by the De Brys, as if to underline the modifications made to the text. The change was confirmed in the lengthy caption that the De Brys added to the engravings, which once again included the words “gantz nacket” and “in totum nudi” that the corresponding section in the original account did not provide. In the background of the De Bry engraving, the impressive Dutch fleet gave a different impression of the balance of power along the West African coast than the original woodcut had done. In a final textual adjustment, the De Brys in the captions employed the word “Barbaric” (das Barbarische Volk / Barbari) to describe the Gabonese elite, while their own translations had used

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Figure 2.4 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Sebald de Weert meets the King of Congo (1)”, in: America vol. ix. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 18 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–732 (4)

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the less derogatory terms “die Mohren” (the Moors) and “Aethiopes” (the Ethiopians) instead.10 Zacharias Heyns had opted to include only a single illustration of the visit of the Dutch sailors to Gabon, but the De Brys in Frankfurt decided to add a second one (Figure 2.5). Generally, throughout the De Bry collection, these newly designed engravings copied elements of images in the original account (if the original account contained any, of course), but the engraver also drew inspiration for the composition from the unillustrated sections of the travel account. In this case, the De Brys depicted another meeting between Captain de Weert and the “King” of Gabon. The juxtaposition between the civilized European visitors and their uncivilized hosts was once again at the heart of the engraving. In the background and to the right of the main scene, other stages of the encounter were depicted by the De Brys, creating an image with narrative quality which combined different episodes into one image. On the right-hand side, the De Brys decided to single out for depiction the “old woman” who had approached De Weert carrying a box. Predictably, she was “entirely naked” to underline the manipulative change to the text the De Brys had made. Changes to the text and changes to the illustrations, then, went hand in hand to create a systematically different representation of the “Other”, and of the nature of the encounter between the Dutch and the indigenous population of Cape Lopez.

From West Africa to Patagonia (and Back)

Other than emphasizing the “otherness” of the indigenous inhabitants of West Africa, the De Brys employed another strategy to increase the divide between Europeans and non-Europeans in the Atlantic world. Throughout their collection, they performed an ethnic homogenization of non-European ­populations – a process which may have partly been the result of a lack of credible visual material in the original travel accounts, but which was systematically executed and had a detrimental effect on the perception of ethnic variety in the Atlantic world. Here the De Brys’ adaptation of Barent Jansz’ Wijdtloopigh verhael provides an examplary case. In the newly invented engraving of the ­encounter at Cape Lopez, the De Brys depicted another naked woman immediately to the right of the “King” of Gabon, bringing fish to the European and indigenous dignitaries during their meeting as the text described. The woman’s 10

Neundter und letzter Theil Americae, [2C3r] vs. [3E4r]; Americae Nona & postrema Pars, [Cc1r] vs. [ee4r]. In Wijdtloopigh verhael, the term ‘barbaric’ is not used either, the Dutch account prefers the word ‘Swerten’ (blacks).

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Figure 2.5 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Sebald de Weert meets the King of Congo (2)”, in: America vol. ix. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 19 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–732 (4)

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hair style, with a distinctive combed-back forelock, and her necklace made of what appeared to be shells, which also served to hold up the remarkably hairy cape she was wearing, were particularly eye-catching. These distinctive elements of the woman’s appearance were not invented in Frankfurt, however, but in Amsterdam, by Zacharias Heyns. The De Brys’ West African woman was copied and pasted from a woodcut in the original Amsterdam edition which depicted the appearance of women along the Strait of Magellan (Figure 2.6). Intriguingly, the De Brys included the same woman in one of their own images of Patagonia too, enabling readers of their coffee-table book to witness the ethnic similarities between West Africa and Tierra del Fuego for themselves. The homogenization of the “other” enabled the De Brys to develop a binary interpretation of the Atlantic world, where Europeans – here represented by the Dutch sailors under Sebald de Weert – were juxtaposed with non-Europeans who were made to look as if they shared some important ethnic features. This in turn formed the basis for the rhetoric of European supremacy overseas, which was introduced by the De Brys to the travel account of Barent Jansz in a stunningly manipulative, and probably highly effective, way. The main subject

Figure 2.6 Anon., “Patagonian woman and her children”, in: Zacharias Heyns, Wijdtloopigh verhael, [G1r] special collections, university of amsterdam, otm o 60–571 (1)

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of these editorial manipulations were the mythical Patagonian Giants, who supposedly inhabited the shores of the Strait of Magellan. They were included among the creatures known in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe as the “Plinian races” (after Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis), and the observations by the first European circumnavigators, like Antonio Pigafetta who took part in Magellan’s expedition, appeared to confirm that European vistors to the southernmost tip of the Americas could anticipate an encounter with human creatures who were more than nine feet tall. Cosmographic literature in Renaissance Europe in particular played a key role in nurturing and shaping this story, and alerting European armchair travelers to the ferocious nature of these gigantic creatures. Sebastian Münster, the German cosmographer, wrote in 1550 that Spanish conquistadors – meaning Magellan and his chronicler Pigafetta – had encountered “terribly large women and even taller men of whom they were horrified, and if they had not reached their ships and their guns in time, they would have been in distress because of these ‘Giganten’ or ‘Heroes’”.11 Münster’s Cosmographia was an extremely popular treatise in Renaissance Europe, going through as many as 46 different editions and translations before 1650.12 The French royal cosmographer André Thevet noted in his 1575 Cosmographie Universelle that “these people are not to be handled with kid gloves, given the force that is natural to them. And moreover that they are so bloodthirsty, so skilful, so well-prepared for battle that it would take only twenty of them to defeat one hundred of ours, because in their fury they no longer fear death, and so they expose themselves to it, like a lioness or tigress whose cubs are taken away”.13 Even in editions of Abraham ­Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum which appeared around 1600, just at the 11

12

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Sebastian Münster, Cosmographei oder Beschreibung aller länder (Basel, 1550), [Kkk7r]: “… mechtig große weiber und noch viel grösser männer, ab dennen sie sich entsetzten, und wo sie nit bey zeit it schiff zum geschütz kommenn were, were sie bey dißen Giganten oder Helden in not kommen”. Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 107, 163–64; Matthew MacLean, The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster: Describing the World in the Reformation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). André Thevet, La Cosmographie Universelle (2 vols.; Paris, 1575), ii, [Aaaaa3r]: “ces gens ne laissent prendre sans mouffles, veu la force qui leur est naturelle, & puis que avec cela ils sont si sanguinaires, adextres, bien combattans, si qu’il n’en faudroit qu’une vingtaine pour en accabler une centaine des nostres: car’estans en leur furie, ils se ne soucient non plus la mort, que de rien, ains s’y exposent, ainsi qu’une Lyonne ou Tygresse, á qui on desrobe des petits”. On Thevet, see Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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time when Barent Jansz’ account was published in Amsterdam, the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego were referred to as “Gigantes”.14 Authors of travel accounts felt obliged to echo these well-known stories in their eyewitness reports, if only to stress the credibility of their narratives and to respect what Anthony Grafton has called “the power of tradition” that dictated European representations of the Atlantic world during the Age of Encounters.15 Barent Jansz was no exception. According to his observations, the Patagonian Giants were “ten to eleven feet tall”, and it was clear from the ship’s surgeon’s narrative that the Dutch sailors were very impressed by the mythical creatures they had come across.16 The corresponding woodcut in the Amsterdam edition of Barent Jansz’ account duly showed two impressive (and impressively large) people, a man in the foreground holding a spear, thus confirming the notions of belligerency which were doing the rounds in learned circles in early modern Europe, and a second man in a canoe in which a fire burned, probably an amalgamated image inspired by other sixteenth-century representations of indigenous life in the Americas (Figure 2.7). The De Bry engraving which was derived from this woodcut placed the encounter between the Dutch sailors and the Patagonian Giants in a completely different light (Figure 2.8). Like the newly added engraving to the encounters at Cape Lopez, the De Bry compostion was divided into three different segments, each depicting a different stage in the first encounter between the Dutch and the fearsome Giants. In the background – exactly like they had done in the newly invented Cape Lopez engraving – the De Brys once again added the Dutch fleet, still complete at the time because the hardships in the Strait of Magellan were still in the (near) future. The fleet of oceangoing vessels was meant to remind readers of the power of European technology and endeavor, and highlight the contrast with the distinctly less impressive seacrafts of the Patagonian Giants. The background of the engraving was connected to the foreground by a sloop of armed Dutchmen rowing towards the coast and using their firearms to deter a handful of Patagonians who had approached the ships in one of their canoes. The clash, as would have been immediately 14

15 16

Dennis Reinhartz, “The Americas Revealed in the ‘Theatrum’”, in: Peter van der Krogt, Peter H. Meurer, and Marcel van den Broecke, eds., Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of his Death, 1598–1998 (Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 1998), pp. 209–20, esp. 213–14. On Ortelius, see also Tine Meganck, Erudite Eyes: Friendship, Art and Erudition in the Network of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Anthony T. Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992). Wijdtloopigh verhael, [D4v]: “10. oft 11. voet langh”.

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Figure 2.7 Anon. “Patagonian men”, in: Zacharias Heyns, Wijdtloopigh verhael, [E1r] special collections, university of amsterdam, otm o 60–571 (1)

clear to any European reader, was an unequal one, and the Patagonian Giants who had remained ashore started to panic. The extent of their anxiety could be witnessed in the foreground, where one Giant pulled a palm tree (!) from the ground – something which they tended to do, as Barent Jansz had observed, to channel their fear. Even though the Patagonian Giants in the Frankfurt engravings were clearly modelled after their counterparts in the Amsterdam edition, the way the De Brys had selected separate episodes from Barent Jansz’ story and combined them in a rhetorically powerful engraving stressed that the Patagonians were in awe of the Europeans, rather than the other way around. The same interpretation of the Euro-indigenous encounter in the Atlantic world was on display in the next two engravings, which also visualized the shifting power relations between the Dutch and the Patagonians. In the second Amsterdam woodcut devoted to Tierra del Fuego, the woman who had served as the template for the newly designed West African woman featured (see Figure 2.6). She too underwent a significant change in the Frankfurt workshop, because the corresponding De Bry engraving had added not only a Dutch ship to the composition, but also placed a much greater emphasis on the skirmish in the background

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Figure 2.8 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Patagonian men encounter Dutch sailors”, in: America vol. ix. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 22 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–732 (4)

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between Dutch sailors – well-armed just like in the previous illustration in the De Bry cycle – and the now markedly fearful Giants who fled from the Dutch onslaught towards the mountainous interior. In the foreground of the De Bry engraving, the woman and her two children were now joined by three Europeans. The contrast between the naked mother, her body stooped to reach out to her children, and the three Dutch soldiers, the most prominent of whom positioning himself as if posing for a contemporary costume book, could not have been greater (Figure 2.9). Arguably the most striking transformation in the visual representation of the Patagonians, however, was reserved for the third and final illustration of the encounter in the Strait of Magellan. This image, the climax to the cycle of ­engravings in Volume ix of the De Brys’ America-series, was once again based on a woodcut designed by Zacharias Heyns. The Amsterdam woodcut, an image not dissimilar to the archetypical costume book illustrations where a male and female member of a specific ethnic group were depicted together, each wearing standard local clothing and carrying attributes – often ­weaponry  – used in that particular region of the world, was not particularly spectacular in the light of what Barent Jansz had described in his account (Figure 2.10). The only remarkable aspects on display were the feathered garments of the Patagonian man, which had not been depicted in the other two images, and suggested not only the distinguished nature and position of this particular man, but also his American roots, as by 1600 feathers were practically synonymous with the indigenous population of the American continent north and south in ­European iconography. In the background of the crude woodcut, Heyns depicted a circle of men, apparently Dutchmen, a man lying face down on the ground whose narrative purpose was unclear, and a Dutch ship and sloop, probably meant to emphasize that the crew of Het Geloof  by now had lost track of the other four ships that were part of the Dutch fleet. The De Bry engraving borrowed all its elements from the woodcut in the original edition, but used these to provide readers with a completely different conclusion to the Dutch-Patagonian encounter (Figure 2.11). The woman, mirrored as usual when copper engravers copied other illustrations, was still in the same position, but the feathered man was lying on the ground, face down, like the small figure in the Amsterdam woodcut. His hands were tied behind his back and his eyes were closed, suggesting that, at the very least, he had been subdued by the Dutch sailors, and – as was confirmed in the caption – that he had died during the Dutch visit to Tierra del Fuego. As the European viewers’ attention was drawn to the Patagonian dignitary’s face, they would have immediately seen the circle of Dutchmen which the De Brys had given added prominence. It could now clearly be seen that the men were praying,

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Figure 2.9 Johan Theodore de Bry, “Patagonian woman and her children encounter Dutch sailors”, in: America vol. ix. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 23 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–732 (4)

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Figure 2.10

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Anon., “Two Patagonian giants”, in: Zacharias Heyns, Wijdtloopigh verhael, [H2v] Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm O 60–571 (1)

and it could be inferred that they thanked the Lord for making them come out on top of the clash with the fearsome Patagonian Giants. In the background, the same three Dutch soldiers who had been depicted in the previous engraving now appeared again in the company of the Patagonian woman, holding here and perhaps taking her back to Europe – although neither the account nor the captions in the two De Bry translations provided any further explanation. Finally, three Dutch sailors were depicted working on a sloop, probably to make their way back to the ship which, as readers already knew, would take them safely back to Europe. The final engravings left no doubts about the transoceanic power balance, not even when Europeans came face to face with what experienced readers in the Old World estimated to be one of the most fearsome indigenous groups of the Americas. The triumph of European civilization, supported across the globe by Christianity, formed a marked departure from the stories of marvelous monsters and “Plinian” races that dominated ancient ideas of the world beyond the Pillars of Hercules. This myth had been carefully resurrected in Renaissance Europe by cosmographers like Sebastian Münster and André Thevet, and even by supposedly modern cartographers like Abraham Ortelius and eyewitnesses and their publishers who wanted to be believed by readers back home such as Barent Jansz and Zacharias Heyns. The fact that Christianity as a whole, and not just a single denomination in post-Reformation Europe, could recognize the simple juxtaposition between “us” and “them” allowed the De Brys to sell

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Chapter 2

Johan Theodore de Bry, “Patagonian giants”, in: America vol. ix. Frankfurt, 1601/2, ill. 24 special collections, university of amsterdam, otm of 63–732 (4)

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their collection to both Protestant and Catholic readers, thus enhancing the scope of their representations. The shift in the narrative of what European adventurers were likely to encounter, achieved in a Frankfurt workshop by people who had never travelled, contributed to the emergence of a more aggressive approach to expansion, not only in the Atlantic world but also in Africa and in Asia. In a sense, it was this kind of rhetoric, systematically manufactured in both texts and images, that legitimated European colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Conclusion: The Tools of Storytelling

The De Brys had one more card up their sleeve in order to impose the results of their editorial strategy on European readers. Every volume of their collection was structured in the same way, meaning that the illustrations that all readers at the time must have been eagerly looking forward to were not included in the text, but added at the end of the translated travel account. Each of the copper engravings was accompanied by a fairly long caption, a verbatim copy of the relevant section of the text or, more often, a tailor-made paraphrase of the text which condensed what the publishers estimated to be the highlights of the account into one short text. It is very likely that contemporary readers – like scholars interested in the De Bry collection today – immediately proceeded to the illustrated part of the volume, reading the cycle of illustrations as a de facto summary of Barent Jansz’ narrative. The De Brys had brought the technique of including copper engravings into printed books to the German book market, and by 1601 – when America ix appeared – the novelty had almost certainly not yet worn off. They may well have used their knowledge of reading habits to enhance the impression that the cycle of illustrations did indeed provide a summary of the narrative, without of course emphasizing the various layers of manipulation that provided the groundwork for their visual representations of the Atlantic world. To understand the intricacy of the De Brys’ editorial strategy, it is useful to look at the cycle of illustrations as a whole. Whereas Heyns, in the original printed account, had included eight woodcuts, the De Brys expanded the number of illustrations to eleven. The first two were practically identical, representing the departure of the Dutch fleet and its arrival in Cape Verde. The third copper engraving, newly invented by the De Brys, displayed the same fleet. The first sentence of the caption, both in German and in Latin, emphasized the continuity between the previous and the current image by stating that “From Santiago [on Cape Verde, the subject of the second image] the Dutchmen sailed on to Brava”, another island of the Cape Verde archipelago. It is here that Jacques Mahu, the fleet’s commander,

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died, and this fact too was mentioned in the caption to the new engraving – a requirement for understanding what was to follow at Cape Lopez and in Patagonia. For this reason the fourth copper engraving included in the background a view of a Christian funeral ritual, a detail not available in one of the original woodcuts, but a crucial element of the De Brys’ strategy of turning the copper engravings cum captions into a summary of Barent Jansz’ travel account. Since the fourth caption ended with the observation that the inhabitants of Cape Lopez were eager to trade with the Dutch after getting acquainted with them, the first sentence of the fifth caption explicitly made the connection to this observation by stating that “Now that the commander [De Weert] and the ‘King’ were entering into trade relations …”, another clear example of chaining together the consecutive chapters of the story. Readers were hence encouraged to understand the cycle of illustrations as a complete and representative summary of the original account. It is for this reason that the selection and manipulation of the three images of the Dutch-Patagonian encounter at the conclusion of the cycle of eleven illustrations, and hence of the De Bry narrative as a whole, carried so much weight. While Heyns’ woodcuts, dispersed through the account, ended with the ethnographic image of the Patagonian woman and man posing, as it were, for their European portraitist, the De Bry cycle of copper engravings concluded with the reassuring message – from a European perspective – that even the canonically most fearsome of indigenous inhabitants in the Americas could ultimately be subjugated by Europe’s technological advantage, supported by God who unconditionally sided with the Christians against the heathen peoples of the New World. As a result, two contrasting visions of the first Dutch attempt at circumnavigation circulated in early modern Europe in the first decade of the seventeenth century. The original Dutch edition, printed by Zacharias Heyns in Amsterdam and based on the eyewitness observations of Barent Jansz Potgieter, emphasized the suffering of the Dutch crew to ride the wave of popularity for tales of disaster which had been created by the publication of Gerrit de Veer’s account of the wintering at Nova Zembla two years earlier. The German and Latin translations published by Johan Theodore and Johan Israel de Bry in Frankfurt used the same information to tell a completely different story. This narrative enriched the contrast between Europeans and non-­Europeans in the Atlantic world, and told a tale of European supremacy, founded on the mutually supportive “languages of Christianity and civility” that characterized so many European travel accounts of the Age of Encounters.17 17

The term “languages of cilivity and Christianity” I borrowed from Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India Through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. xv.

Chapter 3

Dierick Ruiters’ Manuscript Maps and the Birth of the Dutch Atlantic In marked contrast to early modern Spanish and Portuguese expansion in the Western hemisphere, which was shrouded in varying levels of secrecy and censorship, Dutch expansion in the Atlantic world was characterized by an unrivaled openness. Its newspapers, prints, pamphlets, cosmographies, and (occasionally very famous) maps are ample testimony to both the young republic’s boundless self-confidence during the so-called Dutch Golden Age, and the open discussion culture at home that many foreign visitors admired and at times despised.1 Before a “public” Atlantic world flourished at the waterfronts and printing houses of Amsterdam and other maritime towns of the United Provinces, however, the Dutch West India Company too was reluctant to publicize sensitive information. Sources of espionage and strategic intelligence that made the emergence of the Dutch Atlantic possible remained hidden from public view, and have subsequently received relatively little scholarly attention.2 This article examines five manuscript maps by the Zeeland navigator Dierick Ruiters (c. 1575–c. 1640) that played a crucial role in the making of the short-lived Dutch Atlantic empire which thrived in the second quarter of the seventeenth century.3 By studying Ruiters’ manuscript maps, moreover, it explores the sometimes rather blurry line between secrecy and openness which

1 Michiel van Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). One of Ruiters’ maps I discuss in quite general terms on pp. 35–37. An exhaustive overview of early modern Dutch maps of the ­Atlantic world is Bea Brommer and Henk den Heijer, eds., Comprehensive Atlas of the Dutch West India Company (2 vols.; Voorburg: Atlas Maior, 2011). 2 The exception to the rule is Kees Zandvliet, Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans, and Topographic Paintings and Their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion, 1998). Zandvliet discusses only one of Ruiters’ five maps which are the subject of this article (p. 173). 3 On the Dutch Atlantic “moment”, roughly between 1620 and 1670, see Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). The term “empire” is traditionally applied very loosely in connection to the early modern United Provinces, and rightly so.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_005

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defined the early strategy of the West India Company, and which in later centuries determined the boundary between obscurity and (relative) fame.4 The Dutch mapping of the Atlantic world preceded Dutch imperial ambitions by several decades. The Iberian monarchies had been fairly successful in keeping cartographic information from the Americas secret, but the Union of the Crowns (1580) ignited Luso-Spanish disagreement about the geopolitical purpose of overseas maps, and the level of concealment required. Repeated English and French incursions into South America made geographical secrecy an “increasingly futile exercise”, as one historian recently put it.5 As early as September 1592, the Amsterdam globemaker Jacob Florisz van Langren confidently claimed that Dutch merchant ships had reached Pernambuco in Brazil with the aid of his globe.6 Throughout the 1590s, individual trading voyages rendered more maps of coastlines and port towns in the Americas, most notably sketches of Trinidad and the Wild Coast by the Rotterdam skipper Pieter Cornelisz van Petten.7 The major publications of Atlantic navigation, like L­ ucas Jansz Waghenaer’s Enchuyser Zee-caert-boeck (1598), reported the latitudes of several locations in Brazil, and added brief descriptions of the transoceanic routes from the Canary Islands to South America, and from the West African coast to northeast Brazil. Around the turn of the century, cartographers of the so-called North Holland school of cartography, such as Evert Gijsbertsz, Cornelis Doedsz, and the brothers Harmen and Marten Jansz – all from the small maritime town of Edam – provided the first overviews of the Atlantic world. Cornelis Claesz, the Amsterdam publisher, was a crucial figure in disseminating the most recent achievements from cartographic workshops in the North Holland towns.8 Because the projected establishment of the West India Company was suspended in 1606 during Dutch negotiations with Spain over what would become the Twelve Years’ Truce, the early mapping of the Atlantic world did not immediately lead to geopolitical endeavors. After 1614, however, when both Habsburg 4 I am grateful to Martijn Storms, Curator of Maps and Atlases at Leiden University Library, and to the members of the informal Atlantic History reading club at the Leiden Institute for History for their comments and suggestions. 5 María M. Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 264. Spain and Portugal both tried to employ maps to claim overseas territories, most notably the Philippines, see Idem, p. 81. 6 Günter Schilder, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica vii: Cornelis Claesz (c. 1551–1609): Stimulator and Driving Force of Dutch Cartography (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 2003), p. 282. 7 Brommer and Den Heijer, Comprehensive Atlas, i, pp. 137–38, 151. 8 Günter Schilder, Early Dutch Maritime Cartography (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 255–487.

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Spain and the Dutch East India Company (voc) regularly began to violate the Truce in Asia, Dutch skippers in the Atlantic Ocean also became more outright in their ambitions. In January 1615, the privateer Joris van Spilbergen – during a voyage of circumnavigation in the service of the voc – burned down a sugar mill in São Vicente, near the village of Santos in Southern Brazil.9 The following year, in 1616, the Dutch skipper Samuel Lucas lost a ship in a skirmish with Portuguese colonists near Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon River – a feat that was still referred to in maps of the region that were made many years later.10 In May 1617, the voc pleaded with the States General in The Hague to order the Amsterdam Admiralty to prepare a war ship, which could be sent to Brazil or to the West Indies to take Iberian captives. This, according to the directors of the Company, would be the only way to make the Habsburgs agree to a long-awaited exchange of hostages.11 By the time the West India Company was finally established in 1621, Dutch sailors were very much prepared to take the war against Spain to the Americas.

Dierick Ruiters

Dierick Ruiters, born in Zeeland probably around 1575, was a sailor and skipper who spent his entire career in Atlantic waters. He was among the first Dutchmen to visit West Africa, and to write about his experiences there. The most influential early account of trade along the Gold Coast, Pieter de Marees’ Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, published in Amsterdam in 1602, contained a chapter by Ruiters on the Bight of Benin.12 At some point in the next fifteen years, he turned his attention to Brazil. It was at Angra dos Reis, in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro, that Ruiters, as captain of the ship De Blauwe Zeeu (“The Blue Zeelander”) was arrested in the fall of 9 10 11 12

Oost- ende West-Indische spiegel der 2 leste navigatiën, ghedaen inden jaeren 1614, 15, 16, 17 ende 18. daer in vertoont woort, in wat gestalt Ioris van Speilbergen door de Magellanes de werelt rontom geseylt heeft, ed. R. Posthumus Meyjes (Amsterdam: De Bussy, 1952), p. 29. Brommer and Den Heijer, Comprehensive Atlas, i, pp. 174–75. Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal, nieuwe reeks iii, ed. J.G. Smit (The Hague: Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, 1975), p. 106. The monogram D.R. was first identified as Ruiters by S.P. L’Honoré Naber, “Inleiding”, in Beschryvinge ende historische verhael van het gout koninckrijck van Gunea […] door P. de Marees, ed. Idem (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1912), p. xxv. His assumption has since been copied by many authors on West Africa, up to and including Elizabeth Sutton, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 178. For additional circumstantial evidence, see Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000 [1950]), p. 65, n. 5.

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1616 for conducting trade – something that was not allowed under the stipulations of the Truce between the United Provinces and Habsburg Spain. For thirty months, Ruiters was a prisoner in Brazil, forced to “wander with the Portuguese for 300 or 400 miles overland, sometimes in chains or tied with ropes, sometimes quite freely on ships along the coast”.13 He eventually escaped – or so he claimed – and returned to Zeeland in 1619. In reaction to his “miserable detention”, he published Toortse der Zee-vaert (1623; “Torch of Navigation”), a pilot guide that was to the Atlantic world what Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s more illustrious Itinerario of 1596 had been to the Indian Ocean world. Partly based on the Portuguese navigator Manuel de Figueiredo’s roteiros, Ruiters’ navigation manual served a clear patriotic purpose and became the blueprint for the first invasion of Brazil by the Dutch West India Company in May 1624, a campaign in which Ruiters himself participated.14 The Dutch would hold on to Salvador de Bahia, the capital of Habsburg Brazil, for only eleven months, but in February 1630 they would return to Pernambuco, where the town of Recife would remain the nucleus of a flourishing Dutch Atlantic empire for almost twenty-five years.15 Ruiters’ Toortse der Zee-vaert (Figure 3.1), surprisingly perhaps for a pilot guide, does not include any maps. It does, however, contain an explicit reference to maps. In the dedicatory letter to Stadtholder Maurits of Orange, dated 20 May 1623, Ruiters expressed the hope that many of the Prince’s subjects would purchase his work, “… causing me to publish a second edition, to which many things can be added, and which can be furnished with all the plates of the

13

14

15

Dierick Ruiters, Toortse der Zee-vaert (Vlissingen, 1623), preface (unpaginated): “… dertigh maenden, met de Portugijsen (ghevanghen) langs die Custen van America 3. ende 400. mylen weegs hebbe moeten swerven, somtijt in yseren ghesloten, somtijts met touwen ghebonden, en soo over ’tlant gheleyt, somtijts oock los en liber met schepen en passage bercken op de zee ghevaren”. Van Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic, pp. 44–71; Charles Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1682 (London: Athlone Press, 1952), pp. 46–55. Stuart B. Schwartz, “‘The Voyage of the Vassals’: Royal Power, Noble Obligations, and Merchant Capital Before the Portuguese Restoration of Independence, 1624–1640”, The American Historical Review 96.3 (1991): 735–62. For a comparison between Ruiters and Figueiredo, see S.P. L’Honoré Naber, “Inleiding”, in Toortse der Zee-vaart, ed. Idem (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913), pp. xix-xxii. On Dutch Brazil, see also, still, Charles Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). On Ruiters’ imprisonment in Brazil, the only two available accounts are biased, written by Ruiters himself and by his wife Catharina Willems: Ruiters, Toortse, preface (unpaginated); and “Verzoekschrift van de vrouw van den schipper Dirck de Ruyter”, Bijdragen van het Historisch Genootschap te Utrecht 2 (1879), pp. 112–13.

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Figure 3.1 Dierick Ruiters, Toortse der Zee-vaert. Vlissingen, 1623, title-page special collections, university of amsterdam, otm o 60–815

same countries, which I have already skillfully designed”.16 Although Toortse der Zee-vaert was an important work in these early years, it lasted until 1648 – well after Ruiters’ death – before a second edition appeared from the workshop of Jacob Aertsz Colom in Amsterdam. Despite Colom’s shining reputation as a publisher of navigation manuals and maritime cartography, the second edition­ 16 Ruiters, Toortse, [∵3r]: “… sal daer deur veroorsaect werden, een tweeden Druck te laten uyt gaen van veele dinghen vermeerdert, ende met alle de platen der selver landen versien, die alreede veerdigh by my gheteeckent ligghen”.

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of the Toortse did not contain any maps either.17 As the Dutch lost Brazil to the Portuguese in 1654, and the West India Company’s empire began to disintegrate, the first Dutch pilot guide to the Atlantic world gradually lost its relevance. In 1662, Colom changed the date on the title-page but not the contents, a typical publisher’s ploy to make an outdated book look new, and thirty years later his heirs did the same thing again. Evidently Ruiters’ pilot guide had been surpassed by other similar works, and the Colom workshop had a hard time selling its remaining copies.18 Crucially, for our purposes, neither the 1662 nor the 1692 “edition” contained the maps Ruiters had promised to future readers in his original dedication.

Ruiters’ Maps

So what happened to Ruiters’ maps of the Dutch Atlantic world? The answer is that five of them have survived in the National Archives in The Hague, where they have been preserved among other maps of the Atlantic world, but in a different section of the archive than the papers of the West India Company where the rest of the story of Ruiters’ maritime fortunes can be found. This unfortunate separation, realized in the late 1860s by the archivist Pieter Arend Leupe, can be considered symptomatic for the enduring lack of cross-pollination between colonial history and cartography in Dutch scholarship.19 In what follows I will discuss Ruiters’ maps one by one, and explore their value as sources of intelligence for the West India Company. In doing so, I will demonstrate that some of Ruiters’ maps, despite being kept secret by the authorities, ultimately did reach a wider public interested in Dutch progress in the Western hemisphere, one of the most important political storylines of the Dutch Golden Age. Since publishers with an eye for commercial gains presented the maps 17 18

19

On Colom, see M. Donkersloot-Vrij, Repertorium van Nederlandse kaartmakers, 1500–1900 (Utrecht: s.n., 2003), pp. 42–43; Djoeke van Netten, Koopman in kennis: De uitgever Willem Jansz Blaeu in de geleerde wereld (1571–1638) (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2014), pp. 80–83. The only surviving copy of the 1692 edition (Bodleian Library, Oxford, 201 F 13) still shows traces of the 1662 imprint. I have not been able to trace a “clean” 1662 copy. The contents of 1662/1692 are identical to the second edition of 1648. I am grateful to Geert H. Janssen for taking photos for me. In print, Ruiters’ Toortse was surpassed by Colom’s own Vyerighe Colom (1632) for example, and subsequently also by Claes Hendricksz Gietermaker, ’t Vergulde Licht der Zeevaerdt (Amsterdam, 1660), which was reprinted no less than thirteen times between 1668 and 1733. The full name of the collection in the Nationaal Archief, The Hague, is Verzameling Buitenlandse Kaarten Leupe, named after its creator, and usually referred to as “Kaarten Leupe, 4.vel”. I will refer to the collection below only by its shorthand title 4.vel.

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as their own, however, the name of Ruiters has never been connected to what subsequently became canonical images of the short-lived Dutch contribution to Atlantic history. The five maps Ruiters made in the 1620s, all pen drawings, represent five different geographical areas. Three in Brazil: Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara Bay, Salvador de Bahia and the Bay of All Saints, and the coastline of Pernambuco around Olinda and Recife; and two elsewhere: Punta de Araya, in Venezuela, and Valdivia and Corral Bay, in Chile.20 Only the last one, an outlier in several respects, is dated, 1627. All of them are signed (usually “Dierick Ruyters fecit” or an abbreviated version using just the monogram “D.R.”). They are virtually the same size: the three Brazilian maps and the map of Punta de Araya vary in height from 29 to 31 centimeters, and in width from 42 to 44 centimeters, suggesting that they may have indeed been meant for publication. The map of Valdivia, almost certainly made later, is slightly bigger, measuring 31 by 47 centimeters. The three Brazilian maps and the Punta de Araya map contain an elaborate handwritten legend, indicating the most important buildings and (mainly) defensive structures in the respective areas. The text on the Valdivia map is written on the map, and in the margins. The sometimes rather peculiar (or even incorrect) way of spelling geographical names, such as “Rio Popitangi” for a small stream on the map of Pernambuco, corresponds to toponyms used in Toortse der Zee-Vaert.21 The same is true for the idiosyncratic way (in Dutch) of referring to the Portuguese as “Portugijsen” (with a “ij” instead of an “e”) both on the maps and throughout the Toortse, further strengthening the connection between the manuscript maps and Ruiters’ pilot guide. Several other maps in the same “Leupe collection” (4.vel) of the National Archives in The Hague at first glance look similar to this set of five, but they miss the particulars discussed above, have different (relative) measurements, and do not contain Ruiters’ signature. They should therefore not be attributed to the Zeeland pioneer.22 The three Brazilian maps in particular have been noted by scholars of Dutch expansion since the nineteenth century, although they have never been widely known. In 1846, the Zeeland historian Edelhard Swalue reported finding several maps by “a certain De Ruyters” as part of his efforts to write a patriotic 20 21 22

Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 4.vel 724 (Rio de Janeiro, 30 x 43 cm), 4.vel 717 (Salvador, 29 x 42 cm), 4.vel 710 (Pernambuco, 30 x 43.5 cm), 4.vel 580 (Punta de Araya, 30 x 44 cm), 4.vel 736 (Valdivia, 31 x 47 cm). The name Popitangi or Popitango was subsequently used by many seventeenth-century Dutch authors on the Atlantic world, including Johannes de Laet and Arnoldus Montanus. Possible candidates that have to be rejected as Ruiters maps after closer examination include 4.vel 698 and 699 (Paraíba), 4.vel 701, 704, and 705 (Itamaraca), and 4.vel 718 (Bay of All Saints).

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regional history of the Zeeland contribution to the war against Spain. Two years later, an anonymous historian referred to Swalue’s discovery, and explicitly mentioned a manuscript map of Tobago, which he connected to the author of Toortse der Zee-vaert, and which I have not been able to trace.23 Then, in April 1855, the prominent Dutch map collector Johannes Tiberius Bodel Nijenhuis had copies made of the three Brazilian maps by his draughtsman Jacob Cornelis Wendel, which can still be consulted in Leiden’s University Library.24 In the edition of Ruiters’ Toortse which was made by Samuel Pierre L’Honoré Naber and printed by the Linschoten-Vereeniging (“Linschoten-Society”) in 1913, however, no mention was made of any of the five maps. One of them resurfaced only in a small book written by the Brazilian ambassador to The Hague, Joaquim de Sousa-Leão, in 1957.25 Even Kees Zandvliet, in his exhaustive and exemplary study Mapping for Money (1998), and Günter Schilder, in his monumental nine-volume Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica, made hardly any reference to Dierick Ruiters’ efforts as a cartographer – although they each did include one of Ruiters’ manuscript maps.26 It was only in the recent Comprehensive Atlas of the Dutch West India Company, compiled by Henk den Heijer and Bea Brommer in 2011, that the five maps were included in a single publication for the first time, albeit separately, in different geographical chapters.27 23

Edelhard Swalue, De daden der Zeeuwen gedurende den Opstand tegen Spanje (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1846), p. 286, n. 2; Kroniek van het Historisch Gezelschap te Utrecht iv (1848), pp. 149–50. The map of Tobago was supposedly dated 1628. 24 Leiden University Library, Special Collections, collbn 002-12-061 (Rio de Janeiro), collbn 002-12-059 (Salvador), collbn 002-12-055 (Pernambuco). See Martijn Storms, “‘Dit waarlijk vorstelijk legaat’: Johannes Tiberius Bodel Nijenhuis en zijn kaartenverzameling”, in: Idem, ed., De verzamelingen van Bodel Nijenhuis. Kaarten, portretten en boeken van een pionier in de historische cartografie (Leiden: Universiteitsbibliotheek, 2008), pp. 17–19. 25 Dierick Ruiters, Toortse der Zee-vaert, ed. S.P. L’Honoré Naber (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1913); Joaquim de Sousa-Leão, Salvador da Bahia de todos os Santos: iconografia seiscentista desconhecida (The Hague, s.n., 1957). 26 Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, p. 173, includes the sketch of Valdivia. Günter Schilder, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica (9 vols.; Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 1986– 2013). Ruiters’ map of Salvador is included in volume ix: Hessel Gerritsz (1580/81–1632): Master Engraver and Map Maker, Who “Ruled” the Seas (Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 2013), p. 478 includes the drawing of Salvador. See also Kees Zandvliet, “Johan Maurits and the Cartography of Dutch Brazil”, in: Ernst van den Boogaart et al., eds., Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil, 1604–1679 (The Hague: Johan Maurits Stiching, 1979), pp. 511–12. Probably based on Zandvliet’s references, Donkersloot-Vrij, in her 2003 Repertorium van Nederlandse kaartmakers, included Ruiters as a draughtsman/ mapmaker of Valdivia (p. 171). 27 Brommer and Den Heijer, Comprehensive Atlas, i, p. 136 (Punta de Araya), p. 233 (Pernambuco), p. 288 (Salvador de Bahia), p. 306 (Rio de Janeiro), and p. 325 (Valdivia).

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Just how Dierick Ruiters was able to take notes or make sketches of the surroundings in Habsburg Brazil after having been captured is unclear. The maps offer preciously few details regarding Ruiters’ methods, even when they are compared to the relevant textual sections of Toortse der Zee-vaert. What is evident is that Ruiters was by no means the most gifted cartographer of his generation. The value of the manuscript maps lies almost exclusively in the military intelligence they represent. Fortresses, city walls, and a detailed patchwork of shallow and navigable waters characterize the drawings. The maps of Rio de Janeiro (Figure 3.2) and Salvador de Bahia (Figure 3.3) are the most detailed of the series of five, suggesting that Ruiters designed these two based on his own observations. This corresponds to written information on Ruiters’ detainment in Brazil, as well as to the text of the Toortse, which provides confirmation of his presence in Rio and Salvador, but not in Pernambuco – although evidence on this point remains laconic.28 On the maps of Rio and Salvador, intriguingly,

Figure 3.2 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara Bay, Brazil, c. 1620 nationaal archief, the hague, 4.vel.724

28 In Toortse, Ruiters writes that he has personally counted 1,200 houses in Salvador (“… daer staen ontrent de twaelf hondert huysen (soo als ickse ten naesten by) hebbe connen tellen”; p. 58) and that the streets of Rio were not paved in 1618 (“… de straten en waren in ’t jaer 1618. noch niet ghecalzijt”; pp. 82–83).

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Figure 3.3 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Salvador and All Saints’ Bay, Brazil, c. 1620 nationaal archief, the hague, 4.vel.717

Ruiters reserved a special mention for the local prison (‘t gevangen huijs), where he may have spent considerable time.

Map of Salvador

Ruiters’ pen drawing of Salvador is arguably the single most important map in the early history of the West India Company, available precisely at the time when the directors of the newly founded joint-stock enterprise were making plans for their first campaign in the Atlantic world, the so-called Groot Desseyn (“Grand Design”).29 Drawn from a northwesterly viewpoint, Ruiters’ map of Salvador visualizes the city on the horizon, overlooking the Bay of All Saints. At the top of the sheet, Ruiters explains that the perspective is skewed because in reality the ships in the distance are smaller than depicted here, but this, he claims, is done for additional emphasis on “demonstration rather than artfulness (perspective)”.30 The legend, consisting of twenty-five letters, explains the 29 Klooster, The Dutch Moment, pp. 39–43. 30 NA, The Hague, 4.vel 717: “Dat alles naer proportie ware, soo mosten, naer advenant, tegen ’t hooghe gheberghte, die schepen op de reede liggende, cleynder zijn, als die

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location of several islands in the bay – some of which are explicitly labelled as “sugar-rich” – and the main buildings in Salvador, with a strong emphasis on buildings of the various religious orders and fortifications. The map is a little ambiguous with regard to the presence of city walls. In Toortse der Zee-vaert, Ruiters notes that the town is unwalled,31 and the map does not depict any defensive walls either, but letter X indicates the eastern gate of the city, suggesting at least some sort of enclosing barrier. Most importantly, and in contrast to what the Dutch invasion force would experience in May 1624, the map does not depict the Forte do Mar, the defensive structure at the heart of the bay which was probably constructed around 1620.32 On the eve of the first Dutch fleet’s departure to Brazil, the Heeren xix (Gentlemen Nineteen), the directors of the West India Company, placed considerable trust in Ruiters’ information. In September 1623, they asked the Zeeland skipper to assess the potential of a daring plan, launched by Admiral Boudewijn Hendricksz, to attack Spain in the Caribbean. This projected campaign would subsequently be executed in 1625, as a follow-up to the first “Grand Design”. In November 1623, Ruiters attended a directors’ meeting and offered both his services and his book, Toortse der Zee-Vaert, to the bewindhebbers. The directors decided to return the six copies of the pilot guide Ruiters had given them, and ordered that any director wishing to read it should buy it for himself.33 But they did regard the Toortse as a “bequaem” (useful) book, and hired Ruiters to take part in the expedition to Salvador de Bahia which departed in December 1623, to serve as a local guide for Dutch troops intent on taking the city. At no point during the exchanges between Ruiters and the West India Company, at least according to the limited sources which survive, the maps of Salvador and the other two Brazilian locations were mentioned. When news of the successful invasion of Salvador reached Holland in the final week of August 1624, however, the West India Company directors d­ ecided berxkens: maer den autheur siende meer op de demonstratie, als op de const (perspectyve) heeft het selve daeromme aldus ghemaeckt”. 31 Ruiters, Toortse, p. 58: “De Stadt light open sonder Poorten, die yets souden connen hinderen om daer in te comen”. 32 Charles R. Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602–1686 (­London: Athlone Press, 1952), p. 48; Francis A. Dutra, “Matias de Albuquerque and the Defense of Northeastern Brazil, 1620–1626”, Studia: Revista Semestral 36 (1973): 117–66. 33 Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1971), p. 30. Prior to the West India Company, in June 1623, the States-General, the federal government of the United Provinces, had also decided against accepting Ruiters’ dedication, although here he did receive 60 guilders for his troubles. See Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal, nieuwe reeks vi, ed. J.G. Smit (The Hague: Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, 1989), nr. 1123.

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to change their policy of secrecy for one of openness. They ordered the Amsterdam print publisher Claes Jansz Visscher to design a news map of the successful campaign, and provided him with Ruiters’ map of the Bay of All Saints to create a credible design (Figure 3.4). Visscher’s news map appeared a mere five days after news of the successful invasion had reached Amsterdam. Pressed for time, the print publisher must have benefited from having Ruiters’ drawing (or a copy) at hand.34 The perspective and the most relevant details of the coastline are very similar at first glance. Visscher dramatized Ruiters’ representation by making the entry to the Bay of All Saints look more narrow (and hence more perilous for the invasion force) and suitable for defensive crossfire, whereas the two main Portuguese fortifications in reality were too

Figure 3.4 Claes Jansz. Visscher, Description of the invasion of Salvador and All Saints’ Bay in Brazil. Amsterdam, 1624 rijksmuseum, amsterdam, rp-p-ob 79.371

34

Michiel van Groesen, “A Week to Remember: Dutch Publishers and the Competition for News from Brazil, 26 August – 2 September 1624”, Quaerendo 40.1 (2010): 26–49.

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far apart to hurt enemy vessels simultaneously.35 Dierick Ruiters’ name was not mentioned on Visscher’s corporate propaganda, but that his sketch served as the spin-doctor’s model is evident: in the legend of Visscher’s news map, most references allude to the different stages of the invasion. But seven of the 22 numbers refer to landmarks already mentioned by Ruiters, including the prison which played no role whatsoever in the narrative of the attack. The layout of the footpaths from the lower city to the upper city, moreover, is nearly identical in the two maps. For the cranes the colonists employed to tow commodities uphill from the anchorage point at the bottom of the steep cliff to Salvador, Ruiters in his legend used the word gindassers (derived from guindaste = crane, Port.), which Visscher subsequently turned into wind-asen, a different yet infinitely more intelligible word for the Dutch audience. Visscher’s news map was copied time and again in the Dutch Republic and in Europe,36 but the connection with the original source was never made.

Map of Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara Bay

In April 1625, the West India Company surrendered Salvador to a combined Luso-Spanish armada.37 The defeat put a temporary check on Dutch territorial ambitions in the Atlantic world. Dierick Ruiters’ other detailed manuscript map, of Rio de Janeiro and Guanabara Bay, would never be used in the same way as his map of Salvador. The sketch, which combined an orthodox perspective from above with a navigator’s view of the city, must have retained its value as a source of information for at least a number of years.38 But a Dutch attack on Rio never materialized, and as a result Ruiters’ map gradually lost its geopolitical urgency in the minds of the West India Company directors. In the second half of the 1620s, the Dutch focused on mapping the Atlantic world in preparation for a second wave of attacks that was certain to follow. Manuscript maps surviving in the (decimated) archives of the West India Company are testimony to the increasing interest in cartographic knowledge of the Atlantic world. Little was required in terms of codification of cartographic information. The directors even called on admirals and ships’ captains sailing to 35 36 37 38

Van Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic, pp. 52–53. Ibid., pp. 65–70. Schwartz, “The Voyage of the Vassals”. A second map of Guanabara Bay made by Emanuel Garcia in preparation for the campaign of 1630 was almost certainly derived from Ruiters’ sketch: Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 4.vel 723. See Brommer and Den Heijer, Comprehensive Atlas, i, p. 305.

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the Caribbean to verify if representations made in Amsterdam by the likes of Claes Jansz Visscher were geographically correct.39

Map of Punta de Araya

Dierick Ruiters in late 1625 probably joined Hendrik Jacobsz Lucifer’s voyage to the Amazon region, an expedition that served to connect with a group of Zeeland pioneers on the Wild Coast, and ultimately merged with Admiral Boudewijn Hendricksz’ Caribbean fleet about which Ruiters had been consulted two years before. Ruiters’ map of Punta de Araya made on this voyage must be placed in the context of the collective (albeit somewhat haphazard) Dutch effort to map as many strategic locations in the Atlantic world as possible.40 Punta de Araya, known for its large salt pans, had been a regular destination for Dutch ships since Spanish embargoes in the late 1590s had deprived them of access to salt from Setubal.41 But already before the Truce, Spanish galleons had forcefully driven the Dutch away from Punta de Araya, and strengthened their positions. In later years, the West India Company would occasionally visit and “spy on” the salt pans and the adjacent Spanish fortress to assess its state of affairs.42 In Toortse der Zee-vaert, Ruiters dealt with Punta de Araya only very ­succinctly – mentioning trade along the Venezuelan coast as part of a quick survey of Spanish interests in the Caribbean, but he emphasized only the trade in pearls and made no mention of Spanish defensive structures, presumably because he had not visited Punta de Araya before writing the Toortse.43 Ruiters’ subsequent manuscript map, which must be dated early 1626, is strikingly similar to the three Brazilian maps he designed several years before (Figure 3.5). The textual explanation this time is in the bottom-right corner, but clearly resembles the legends of the Bahia and Rio maps. The perspective is unorthodox, 39 Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, p. 238. 40 The consecutive nature of the references in Nationaal Archief, owic 20, fol. 18r, suggests that Ruiters returned to Middelburg with Lucifer’s fleet on 10 August 1626. On Lucifer’s expedition with three ships to the Amazon delta, and back via Hispaniola, see Johannes de Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, i, ed. S.P. L’Honoré Naber (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1931), pp. 123–30. On Hendricksz’ lengthy expedition, see Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, pp. 158–67. 41 Catia Antunes, “The Commercial Relationship between Amsterdam and the Portuguese Salt-Exporting Ports: Aveiro and Setubal, 1580–1715”, Journal of Early Modern History 12.1 (2008): 31–35. 42 De Laet, Iaerlyck Verhael, i, p. 119: “Het Schip Leyden en ’t Jacht S. Domingo zijn dicht langhs de wal ghezeylt, om ’t Casteel ligghende nevens de groote Soutpanne van Punta d’Araya te besichtighen ende te bespieden of daer yets te doen was”. See Klooster, The Dutch Moment, pp. 59–60. 43 Ruiters, Toortse, p. 158.

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Figure 3.5 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Punta de Araya, Venezuela, c. 1625? nationaal archief, the hague, 4.vel.580

with the coastline of Cumana, close to Punta de Araya, added on the same sheet with a different scale on the right-hand side, with north on the left instead of at the bottom. Some of the geographical features are very inaccurate, but once again accuracy was not the main objective of the drawing. Just like his three Brazilian maps, Ruiters’ map of Punta de Araya served a clear military purpose, as it reserved special mentions for the Spanish fortresses on the mainland, protecting the salt pan, and on Isla Margarita, a small and vulnerable island just off the Venezuelan coast. On Margarita, Ruiters depicted a watchtower that was destroyed by an attack by Boudewijn Hendricksz in February 1626.44 Ruiters’ map, by all means, once again provided crucial intelligence in the build-up to the attack on Habsburg positions.

Map of Valdivia and Corral Bay in Chile

Ruiters’ manuscript map of Valdivia and Corral Bay in Chile cannot be connected to any of the Zeeland skipper’s voyages, and almost certainly was not made as a result of personal observation (Figure 3.6). It is dated 1627, a year in 44

Brommer and Den Heijer, Comprehensive Atlas, i, p. 136.

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Figure 3.6 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Valdivia and Corral Bay, Chile, 1627 nationaal archief, the hague, 4.vel.736

which there were no Dutch expeditions to the Pacific coast of South America through the Strait of Magellan or Strait le Maire, or around Cape Horn. The disastrous “Nassau Fleet”, which had rounded Cape Horn in 1623 and sailed along the Chilean coast, returned to the United Provinces, depleted, in the summer of 1626, without having had a clear view of Corral Bay. Expeditions to the ­Pacific in the late 1620s were either postponed or cancelled, and the first (and only) expedition to Chile from Dutch Brazil did not take place until 1643.45 The only way of obtaining a map of Valdivia for Ruiters would have been the 45

Benjamin Schmidt, “Exotic Allies: The Dutch-Chilean Encounter and the (Failed) Conquest of America”, Renaissance Quarterly 52.2 (1999): 440–73. On the Nassau Fleet, see Op jacht naar Spaans zilver: Het scheepsjournaal van Willem van Brederode, kapitein der mariniers in de Nassause vloot (1623–1626), ed. Anne Doedens and Henk Looijesteijn (Hilversum: Verloren, 2008), p. 96. On the equally fateful voyage by Hendrick Brouwer and Elias Herckmans in the early 1640s, see Goud en Indianen: Het journaal van Hendrick Brouwers expeditie naar Chili in 1643, ed. Henk den Heijer (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2015).

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interception of a Spanish vessel in the Atlantic with first-hand oral or visual sources of this sensitive geographic information. The result, even though its maker labelled it a “truthful image” (ware afbeelding), lacked the strategic value of the other maps Ruiters had designed. Moreover, the geography of Valdivia and its immediate surroundings deviated significantly from a map made by a Dutch eyewitness sixteen years later.46

Map of Pernambuco

In the late 1620s the West India Company decided to make a more systematic effort to map the Atlantic world. The Amsterdam cartographer Hessel Gerritsz compiled all the available information and spoke with dozens of sailors and merchants with experience in mapping ports and coastlines.47 Two pages of his first and most extensive Atlantic roteiro were completely devoted to oral information obtained from Dierick Ruiters.48 The information Gerritsz’ roteiros contained must have served as a guideline for the second major Dutch attack on Brazil in February 1630. In the aftermath of this invasion, in which Ruiters once again participated, one West India Company official estimated that cartographic knowledge of the Atlantic world in the United Provinces had now superseded that in Spain and Portugal.49 In subsequent years, the Company would embrace a policy of greater openness, enabling Claes Jansz Visscher to publicize the progress made in Brazil using cartographic information from Gerritsz.50 The news map genre was very popular, and other publishers attempted to benefit from its popularity too. In 1630, Ruiters’ manuscript map of Pernambuco which the Company directors had succeeded in keeping secret in the 1620s, would reach a wider audience after all. Ruiters’ sketch of Pernambuco was by no means as accurate as his drawings of Rio and Salvador, and also lacked the precision of Hessel Gerritsz’ designs (Figure 3.7). It is not inconceivable that it 46 47

Brommer and Den Heijer, Comprehensive Atlas, i, p. 306. Kees Zandvliet, “Mapping the Dutch World Overseas in the Seventeenth Century”, in: David Woodward, ed., The History of Cartography, vol. 3 Part 2: Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 1450. On Gerritsz, see: Schilder, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica ix. 48 “Anteyckening uyte de mont van Dirick”, in Nationaal Archief, 4.vel x, fols. 141–43. See for a discussion of this roteiro, and others by Gerritsz: Schilder, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica ix, pp. 530–42. 49 Zandvliet, Mapping for Money, p. 169. 50 Van Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic, pp. 80–89.

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Figure 3.7 Dierick Ruiters, manuscript map of Pernambuco, with Olinda and Recife, c. 1620 nationaal archief, the hague, 4.vel.710

was based on a Portuguese map, and that Ruiters never witnessed the settlements. The legend even mixed up the toponymic references to Olinda, Recife, and Pernambuco. What stood out, apart from the elevated positioning of the town of Olinda and – from a Dutch perspective – the ideal maritime location of Recife, surrounded by water practically on all four sides, were the two fortresses Ruiters assigned the letters T. and V. in the heart of the composition. The prominence of these two bulwarks and the straightness of the reef on which one of the fortresses was built, both features which Ruiters perhaps only witnessed while passing by on his way to or from Bahia or Rio, are unique in Dutch cartographic representations of Pernambuco in the seventeenth century. As news of the Dutch victory in Pernambuco broke in Holland, an anonymous print publisher issued a news map of the conquest of Olinda and Recife which intended to rival the one Visscher produced in Amsterdam (­Figure  3.8).51 Although the design as a whole differed greatly from Ruiters’ sketch, the prominence and the positioning of the two bulwarks, and the idiosyncratic lay-out of the reef protecting the entrance to the port of Recife, as well as the scattering of half-sunken ships in the bay in front of the town, are 51

Ruiters returned from Pernambuco to the United Provinces only in 1631, and therefore cannot himself have provided the sketch to an eager publisher.

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Figure 3.8 Anon., Representation of the conquest of Olinda, in Pernambuco, s.l., [1630] rijksmuseum, amsterdam, rp-p-1910–2190

strongly reminiscent of Ruiters’ drawing of several years before which was still kept in the possession of the West India Company. The same is true for several topographical mistakes which are included in both Ruiters’ manuscript map and the anonymously published news map. The bended coast line between Recife and Olinda, the slight broadening of the reef where the town of Recife was located, the rather abrupt hilltop on which Olinda was built, and the receding landmass behind Olinda – incorrectly suggesting that the town was located on a peninsula – can all be found both in Ruiters’ sketch and in the news map, suggesting that the print publisher had seen the Zeeland skipper’s drawing, or a derived map. The news map’s title emphasized that the account of the invasion had come from someone aboard the vessel De Braeck, but the map almost certainly did not stem from an eyewitness account, because it was ­mirrored – implying that Olinda was to the south of Recife. This mistake was not uncommon for print publishers who produced a map based on a drawing in a hurry, but will have damaged the news map’s reputation among members of the audience who were better informed. It did retain its appeal in the book market, however, because it was subsequently copied for a crude German news map of the same campaign (Figure 3.9), hence indirectly extending the scope of Ruiters’ design beyond the United Provinces. Once again, in neither publication, Ruiters was credited as the source.

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Figure 3.9 Anon., Representation of the conquest of Olinda, in Pernambuco, s.l., [1630] library of congress, washington, dc, lot 14117, no. 27



Ruiters, a Re-evaluation

The conclusion to the story of Ruiters’ maps brings us to the broader question which the Dutch West India Company faced in the opening years of its existence: What to make public and what to keep secret? In his canonical essay “Silences and Secrecy”, Brian Harley in 1988 emphasized the special position of the Dutch Republic in early modern Europe when it came to cartographic secrecy, as he connected an effervescent approach to publishing maps to the federation’s nascent bourgeois republicanism.52 But almost in the same breath, Harley then highlighted the restrictive cartographic practices of the joint-stock companies in the United Provinces, emphasizing the prudent policy of the voc. The West India Company in the 1620s and 1630s, however, was a different proposition, which was more politically motivated than its successful counterpart in Asia. Both the example of corporate secrecy set by the Dutch East India Company, and the encounter with the Iberian enemy in the Atlantic world which routinely limited all access to its cartographic material, clashed with the West India Company’s eagerness to publicize its maps, and hence a­ ppropriate .

52

J.B. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe”, Imago Mundi 40 (1988), p. 60.

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in the public domain the provinces in the Americas which it aspired to control. After the Company had established an initial territorial presence in Brazil, the directors considered openness more rewarding than secrecy. The production, dissemination (or lack thereof), and reception of Ruiters’ hand-drawn maps indicates not only just how complicated the issue of secrecy or openness was for the West India Company as its Dutch Atlantic empire emerged, but also how reputations in cartography and colonial history alike in later centuries have depended on the availability of maps for a wider audience, certainly in the culture of openness that characterized the Dutch Golden Age. The names of Claes Jansz Visscher, Hessel Gerritsz, and Johan Blaeu – key players in the cartographic representation of the incipient Dutch Atlantic world – are well-known. Still, it lasted until 1675 before Arend Roggeveen would finally provide the cartographic overview of the Atlantic world which Ruiters may have already had in mind. It is only because of the refusal of the West India Company to (allow him to) publish his manuscript maps that Dierick Ruiters has not acquired canonical status as one of the cartographic founders of the Dutch Atlantic world. By the time two of his manuscript maps did inspire printed maps, their urgency as sources of cartographic intelligence had already diminished. Most significantly, his name as the draughtsman of the underlying manuscript maps was never mentioned. The division of the archival remnants of Dutch Brazil along material and disciplinary lines further added to the arbitrary amnesia that diminished Ruiters’ reputation as one of the true pathfinders of the Dutch Atlantic world. In the world of print, intriguingly, Ruiters’ reputation suffered the same fate. Sections of his Toortse der Zee-vaert were surpassed already in 1625 by the first of several authoritative publications by West India Company director (and chronicler) Johannes de Laet’s Nieuwe Wereldt ofte beschrijvinghe van West-Indien (“New World or Description of the West Indies”). Unlike Visscher, for his news map, De Laet did cite Ruiters as one of his prime sources.53 But here too, the difference in scope between De Laet’s and Ruiters’ publications conditioned the latter’s legacy. The “open” culture of the Dutch Golden Age, and more specifically the Dutch Atlantic enterprise which had a very public dimension, cultivated the idea that what really mattered about the geographic knowledge of the West India Company invariably appeared in print. Dierick Ruiters’ manuscript maps provide a crucial correction to that picture, and may ultimately help to put a key figure in the story of Dutch Atlantic expansion back into the historiographies of the West India Company and early Dutch cartography. 53 Schilder, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica ix, p. 477.

Chapter 4

A Brazilian Jesuit in Amsterdam: Anti-Spanish and Anti-Catholic Rhetoric in the Early Dutch Golden Age On 8 May 1624, from their quarters in Salvador de Bahia, the members of the Jesuit community saw a large fleet at the entrance of the Bay of All Saints. That these were enemy vessels intent on attacking the capital of Luso-Spanish Brazil was immediately obvious. Two days earlier, one Jesuit had received an ominous warning that the city was about to come under attack. During prayer in the Order’s church, Christ, bearing a sword, had appeared in a revelation to the priest, pointing the weapon straight at the heart of the city. The following day, Christ appeared to the same man again, this time carrying three spears which were aimed at Salvador’s main religious buildings. Although the Jesuits did not know precisely what to make of the revelations, the subsequent appearance of twenty-six Dutch ships on the horizon removed any lingering uncertainties. The colonists were ill-prepared to resist the attackers. Within 48 hours, the fleet of the Dutch West India Company under the command of Admiral Jacob Willekens and Vice-Admiral Piet Heyn had completed the conquest of Salvador. Despite the swiftness of the operation, almost the entire colonial population, including the occupants of the Jesuit college, escaped before the Dutch soldiers entered the city gates. Inspired by bishop Marcos Teixeira, they began to prepare for months of guerrilla warfare from the Recôncavo. Some of the highest-ranking officials in Salvador, however, chose to remain in the city. The Dutch took Governor-general Diogo Mendonça de Furtado, his son Antonio, and three of his closest confidants in custody. Two and a half weeks later, nine Jesuits completed the group of fourteen distinguished captives. The fathers, including the provincial Domingo Coelho, had been making an inspection in Rio de Janeiro and Espirito Santo at the time of the attack. Unaware of the recent political turnaround, they were taken by surprise on their return to Bahia.1

1 Serafim Leite, História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil (10 vols.; Lisbon: Livraria Portugalia, 1938–1950), v, pp. 28–33; On the Dutch conquest of Salvador, see: Charles R. Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola 1602–1686 (London: Athlone Press, 1952), pp. 46–56, Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: the Society of Jesus in Portugal, its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 206–8.

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In the United Provinces, news of the Dutch conquest prompted both spontaneous and well-rehearsed jubilations. The West India Company’s first attack in America had been successful, and the Dutch estimated that Habsburg Spain would now be forced to divide its military attentions between two fronts, one in Europe and the other in the New World. When Dutch success in Brazil was ultimately confirmed to the general public at home in the final days of ­August, the States-General proclaimed a day of public prayer and a day of public celebrations. Excitement over the conquest was further enhanced when the Dutch learned that their forces were to bring home some illustrious prisoners. In ­October 1624, the group of fourteen arrived in Holland. Two leading opinion makers in Amsterdam, the print publisher Claes Jansz Visscher and the chronicler Nicolaes van Wassenaer, provided the Dutch audience with information on the captives. Visscher designed a so-called news map, a publication which in both text and image commented on their arrival in Holland, while Van Wassenaer, in his bi-annual war chronicle Historisch Verhael, concentrated on developments during their captivity which lasted until the autumn of 1626. Both publications focused their attention on Domingo Coelho S.J. (1563–1639), an experienced man who had left his native Portugal for Brazil in 1587, and had risen through the ranks of the Society during more than thirtyfive years of service in the colony.2 He was imprisoned in Amsterdam along with four other fathers: João de Oliva, Manuel Tenreiro, Manuel Martins, and António Rodrigues. The other four Jesuits, António de Matos, Gaspar Ferreira, Agostinho Coelho, and Agostinho Luiz, were held in Rotterdam.3 Based on the views of Visscher and Van Wassenaer, this article will discuss anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic rhetoric in the United Provinces by analysing their representations of the captured Jesuits from Brazil.

Anti-Jesuit Sentiments in the United Provinces

The Dutch Revolt had resulted in a decline of Catholicism in the United Provinces. The remaining adherence to Rome varied from town to town, with the size of congregations generally depending on the liberties local authorities 2 Leite, História, i, pp. 569, 579; viii, pp. 164–65. See also: Georg Schurhammer, Gesammelte Studien (Rome: Institutum Historicum, 1965), iv, pp. 389–90 with references to further sources. 3 The names and ages of the fathers are recorded on the news map of Claes Jansz Visscher discussed in detail below, and are confirmed in a handwritten note from Coelho, a brief written testimony signed in the presence of the Amsterdam notary Willem Cluyt on 14 November 1624: Nijmegen, Archivum Neerlandicum Societatis Iesu, OS 352, pp. 1–3.

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extended to priests. The number of Dutch Catholics appears to have reached its nadir around 1620, and the Society of Jesus had made little difference up to that point. In the surrounding territories, however, the influence of Jesuits had increased significantly. They had made important contributions to the revitalization of Catholicism in the Southern Netherlands, the North Rhine area, and Westphalia, and, more worryingly for the States-General, they had began to infiltrate the United Provinces to assist the Catholic part of the population.4 A few years before the Jesuits from Brazil were to arrive in Holland, one of these clandestine missionaries was arrested in Amsterdam. Lieven Wouters, who had been active in the city since 1610, had eluded the municipal authorities several times, but was finally captured in 1619.5 In April 1620, he was transferred to the Rasphuis, where the city’s petty thieves and other lowlife were put to the service of the common good grating imported brazilwood to extract dyes for the weaving industry. Notwithstanding the appeals of several European princes for Wouters’ release, the usually lenient Amsterdam magistrates remained uncompromising. It was to their great embarrassment, then, that Wouters and two liberal members of the Reformed Church (‘Remonstrants’) eventually escaped from the Rasphuis in 1621, with the assistance of sympathizers from inside the city. Anti-Jesuit rhetoric flourished during the Dutch Golden Age, particularly at times of anxiety. A central feature of the Catholic menace in the eyes of many Protestants, Jesuits were broadly defined as a secretive and deceptive threat to the state and the Reformed Church.6 After the expiration of the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–1621), anti-Jesuit sentiments increased when the Habsburgs – ­already victorious in Bohemia and the Rhine Palatinate – stepped up their military efforts on the southern border of the United Provinces. Spanish troops 4 Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 380–81, 414–19. See also: Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins. Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 5 Herman J. Allard, “Hoe een Jezuïet en twee predikanten uit het Amsterdamsche tuchthuis ontsnapten met den aankleve van dien (a.d. 1621)”, Jaarboekje van Alberdingk Thijm 49 (1899): 86–131. 6 Relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to Dutch anti-Jesuit rhetoric in early modern Europe. For a broader perspective, see: Sabina Pavone, “Between History and Myth. The Monita secreta Societatis Jesu”, in: John W. O’Malley et al., eds., The Jesuits ii. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 50–65; Peter Burke, “The Black Legend of the Jesuits: An Essay in the History of Social Stereotypes”, in: Simon Ditchfield, ed., Christianity and Community in the West. Essays for John Bossy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 165–82; Eric Nelson, “The Jesuit Legend. Superstition and Myth-Making”, in: Helen Parish and William G. Napby, eds., Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 94–115, esp. pp. 94–95. Nelson goes on to demonstrate the cross-confessional development of the polemic.

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c­ aptured the town of Steenbergen in 1622, and laid siege to Bergen op Zoom. The panic of the population was reflected in rumours of treason. The Amsterdam minister Rudolphus Petri recorded in July that burghers of his city had managed to uncover a Spanish conspiracy just in time. Jesuits from Antwerp, he claimed, had intended to set fire to the heart of Dutch mercantile activity by throwing fireballs over the city walls from all sides, which would contaminate the air and poison the inhabitants during their attempts to rescue their possessions. In order to add further credibility to his story, Petri claimed that a certain Balthasar Paul, a Jesuit who was almost certainly the product of the minister’s own imagination, promptly confessed and was executed.7 In August, when the situation looked even bleaker for Protestants, news arrived of the canonizations of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier. The exuberant celebrations in Antwerp suggested that a Catholic triumph in the Low Countries was inescapable.8 In this climate, the arrival of the Jesuits from Brazil represented a chance for the Amsterdam regents to make a strong stance, as well as an opportunity to make amends for their failure to keep Lieven Wouters under lock and key. The prison regime for the provincial and his fellow Jesuits, as a result, was extremely strict.

The Jesuits from Brazil through the Eyes of Claes Jansz Visscher

Before Coelho and the four other Amsterdam prisoners were brought to their cells, the West India Company seized the moment to inform the wider public of their arrival in the United Provinces. For this purpose they employed the Amsterdam print publisher Claes Jansz Visscher. Visscher, at the instigation of the Company directors, had issued a so-called news map of the conquest of Salvador in August 1624 (see Figure 3.4).9 Such news maps or news prints, 7 Willem Th. M. Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. 299. No Jesuit of this name can be traced in: Prosopographia Jesuitica Belgica Antiqua: a biographical dictionary of the Jesuits in the Low Countries 1542–1773, ed. Willem Audenaert and Herman Morlion (4 vols.; Leuven: Filosofisch en Theologisch College S. J., 2000). 8 On the Antwerp celebrations: Karel Porteman, “Exotisme en spektakel. De Antwerpse jezuïetenfeesten van juli 1622”, in: Johan Verberckmoes, ed., Vreemden vertoond. Opstellen over exotisme en spektakelcultuur in de Spaanse Nederlanden en de Nieuwe Wereld (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), pp. 103–19. 9 Frederik Muller, De Nederlandsche geschiedenis in platen. Beredeneerde beschrijving van Nederlandsche historieplaten, zinneprenten en historische kaarten (3 vols., Amsterdam 1863–1870), nr. 1508; Atlas van Stolk, Katalogus der Historie-, Spot- en Zinneprenten Betrekkelijk de Geschiedenis van Nederland (10 vols., Amsterdam 1893–1935), nr. 1593.

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a common type of war bulletin in Northern Europe, usually combined an illustration of the geographical setting and the unfolding of the battle with a printed caption.10 This textual explanation, which in Visscher’s news maps could be as long and detailed as a pamphlet, explained the various episodes of the confrontation. Visscher, a resolute Calvinist, had previously distinguished himself with a famous news map on the execution of the Holland pensionary Johan van Oldenbarnevelt in The Hague in 1619, and this may explain his employment by the West India Company five years later.11 Upon the arrival of the fourteen prisoners from Brazil in Holland in October 1624, the print publisher was given the opportunity to draw a sketch of the captives from life, resulting in his second news map of the overseas triumph.12 Since more than six weeks had passed since the news of victory had reached the United Provinces, Visscher now embedded the success in Brazil into the wider narrative of the war against the Habsburgs. Visscher’s second news map envisaged the prisoners against the backdrop of Salvador (Figure 4.1).13 The cityscape, a detail from his earlier news map of the conquest, reminded his audience of the geographical origins of the captives. The two main protagonists, Mendonça de Furtado and Coelho, were positioned in the foreground of the image, as the two leading representatives of the colonial hierarchy in Brazil. Both were dressed for the occasion. Visscher’s representation of the governor-general epitomized the stereotypical Dutch image of a Portuguese nobleman, proudly wearing a sumptuous cloak, hat, and body armour; Coelho, also in full attire, was depicted wearing the rosary of Francis Xavier around his neck. The caption in italics explained that the fourteen­men had been captured in Salvador. Visscher then described how they had been brought to Holland, and where they were to be imprisoned. With a short list on the right, Visscher informed his customers of the identities of the fourteen men. 10

Christi M. Klinkert, Nassau in het nieuws: nieuwsprenten van Maurits van Nassaus militaire ondernemingen uit de periode 1590–1600 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2005). 11 On Visscher and his engravings, see: Nadine M. Orenstein, Huigen Leeflang, Ger Luijten, “Print Publishers in the Netherlands 1580–1620”, in: Ger Luijten et al., eds., Dawn of the Golden Age. Northern Netherlandish art, 1580–1620 (Zwolle: Waanders, 1993), pp. 167–200, here pp. 189–95; Maria Simon, Claes Jansz. Visscher (Freiburg: Albert-Ludwig Universität, 1958); Hollstein’s Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450–1700. vols. 38 & 39, Claes Jansz Visscher to Claes Claesz Visscher ii (Roosendaal: Koninklijke Van Poll, 1991). 12 Visscher presumably made detailed sketches only of the governor-general and the provincial. He certainly could not have seen the four Jesuits who arrived in Rotterdam. 13 Muller, De Nederlandsche geschiedenis, nr. 1509; Atlas van Stolk, nr. 1600.

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Figure 4.1 Claes Jansz. Visscher, Steyger-praetjen [‘Chat on the wharf’]. Amsterdam, 1624 het scheepvaartmuseum, a.0145 (250) 2

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At the bottom, Visscher added a fictional dialogue entitled Steyger-praetjen (‘Chat on the wharf’). This dialogue between a sailor who had taken part in the expedition to Brazil, and a patriotic ‘Batavian’ who had remained at home eager for good news, touched on all the right anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic themes for a Dutch public used to the rhetoric of war. The Steyger-praetjen opened with the capture and imprisonment of the fourteen men, establishing the connection with Visscher’s illustration. The sailor and the ‘Batavian’ gleefully recounted that the Jesuits were now fittingly locked up in a building – the Rasphuis – which before the Alteration of Amsterdam (1578) used to belong to the nuns of the Order of St. Clare. Some standard anti-Jesuit rhetoric followed: the sailor charged the Society with improving their position in court circles in Europe, and squandering the financial profits of these political connections in their houses. The ‘Batavian’ further reinforced this stereotype by stating that: in contrast, he who is not prepared to open his wallet for them, is denied entry to Heaven [by the Society].14 In order to make readers of the dialogue understand the impact of this accusation, the sailor feigned surprise. Paraphrasing the words of the ‘Batavian’, he re-iterated with disbelief how the Jesuits conspired to fill their coffers, and wondered why there were people who believed these ‘Papists’. Then the two characters changed the subject, and discussed the main reason for the Spanish presence in the Americas: greed. The dialogue proceeded by placing Habsburg rule in Brazil in the context of Spanish tyranny abroad, arguably the most important strand in the Dutch representation of the New World over the previous decades.15 Both men pledged their support to the States-General and the House of Orange, before promising to serve the cause of the United Provinces by: taking from [the Spaniard] that which has supported his dominance for so long, that is his great tyranny, and the annihilation of thousands through murder, hanging, burning, (just what our parents used to suffer in [the Netherlands]).16 14 15 16

“Daer tegen, die haer niet en wil sijn kas ontsluiten / Den Hemel sluyten sy, en houden hem daer buyten”. For the rhetoric of the Dutch-Amerindian alliance against Spain as part of the Dutch version of the Black Legend, see: Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad. The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). “Benemen hem het geen daer hy sijn heerschappy / Dus lang me heeft gestut, door groote tyranny / En duysenden vernielt met moorden, hangen, branden / (Gelijck ons Ouders is bekent in dese Landen)”.

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The analogy between the fate of the American Indians and the ordeals of the Dutch population in the early years of the Revolt against Spain was one of the mainstays of anti-Spanish propaganda in the United Provinces. As the ‘Batavian’ recited the list of familiar Spanish cruelties – cutting off hands, noses, and ears, hanging the innocent, and quartering children – the sailor concluded that the conquistadors must have enjoyed these brutalities as he could see no other explanation for them. He revelled at the thought of divinely inspired revenge by means of Dutch success in conquering Spanish-held towns like Salvador. At the same time, victories in the New World would relieve the position of the “naked, innocent Indians”, who had done nothing wrong apart from being so naive as to hand their riches to the Spanish conquistadors. In order to make the rhetoric of the Steyger-praetjen more recognizable and more powerful for a Dutch audience, the sailor and the ‘Batavian’ systematically labelled the enemy as Spanish. The fact that Salvador was administered by the Portuguese, albeit under the watchful gaze of Madrid, was ignored completely in the dialogue. The Portuguese descent of both the governor-general and the Jesuit provincial was also withheld from readers. The Dutch had been caught in two minds over the extent of Portugal’s dislike of its neighbours ever since Philip ii of Spain had united the Iberian crowns in 1580. Optimists argued that in colonies like Brazil, the Portuguese would rise in support if the Dutch launched an attack on what were now, technically speaking, Spanish interests. The overstatement of Portuguese grievances against Madrid played a part in persuading the directors of the West India Company to single out Brazil as the most vulnerable province of Habsburg America. Others, more realistically, predicted there would be few differences between the colonial agendas at both courts.17 A premeditated mix-up of Portuguese and Spanish identities in a colonial setting, like in Visscher’s Steygerpraetjen, was hardly new. An earlier and quite similar effort to manipulate ­information – also relating to a Dutch encounter with colonists in Brazil – can be found in the travel log of the privateer Joris van Spilbergen. Midway through the Twelve Years’ Truce, in January 1615, he and his crew had visited the colony as part of a successful circumnavigation of the world. His account, which had reported contacts with Portuguese villagers, had turned sour when hostilities 17

Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 14–16. The best-known exponent of the theory that some in Brazil ‘would rather see two Orange flags than one Inquisitor’ was Jan Andries Moerbeeck, who submitted his plans to the States-General in April 1623, and published the same the following year, after the capture of Bahia, as Redenen waeromme de West-Indische Compagnie dient te trachten het landt van Brasilia den Coninck van Spangien te ontmachtigen (Amsterdam, 1624).

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broke out around São Vicente, near the town of Santos. At first, the Portuguese had offered the sailors fresh fruit, the Dutch giving wine and cheese in return. The parties had then discussed an exchange of long-term hostages, but when the colonists delivered a letter to Van Spilbergen rejecting the deal, the mood quickly changed, as did the tone of the travel account. The letter of refusal, according to one Dutch witness, had been “written in the Spanish nature, stating that if we wanted something, we had to come and get it by means of the rapier”.18 Both the anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic tropes in early Dutch Americana and the subsequent identification of the population with the ‘innocent’ Indians had their roots in the early phase of the Dutch Revolt, which had become an integral part of public memory in the Northern Netherlands.19 Yet this rather specific version of the ‘Black Legend’ did not easily translate to other Protestant audiences in Northern Europe, where each region had its own distinct memories of religious turmoil. Hence it is questionable whether the Steyger-Praetjen and thus the second news map of 1624 as a whole ever achieved commercial success. Visscher’s first, informative news map of the conquest of Salvador was copied, translated, and reissued across early modern Europe in the final months of 1624, and the image of the fleet in the Bay of All Saints acquired canonical status in European iconography. In stark contrast, the opinionated news map of the fourteen captives yielded only a single German copy, and this copy did not contain the Steyger-praetjen (Figure 4.2).20 From an artistic perspective, Visscher’s news map of enemy prisoners was not very successful either. No other bulletins with a similar composition are known in the Dutch Golden Age, and Visscher himself – as one of the leading producers of news maps in the United Provinces until his death in 1652 – never again combined a topical illustration of military achievements with a fictional dialogue.

18

Oost-ende West-Indische spiegel der 2 leste navigatiën, ghedaen inden jaeren 1614, 15, 16, 17 ende 18. daer in vertoont woort, in wat gestalt Ioris van Speilbergen door de Magellanes de werelt rontom geseylt heeft, ed. Reinier Posthumus Meyjes (Amsterdam: J.H. de Bussey, 1952), p. 29: “Desen brief smaeckten gheheel nae den Spaenschen aert ende humeuren […] Dan soo wy yets begheerden, dat wy t’selve met het punt vant Rappier souden haelen” [italics mine]. 19 Schmidt, Innocence Abroad. 20 John Roger Paas, The German Political Broadsheet, 1600–1700 (9 vols.; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), iv, nr. P-1044; Michael Niemitz, Antijesuitische Bildpublizistik in der Frühen Neuzeit. Geschichte, Ikonographie, und Ikonologie (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2008), pp. 106–7, 355.

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Figure 4.2 Anon., German copy of ‘Chat on the wharf’, s.l., [1624] hamburg state and university library carl von ­o ssietzky, scrin. c/22, 109



The Jesuits from Brazil through the Eyes of Nicolaes van Wassenaer

The rhetorical opportunities of having a high-ranking Jesuit prisoner in the heart of Amsterdam, however, were not lost on other Dutch opinion makers. The weekly newspapers of Jan van Hilten and Broer Jansz, which reported on

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Dutch progress in Brazil with great regularity, announced the arrival of the fourteen prisoners in the third week of October.21 In Friesland, the Reformed minister and amateur lyricist Johannes Haselbekius devoted a poem of no less than 314 verses to the victory in Salvador. He alluded to the imprisonment of the Brazilian elite in Amsterdam, but mentioned only the Jesuits explicitly. Now that they had been shipped to Holland, Haselbekius remarked tonguein-cheek, it could finally be established whether or not they liked the Dutch cuisine.22 The most elaborate discussion of the Jesuit presence in Amsterdam, uniquely informative but at the same time highly opinionated like the Visscher news map, was produced by the Remonstrant chronicler Nicolaes Jansz van Wassenaer. Van Wassenaer, who was employed as a physician by the Admiralty of Amsterdam and had intimate knowledge of what had happened in Salvador from conversations with injured veterans, twice annually published a serial work titled Historisch Verhael. These quartos, issued between 1622 and 1635, summarized political, religious, and military developments both at home and abroad for Dutch readers who wanted to be informed about world affairs.23 In Volume vii, published in the spring of 1625, Van Wassenaer did little more than to reproduce information from Visscher and others about the conquest of Bahia (Figure 4.3). By the time Volume viii appeared six months later, the physician had managed to obtain reports about the interrogations of the governorgeneral and the Jesuit provincial in their Amsterdam quarters. Parts of these reports had a highly personal nature, and Van Wassenaer repeatedly implied that he had spoken to Coelho himself. As a result, readers

21

22

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Dutch Corantos 1618–1650: A Bibliography Illustrated With 334 Facsimile Reproductions of Corantos Printed 1618–1625, ed. Folke Dahl (The Hague: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1946), nrs. 38 & 133. On the race among Amsterdam newspapermen for information from America, see: Michiel van Groesen, “A Week to Remember. Dutch Publishers and the Competition for News from Brazil, 26 August – 2 September 1624”, Quaerendo 40.1 (2010): 26–49. Johannes Haselbekius, Triumph-Dicht, over de Gheluckighe Ver-overinghe van de Spaensche Silver-Vlote, Geschiet den 8. Septemb. Anno 1628. Item, over de rasse Ver-overinghe van de Bahia de Todos os Sanctos. Den 10. Maij, Anno 1624 (Leeuwarden, 1629), [C4v], vss. 279–82: “Ooc soo is de’ Stad-houdre van onse gewaep’nede Knechten / Met noch som’ge getimpd’e Iesuyte’ genomen in hechten: / En van daere gescheept nae ons’ Hollandische kuste, / Omme te sien, of hun ooc d’hijr-landische Spijse geluste”. Nicolaes van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael alder ghedenck-weerdichste geschiedenisse, die hier en daer in Europa, als in Duijtsch-Lant, Vranckrijck, Enghelant, Spaengien, Hungarijen, Polen, Sevenberghen, Wallachien, Moldavien, Turckijen en Neder-Lant, van den beginne des jaers 1621 … tot octobri, des jaers 1632, voorgevallen sijn (21 vols., Amsterdam, 1622–1635). See: Jan Z. Kannegieter, “Dr. Nicolaes Jansz. van Wassenaer (1571/72–1629)”, Jaarboek Amstelodamum 56 (1964): 71–99.

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Figure 4.3 Nicolaes van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. vii. Amsterdam, 1625, title-page special collections, university of amsterdam, otm o 63–965 (3)

could have no doubts about the credibility of the information the physician presented. The provincial, according to the author, was a man of humble disposition. He was soft-spoken, blessed with good judgement, and well versed in Latin. He had an exceptional reputation among fellow Catholics, especially

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within the ranks of the Society, where since his adolescent years he had been regarded as very promising. His eyes, Van Wassenaer confirmed from personal experience, flickered like those of cats, lions, tigers, and leopards, something which physicians usually explained through heat of the liver. Some Jesuits even regarded him as ‘divine’, and honoured him as an extraordinary man.24 The chronicler clearly did his best to give a meticulous and agreeable representation of Coelho’s character, but some of the details may well have been perceived by the Dutch readership as rather sinister. Jesuits, Dutch pamphleteers had after all insisted for decades, were notoriously unreliable.25 It is difficult to gauge whether Van Wassenaer alluded to these preconceptions. The feline analogies may well have served to discredit the provincial, while heat of the liver was a common effect of fever, but could also indicate a serious imbalance of the humours.26 In the final months of 1624 Coelho was in a weak physical state. He complained about the strict regulations of his detention, and in a letter to Superior General Muzio Vitelleschi he blamed the Dutch for demonstrating a strong hatred for the Jesuit order since the early days of their occupation of Bahia.27 But under interrogation, according to Van Wassenaer’s report, Coelho adopted a haughtier tone. He claimed, in the words of Historisch Verhael, that some considered him of higher rank than the governor-general, or even the king himself. How was it possible that such a holy man was now being held in such terrible surroundings? The response he received was taken straight from the Dutch rhetorical handbook: here, in Holland, “the free burghers were not subjected to the dictates of the [Spanish] monarch […], and the provincial would be treated in the same way that someone from our lands would be treated in

24

“Dominicus Kohello, Pater Provincialis van Brasil, heeft hem, terwijl hy alhier in hechting in S. Clarae klooster was, altoos getoont een Man van een sacht gemoed, minnelick in ’t spreken, goed van oordeel, en promptelijck de Latijnsche Tale gebruyckende, van de Griecksche of Hebreeusche gantsch geen kennisse hebbende. […] Sijn Mede broeders, en bysonder sijn Socius, hielt hem in groote reputatie, om dat hy van sijn jonckheyd as voor yet raers ghehouden wierd onder de synen, bevonden dat hy glinsterende oogen hadde, gelijck eenige gedierten, als Katten, Leeuwen, Tygers en Lupaerden, ’t welck de Physici op de hitte van de Lever legghen, en van sulcken constitutie is hy van my mede bevonden: Sy meenden dat het yet wat Goddelijckx in hem was, en dies als een bysonder Man van hen ge-eert wiert”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fol. 4v.) 25 Nelson, “The Jesuit Legend”, p. 95. 26 Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 61–62. 27 Leite, História, v, pp. 41–42. At least some of this must have been based on second-hand information, since Coelho only returned to Bahia in the final week of May.

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Spain”.28 Coelho then admitted that he received better care than his Dutch counterparts, according to Van Wassenaer, although one wonders how he was able to compare the prison conditions in Amsterdam to those in, say, Madrid or Seville. He offered in mitigation the claim that under his command the Jesuits in Bahia had provided shelter to foreign prisoners who had escaped detention. He and the other Jesuits recorded having assisted a Dutch ship’s captain and several of his compatriots who had broken out of their Salvador imprisonment, and mentioned the names of Dutchmen who could testify to the truth of these claims.29 It is uncertain whether this story made any impression on the Amsterdam custodians, but after several months – and a severe, briefly life-threatening illness – Coelho’s prison regime in the Rasphuis was softened, allowing him to receive visitors from outside.30

The Coelho Interrogations

Alongside his personal predicament, Coelho also discussed the state of the Brazilian colony now in the hands of the West India Company. This was surely the type of confidential information which interested the Dutch interrogators. A crucial topic in this respect was the malfunctioning bureaucracy of Salvador. Many of the wealthy Portuguese lavradores de cana in and around the colonial capital had a strained relationship with the representatives of the crown – the governor-general and the Relação, the High Court established in 1609. The desires of the sugar aristocracy were often at odds with the dictates of the royal government, and in a conflict between the planters and the crown, the Relação would invariably support the latter. Although the Jesuits did not enjoy a particularly close relationship with the Habsburg monarchs, they were the only religious order in the colony to endorse the majority of metropolitan rulings. In 1610, for instance, the Society supported a royal decree which prohibited 28

“… dat de vrye luyden onder ’t Commendo van de Koningh niet en staen, […] maer dat hy wel so gheleyt en getracteert soude werden, als yemant van onse landen in Spangien gevanghen”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fol. 4v.) 29 “Dit heeft de Pater selfs teghens my bekent, dat hy met sijn Broeders beter ghetracteert wiert als d’onse in Spangien: en dat, meende hy, gheschiede in recompense van ’t gene hy selfs en zijn gantsche Collegie in ’t voordeel van d’onse, of op den roof loopende, gevangen zijnde, ghedaen hadde. […] Alle die Patres hier by een waren, verclaerden dat sy de uytghebrokenen, haer vlucht in haer Clooster nemende, eenige dagen daer binnen ghevoedt, en daer naer laten loopen hebben, van sulckx sal getuygen de Capiteyn Cat, in dienst van de H.H. Staten geweest zijnde, en andere meer, die alhier by ons leven”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fols. 4v-5r.) 30 Schurhammer, Gesammelte Studien, pp. 391–92.

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the enslavement of the indigenous population. Local planters, however, vehemently opposed the crown’s ruling, and called for the expulsion of the Jesuits from Salvador. In the 1620s Governor-general Mendonça de Furtado had caused more disorder among the aristocracy by raising taxes to finance the building of defensive walls around the city. Only a few days before the Dutch attack in May 1624, the crown had been forced to intervene in the ensuing conflict between the governor and the sugar elite.31 Domingo Coelho sang the praises of the governor-general during the Amsterdam interrogations. According to Van Wassenaer, the provincial was even prepared, if necessary, to defend him at the Spanish court against accusations of having failed to accept his responsibilities. Mendonça de Furtado, unlike what some of his detractors had stated, had dutifully assembled the money to build a new fortification at sea level, in front of the coast of Salvador, in time for the Dutch attack. He had managed to maintain order among the armed forces in the city, just as the crown had desired.32 Van Wassenaer, carefully recounting his alleged conversations with Coelho, must have enjoyed laying the blame for the loss of Salvador indirectly on the court in Madrid. The Dutch reports of 1624 had all emphasized how easily Piet Heyn had conquered the newly financed ‘royal’ fortress. The line between the chronicler’s rhetoric and the Jesuit’s convictions is therefore rather fine here. Van Wassenaer distanced himself from the provincial’s defence of Mendonça de Furtado only when the governor’s religious preferences came under scrutiny. In his Amsterdam prison quarters in the West India House, Mendonça de Furtado had continued to practise his religion, but when his guards discovered that he possessed an image of the Virgin Mary, they had removed it from his cell. The governor and his son were so dismayed, according to Van Wassenaer, that they kneeled before the statue and kissed its feet – an anecdote that the largely Protestant readership of Historisch Verhael must have relished.33 31 32

33

Stuart B. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil. The High Court of Bahia and its Judges, 1609–1751 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 117–21, 136, 169, 209; Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, pp. 479 ff. “Soo veel als het stuck aenging dat hy van de Roomschen gesinde alhier beschuldigt wiert, dat hy zijn devoir in zijn Ampt niet gedaen hadde, dat s’Coninckx ordre in ’t houden van de Soldaten op die plaets niet gevolgt was, verklaerde de Pater heel contrarie te zijn, also hem bekent was, en voor de Coning sulckx mede wilde sustineren, dat hy alles na de last van sijn Majesteyt uytgevoert hadde: te weten, dat die Batarije aen het water uyt ’s Conincx inkomen, en schattinge der Ingesetenen, nae zijn vermoghen gevordert was”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fol. 6r.) “Als de Gouverneur een wyle ghevanghen was, heeft hy, op hope die hy hadde dat de Pater Provincialis by hem soude ghebrocht worden, uyt sijn kisten, die hy besloten by hem hadde, sijn beelden ghehaelt, die hy achter sijn koets met een kleedt bedeckt hielt, om

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Elsewhere in his description of Coelho’s interrogations Van Wassenaer displayed much stronger biases. The parallel implementation of different rhetorical tropes, variously anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic, is indicative of how the imprisonment of the Jesuit provincial nourished the flexible Dutch propaganda of the mid-1620s. The Dutch chronicler was only too happy to take sides with Coelho again when the provincial criticised Spanish policies in Portuguese overseas territories like Brazil, and Van Wassenaer may well have overstated the Jesuit’s displeasure: [Coelho] confessed that the Portuguese suffered from the King of Spain, who was a nuisance to everyone, and who possessed so many empires that he could not possibly rule them all. That there were also many of his officials, who acted so rudely that they had brought despair to the subjects, which had resulted in wars. That [the Portuguese] had lost the better part of the East Indies by the hatred unleashed, and that [these enemies] now intended to attack the West Indies, citing the example of Bahia.34 The origins of these confessions are difficult to establish. Did the Jesuit provincial really use such strong terms to criticise the Habsburg monarch whose policies he had often supported and defended? Was he forced to concur with the line of rhetoric his Dutch custodians presented him with? Or did Van Wassenaer wilfully construct these comments in order to reinforce the existing anti-­ Spanish sentiments of his readership? Coelho’s lamentation, in any case, continued in predictable fashion. He cried out for his beloved King Sebastian, the Portuguese monarch whose death in 1578 had brought about the arrival of

34

sijn oeffeningh van sijn Religie daer te houden: soo gheviel ’t dat sulck te wete ghekomen wiert, van die daer opsicht op hadden, en ’t wierde hem ontnomen: Over sulckx bedreef desen man met sijn Soon sulcken misbaer, dat sy in ’t afnemen en ’t voor by draghen de voeten der Beelden kusteden, en by-sonder op haer knyen het Beelt dat S. Maria van haer ghenoemt was, soo dat sy gantsch in droefheyt vielen, om dat de presentie van die haer onthaelt wiert, en sy (als) sonder heylighdom saten”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fol. 7r.) “Onder andere discoursen viel dit mede voor, dat de Pater bekende, dat haer Portugysen sulckx over quam, van wegen de Coningh van Spaengien, die een yeder op syn hals kreegh, en soo veel Rijcken hadde, die hy qualijck alle conde regeren: Datter mede vele synder Oversten waren, die het so grof maeckteden, dat sy de Ondersaten tot disperatie brochten, uyt het welck Oorlogen ontstonden: Dat sy door sulcken geconcipieerden haet nu soo een goedt deel van Oost-Indien verloren hadden, en men bestont also West-Indien mede aen te tasten, ’t beginsel van de Bahia nemende”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fol. 5r.)

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the Habsburgs in Lisbon, and bemoaned the fatal battle [of Alcácer El-Quibir in Morocco] where he had perished. When the House of Aviz-Beja had ruled Portugal, Coelho claimed, the Portuguese had maintained good relations with the other European powers. Since Sebastian’s death, they had found themselves loathed by their former friends. While it was not unusual for a Portuguese Jesuit to sing the praises of the late king, Coelho’s efforts to dissociate himself from the Habsburgs appear farfetched. According to Van Wassenaer, the provincial’s fellow Jesuits also shed tears over the misfortune that had befallen them. They all agreed that had they not been under Spanish rule, they would still have enjoyed the adoration of the whole world, and would have been able to continue their mercantile activities without peril.35

From Reality to Rhetoric

The relation between the Habsburg monarchy and its Portuguese subjects in the 1620s was far from smooth. Lisbon suspected the Spanish authorities of not defending Portuguese overseas territories with the same vigour they reserved for the protection of their own possessions in America. The fall of the Portuguese trading post in Ormuz in 1622 further added to Lisbon’s mistrust. When news of the loss of Salvador arrived at the Iberian courts, however, mutual bickering was temporarily laid aside, resulting in the famous “Voyage of the Vassals” which returned the Brazilian capital to Habsburg control in April 1625.36 At the time of the interrogations in Amsterdam, the recapture of Salvador was still in the (near) future. Nonetheless, for the incarcerated Jesuits to have been so critical of the royal government they had often supported, in the 35

“Op het welck hy ophet alderdiepste syns gemoets suchtende, exclameerde: O lieve Coning Sebastiaen, onse lieve Vader en Heer, wy beklaghen met droefheyt u dood, en ’t sedert u aflyven zijn wy in verdriet gekomen, o ongeluckighe uyre die u van ons scheyde, O heyloose veltslagh die u van ons weg nam: doen ghy over ons regeerde waren wy vrienden van de gantsche werelt, door onse Coopmanschappen der Specerijen, ’t zedert u aflyven zijn wy in den haet van een yeder gheraeckt, om onser sonden wille, die wy bedreven hebben: Alsulcke doloreuse redenen meer vielen hem met groote weemoedicheyt uyt de mondt, daer d’andere Socij mede tranen om lieten, als zijnde door ’t selfde ongheluck ghetroffen […] Sy meenen soo sy onder ’t rijck van Spaengien niet en stonden, dat sy van de gantsche wereldt gheadoreert, versocht, en op haer havenen sonder eenigh perijckel ghehandelt soude werden, als in voortijden geschiede, datter niemant eenigh quaet in haer Landen overquam, die haer na de gheleghentheydt van de plaets voegdede”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fols. 5r-v.) 36 Boxer, Salvador de Sá, pp. 56–68; Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Voyage of the Vassals: Royal Power, Noble Obligations, and Merchant Capital before the Portuguese Restoration of ­Independence, 1624–1640”, The American Historical Review 96.3 (1991): 735–62.

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strong words that Van Wassenaer reported, is unlikely. The chronicler moulded the information he had obtained into an anti-Spanish tirade recognizable to a Dutch audience. Pamphleteers and readers in the United Provinces were familiar with the rhetorical value of the Spanish occupation of its neighbouring kingdom. They often placed the regime change in Portugal in the context of Spain’s ‘universal monarchism’, an accusation derived more from patterns of rhetoric than reality.37 Van Wassenaer’s representation of the interrogations in the Rasphuis fits firmly in this tradition. The next paragraph reveals even more clearly how Van Wassenaer twisted Domingo Coelho’s words into representations acceptable for a Dutch readership. Here the provincial defended the Society of Jesus against the claims of its adversaries. When the Society was first mentioned by the interrogators, Coelho acknowledged that it was disliked more than any other order, and that he was familiar with the rationale behind this aversion. The Society, it was suggested, stirred up the Old World royalty and nobility, and by doing so had caused many wars. The Jesuits did not hesitate to kill monarchs if necessary, either in public or by secretly placing explosives which, so Van Wassenaer claimed, “we have seen all too often during our times”.38 Of course Coelho denied the accusations, and insisted that no Jesuit was allowed to interfere in government. He explained that sometimes they were called upon to advise governors, especially when there were few other counselors available, but that they would never recommend waging war as this was prohibited by the Society’s constitutions.39 In Salvador, Coelho continued, the governor once had consulted the entire administrative elite over the desirability of launching an attack on a group of rebellious and murderous Indians. The provincial’s answer at the time had been a very formal one. The superior general of the Society in Rome would not permit him to get involved in such matters, and he had therefore left the meeting.40 37 Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, p. 100. 38 “In ’t mentie maken van haer Ordre, gaf hy wel te kennen, dat die buyten andere gehaet wiert, als oock de redenen, beschuldigt synde, dat sy die zijn, die Coningen, Vorsten, Princen teghens malkanderen ophitsen, ende oorsake van groote oorloghen zijn, ja niet en schromen Coningen of om te brengen in ’t gesicht van alle menschen, of door heymelijcke lagen van Bospoeder, ende andersints, als in onse eeuwe al te veel gebleken is”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fol. 5v.) Van Wassenaer presumably referred to the English gunpowder plot of November 1605. 39 On the role of the Jesuits on the international political scene, see also: Harro M. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: the Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Robert L. Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War. Kings, Courts, and Confessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 40 “’t welck hy excuseerde teghens haer Ordre te zijn, dat sy haer niet met den vleeschelijcken arm (soo sy de Koninghen en Regenten noemen) moeyen moeten: […] Dat zy altemet op plaetsen daer de Gouverneurs weynigh raets hebben, sijn zy wel in de Raet geroepen,

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Whereas for Coelho this account illustrated the non-interventionist attitude of the Society under his supervision, Van Wassenaer and his Dutch readers reached a different verdict. Having been brought up with exaggerated stories of Spanish tyranny against innocent Native Americans, based on Bartolomé de las Casas’ best-seller Brevíssima Relación,41 they interpreted Coelho’s departure from the meeting as a refusal to protect the lives of the natives the Society was supposed to convert to Christianity. That the Jesuits in fact had been actively advocating a more humane attitude towards Brazilian Indians was of no consequence at all to Van Wassenaer. Realistic representations were conveniently overlooked in favour of recognizable rhetoric. Arguably more important still for the Dutch image of the Society was the conclusion to Coelho’s enforced introspection. The provincial admitted that it was allowed for Jesuit fathers to advise monarchs in maintaining their [Catholic] religion, and to propagate the faith among their subjects. How this was done was left unexplained, Van Wassenaer added in one of his rare personal remarks: This was not the place to elaborate. If it were up to him, the chronicler stated, he would certainly have an opinion on these matters as such controversies pleased him greatly. But he would allow every reader to judge for himself.42 Regardless of Coelho’s efforts to explain and justify the influence of the Society, and of the fairness of the reflection of his words in Van Wassenaer’s text, the conclusion to the paragraph did more for the prolongation of the existing stereotype than for the rebuttal of Jesuit intrusion in political affairs. om met hen van stucken de Regeringhe aengaende te consuleren, maer tot den Oorlogh eenige consultatie te geven, dat is hen op haer saligheyd verboden. Dese Pater selfs protesteerde voor Godt en zijn Heylighe Engelen, met devotie zijn ooghen nae den Hemel slaende, dat hy de waerheyt sprack, dat hy in zijn tijt tot dit hooge Ampt gheroepen zynde, in de Bahia, van de Gouverneur in een Ghenerale vergaderingh, […] gevordert synde, om te consulteren, of hy de Binnelantsche Indianen, die zijn volck doot geslagen, geplondert, ja wegh gevoert hadden, en Rebellen waren, niet mocht beoorlogen, dat hy daer op gheantwoordt heeft, op sulckx te consulteren, hen van haer Generael die binnen Romen sidt, verboden was sub paene excommunicationis, en dies uyt de vergaderingh met sulcken antwoort vertrock: Statuerende daer by, dat alle die sulcx deden, dat sy geen oprechte Jesuyten waren, haer Ordre niet voldoende”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fol. 5v.) 41 Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, pp. 96–99. 42 “… maer dattet hen geoorlooft was de Coningen te Raden tot onderhout van haer religie, tot voortplantinge van dien: Hoe sulckx dan geschiet, laten wy hier in medio: geen plaets synde om hier daer van te spreken. Soo veel als my aengaet ick mach gaerne sulcke velitationes hooren, en ’t myne daer op infereren, het oordeel staet dan aen den derde, die als Auditor daer by sidt: Het geloof of het accepteren wil niet gedwonghen zijn: het staet een yeder vry yemants segghen aen te nemen of te verwerpen”. (Van Wassenaer, Historisch verhael, vol. viii, fols. 5v-6r.)

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Epilogue Van Wassenaer’s transcripts of the Coelho interrogations in Amsterdam, like the news map by Claes Jansz Visscher, were instrumental in reinforcing familiar rhetorical programs. Rarely in the Dutch Golden Age would such an ideal opportunity arise to employ various strands of rhetoric all at the same time. Visscher made use of trusted stereotypes to criticize the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus, and the Spanish monarchy. In the process, the two unpretentious protagonists of the Steyger-Praetjen minimized the role of the Portuguese in Brazil. Van Wassenaer went one step further: first he twisted the words of a Luso-Brazilian Jesuit, a levelheaded man according to Van Wassenaer’s own report, in order to inflict the blame for all colonial misdeeds on Madrid. Then, after this apparently reasonable and, to the Dutch, recognizable condemnation of Spanish tyranny, he used Coelho’s testimony to denounce the Society. Just as with Visscher’s news map, however, Van Wassenaer’s rhetorical ploys were only available to a Dutch audience. His Historisch Verhael was never translated or published abroad. Military developments in Brazil soon caught up with the two opinionated representations. When a Habsburg armada recaptured Salvador in April 1625, the Dutch opinion makers were silent, although both Visscher and Van Wassenaer continued to follow Dutch expansion in the Atlantic with professional interest. Their representations of maritime success re-emerged in the late 1620s when Piet Heyn first returned to Bahia to take a large share of the annual Portuguese sugar export, and then managed to capture the Spanish treasure fleet in the Bay of Matanzas in Cuba. As the war between the Dutch and the Habsburgs continued, finding a diplomatic settlement for the prominent captives that was acceptable to both parties proved difficult. Coelho himself, during his interrogations, had been correct in predicting that Madrid and Rome would not be prepared to pay ransom for the hostages from Brazil. Meanwhile various people exerted pressure on the Dutch authorities to let the Jesuits go. The Habsburg commander Ambrogio Spinola wrote to Maurits to ask for their release as early as January 1625, and several days later, Dutch family members of prisoners in Dunkirk, Ostend, and elsewhere in Flanders requested the States-General to consider an exchange of captives.43 Despite the personal efforts of the stadtholder, the States decided that the Jesuits could not be part of any deal based on existing treaties, because they had been captured in the

43

Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal. Nieuwe reeks, 1610–1670, vol. vii (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1994), nrs. 1266, 1280.

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Indies.44 One of Maurits’ correspondents pleading for the release of the Jesuits in January 1625 – Charles Faye, monsieur d’Espesses, the French ambassador in The Hague – complained to the stadtholder that if the States continued to be unwilling to co-operate, there was no point in concluding treaties anymore.45 His efforts did not produce the desired result, he reported six days later to Florent de Montmorency, the Society’s provincial in Antwerp. D’Espesses, whose tenure in The Hague was characterized by misunderstandings and conflicts, made another effort to free the Jesuits after Maurits had passed away and had been succeeded as stadtholder by Frederik Hendrik, but again to no avail.46 Coelho and the others remained in custody. The Jesuits would have to wait for almost two years to be released. By then Diogo Mendonça de Furtado had been allowed to leave his captivity temporarily to broker an exchange deal. With the support of the Archduchess Isabella, Superior General Vitelleschi, and even Philip iv himself, the fathers were finally free.47 While in 1624 and 1625 Dutch Protestant publishers and authors had cherished the Jesuit captivity to re-ignite anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jesuit sentiments, in November 1626 it was the turn of Jacob Schaep, the most influential Catholic burgher of Amsterdam, to make a public statement. Schaep organised a lavish celebration dinner for the liberated fathers in his house at the Oudezijds Voorburgwal.48 Several days later Coelho and the other Jesuits left Holland, under the gaze of large numbers of curious onlookers. In the spring of 1628 the Jesuits returned to Salvador, where Coelho was to serve another term as provincial of Brazil. In May 1638, he reported to Vitelleschi 44 45

46

47

48

Ibid., nrs. 1316, 1327. “Je dirai qu’il pas licite quand deux parties ont faict un contract que l’une d’Icelles puisse dire que son intention at esté differente car de ceste façon il n’y auroit contract que seroit de valeur”. (Charles Faye, monsieur d’Espesses to Maurits of Nassau, The Hague 17 January 1625; Nijmegen, Archivum Neerlandicum Societatis Iesu, OS 352, pp. 6–7.) During the early months of 1625, Franco-Dutch relations rapidly deteriorated. On the troublesome relationship between the ambassador and the States-General, see: Maarten Hell, “Heliogabalus in The Hague. Franco-Dutch relations during the embassy of D’Espesses (1624–1628)”, Dutch Crossing 33.1 (2009): 44–63. Charles Faye, monsieur d’Espesses to Florent de Montmorency S.J., The Hague 23 January 1625; Nijmegen, Archivum Neerlandicum Societatis Iesu, OS 352, pp. 8–9; Charles Faye, monsieur d’Espesses to Frederik Hendrik, The Hague 13 May 1625; Nijmegen, Archivum Neerlandicum Societatis Iesu, OS 352, pp. 10–11. Mendonça de Furtado was also freed as part of the prisoner exchange, but his reception in the Iberian peninsula was decidedly unfriendly. Held responsible for the embarrassment of the loss of Bahia, he was first made to wait in Madrid for ten months before being granted an audience with Philip iv, and was then imprisoned again in Lisbon for fourteen months: Schwartz, “The Voyage of the Vassals”, pp. 756–57. Herman J. Allard, “De oude heer Jacob Pietersz Schaep te Amsterdam en drie zendelingen uit Brazilië (1626)”, Jaarboekje van Alberdingk Thijm 54 (1905): 73–108.

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Figure 4.4 Salomon Savery (after Gerard van Honthorst), Portrait of Maria de’ Medici, [Amsterdam, 1638] rijksmuseum, amsterdam, rp-p-1944-1579

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about the Dutch once again, this time to express his joy over Governor-general Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s failure to recapture Bahia.49 Several months later, in the first week of September, the final episode in the story of the Jesuit imprisonment took place.50 Maria de’ Medici, the exiled mother of the French king Louis xiii, visited the United Provinces. In Amsterdam, the burgomaster Albert Coenraadsz Burgh presented her with a gift: the rosary of Francis Xavier he had received from Domingo Coelho. The Brazilian provincial, who in 1624 had been depicted by Visscher wearing the rosary around his neck, had used the relaxation of the Rasphuis prison regime to give his most valuable possession to the visiting Burgh. The artist Gerard van Honthorst painted the queenmother with Coelho’s rosary in her hand (Figure 4.4). In her will, made shortly before her death in Cologne in 1642, eighteen years after the Dutch conquest of Bahia, she returned it to the local Jesuits. 49 Leite, História, v, pp. 60–61; Schurhammer, Gesammelte Studien, iv, pp. 393–94. On Johan Maurits’ expedition to Bahia: Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 86–87, with further references. 50 Paul Begheyn, “The Cult of Saint Francis Xavier in the Dutch Republic”, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 71 (2002), p. 306. The Honthorst painting is currently in the collection of the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

Chapter 5

(No) News from the Western Front: The Weekly Press of the Low Countries and the Making of Atlantic News On Saturday 5 January 1630, the Amsterdam publisher Jan van Hilten issued his first newspaper of the new year. The Courante uyt Italien ende Duytschlandt (‘Coranto from Italy and Germany’), a single sheet of paper of which both sides were densely printed, appeared every Saturday. It typically contained rumours and reports from all major battlefields in Europe and in the Atlantic world, where the Dutch West India Company had opened a second front in the war against Habsburg Spain. “Courante No. 1”, the first issue of the new year, brought three snippets of Atlantic information. First Van Hilten related how two Dutch squadrons had fired shots at the Spanish fortress in Havana. Then he reported that Don Fadrique de Toledo, Captain-General of the royal Indies fleet, had sent twelve vessels to the Virgin Islands to remove the Dutch from the area. More details, Van Hilten promised his readers, were to follow in the next issue. The third report concerned a ship of the West India Company that had anchored in England with a sizeable booty from Brazil, including four hundred crates of sugar. On its return voyage it had encountered a Dutch fleet in the Canary Islands. Despite having been dispersed by a storm, the fleet would reassemble near Cape Verde, and continue its mission as planned.1 None of the three stories would qualify as “breaking news” by any stretch of the imagination, but it must have pleased Van Hilten that he had managed to produce some Atlantic information that was fit to print. The market for news in the United Provinces during the country’s Golden Age was highly competitive: Weekly newspapers appeared in several towns, and Amsterdam had been a two-paper city for more than ten years. The other local coranto, Tijdingen uyt verscheyden Quartieren (‘Tidings from various Quarters’), issued by Van Hilten’s principal rival Broer Jansz, did not contain any Atlantic reports in the opening weekend of 1630, something which made Van Hilten’s information infinitely more valuable.2 But beating the competition was only part of the challenge he faced every week. Readers were very knowledgeable regarding maritime 1 Jan van Hilten, Courante uyt Italien ende Duytschlandt &c. 1630. No. 1 (Amsterdam, 5 Jan. 1630). All translations from Dutch into English are the author’s. 2 Broer Jansz, Tijdingen uyt verscheyden Quartieren. 1630. No. 1 (Amsterdam, 5 Jan. 1630).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_007

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affairs and could not be fooled with misinformation. Ordinary sailors on the Amsterdam waterfront spread all sorts of maritime rumours, while the regent elite in the decentralized political framework of the United Provinces could not stop the leaking of sensitive information. In this atmosphere of openness, newspaper stories could be contradicted and thrown into doubt within hours of their appearance. Conflicting information could even arrive from abroad, for example from the Southern Netherlands where another regular newspaper appeared, the Wekelijcke Tijdinghe (‘Weekly Tidings’), issued in Antwerp by the publisher Abraham Verhoeven. This coranto, one half-sheet of paper folded once so as to create a four-page pamphlet, reported on the same events from a Spanish perspective. Predictably, the news media on opposite sides of the border covered the war in the Atlantic in very different ways. In the fifty-one corantos that were to follow that year, Jan van Hilten closely monitored developments in the Atlantic world. Nearly every week he provided fresh information, a remarkable achievement given the irregular arrival of news from the Western front. Thanks to an unusual bit of good fortune, all fiftytwo issues for the year 1630 have survived and are preserved together in the Royal Library in The Hague.3 Even more strikingly, the Royal Library in Brussels holds a complete series of Abraham Verhoeven’s Wekelijcke Tijdinghe for the same year. Verhoeven tended to print a new issue as soon as he had enough material to fill four pages, but in 1629 he settled on a weekly rhythm as well. Since he produced multiple issues on the same day, there are no fewer than 122 issues of the Antwerp newspaper for the year 1630. New corantos appeared on fifty-four different days of the year, usually on Fridays, and the Wekelijcke Tijdinghe thus displays a periodicity comparable to the Amsterdam newspapers.4 Based on these two complete sets of corantos, and complemented by the few surviving issues of Broer Jansz’ Tijdingen,5 this article will study the serial production, dissemination, and reception of Atlantic news in the Low 3 Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, 341 A 1, a contemporary convolute of Van Hilten’s Courante, containing all fifty-two issues of 1630. The anonymous owner added a handwritten title-page: “Nieuws Tijdingen gedrukt te Amsterdam voor Jan van Hilten in de Beursstraat en bij Jan Frederik Stam in de Drukkerij van Vezelaer aan of bij de Zuijderkerk in de Hoope Van 5 Jan 1630 – 28 Dec 1630”. 4 Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels, iii 33.519 A, a contemporary convolute of Verhoeven’s Wekelijcke Tijdinghe, containing all 122 issues of 1630. It was probably assembled by the Jesuits in Antwerp based on the evidence of provenance on the volume’s opening page. For the precise dates of publication in 1630, see Stéphane Brabant, L’Imprimeur Abraham Verhoeven (1575–1652) et les débuts de la presse “belge” (Paris: a.e.e.f., 2009), pp. 407–14. 5 Only five issues have survived for 1630. Four in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, C 1103 (nr. 1, 5 Jan.; nr. 21, 25 May; nr. 24, 14 June; nr. 34, 24 Aug.), and one in the University Library in Ghent (nr. 14, 6 April). I am grateful to Rik Declercq (Ghent) for sending me a scan of this

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Countries­in the crucial year 1630, when both the United Provinces and the Spanish crown experienced a blend of victories and disappointments.6 The West India Company conquered Olinda and Recife in Northeast Brazil; Madrid celebrated the safe arrival of a complete shipment of American silver for the first time in nearly three years, a great relief after Piet Heyn had captured the previous New Spain fleet in Matanzas Bay. As a case study of how good and bad news from the Western front circulated in the Low Countries, the article will compare two contrasting ways of covering the same Atlantic events. It will trace two different strategies for obtaining and presenting information, discuss two different perspectives on credibility and partiality, and address questions such as: How did each of the newspapers solve the discrepancy between the irregular arrival of information and a weekly deadline? What kind of rhetoric did the respective newspapermen use to reach their readership, what topics did they emphasize or suppress, and how did a well-informed reader assess their weekly bulletins? And finally, in a broader sense, what does all of this tell us about the mechanisms of serial news from the early modern Atlantic world? The historiography of news and public opinion during the ancien régime has greatly expanded in the last two decades and promises to be the subject of much more scholarship in the foreseeable future. Printed newspapers, the mechanics of their regular communications, and the public interest in serial news have received considerable attention, particularly for seventeenth-­century England in the work of Joad Raymond.7 Raymond and others have demonstrated the addiction to news of early modern readers and have revealed how quickly the periodicals evolved into the most widely circulated and most widely read c­ arriers of information in the first half of the seventeenth century. These in-depth studies, however, focus on a single news culture, strictly issue. Five out of fifty-two represents a typical survival rate for early-seventeenth-century corantos. 6 Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast 1580–1680 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1971), p. 218, calls 1630 “a remarkable year in the history of the Caribbean”, a claim which is echoed by Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 188. 7 Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (2nd rev. ed.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Idem, ed., News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). See also Nicholas Brownlees, Corantos and Newsbooks: Language and Discourse in the first English Newspapers (1620–1641) (Pisa: Edizioni ets, 1999); Adam Fox, “Rumour, News, and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Culture”, The Historical Journal 40.3 (1997): 597–620; C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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curtailed by linguistic and political boundaries. Comparisons with foreign periodicals are included mainly to emphasize the everyday practice of newspapermen to translate and copy bulletins from abroad, but they do not generally investigate the production, dissemination, and reception of news in comparative perspective. An excellent recent collection of essays on the dissemination of news in early modern Europe does address this issue: Brendan Dooley assembled a team of specialists of various continental news cultures to add an international dimension to the study of the circulation of political information. The contributors focus on the concept of contemporaneity, a term referring to the perception, shared by a number of human beings, of experiencing political events at more or less the same time. New methods of communication in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including regularly printed newspapers, the volume argues, helped to build this sense of contemporaneity. Taken together, the essays offer a panoramic view of the way news stories were transmitted from source to source, from country to country. Dooley, in his introduction, explains that in order to reveal the paths of stories as they traveled through early modern Europe, the comparison of news bulletins is the desired scholarly approach, and continues by pointing to cross-boundary transmission and reception of news as an obvious new direction for research.8 This article proposes to take another step in that direction by comparing two ways of presenting, disseminating, and consuming news from the Atlantic world, a topic little studied so far in spite of extensive coverage in seventeenthcentury European newspapers. One notable exception is Nicole Greenspan’s recent article on the importance of news in the advancement of England’s expansion in the Caribbean under Oliver Cromwell. Greenspan concludes that news, and at times its absence, played as much of a role in the unfolding of the “Western Design” as commanders, soldiers, seamen, and government officials involved in its planning, direction, and execution. She demonstrates how incomplete and insufficiently reliable information from the Atlantic world promoted an atmosphere of political, economic, and diplomatic instability. Perhaps most pertinently in the context of the present article, she also shows how the news media in England were far from silent and that rumours and speculations ran wild in the months before the arrival of verified information.9

8 Brendan Dooley, “Introduction”, in: Idem, ed., The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 2. 9 Nicole Greenspan, “News and the Politics of Information in the Mid Seventeenth Century: The Western Design and the Conquest of Jamaica”, History Workshop Journal 69 (2010): 1–26.

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Any news, as David Randall has recently reminded us, must take into account the essential uncertainty of its nature, yet in no other geographical context was that uncertainty more compelling than in the Atlantic world.10 Fernand Braudel famously claimed that distance was the primary enemy of early modern society: It resulted in every kind of delay, and not until the end of the eighteenth century would the situation significantly improve.11 The geographical distance between the New World and the Old and consequently the gap of weeks or even months between actual events and the moment they were reliably recounted as news in Europe extended the period of uncertainty. The time lag between events and reports and the tension between irregular and infrequent access to information and the rigidity of a weekly deadline at a time when maritime news was in high demand resulted in an exceptional form of reporting. It was not at all uncommon for a fleet to depart from Europe for the Caribbean and not to return for eighteen months, giving patriotic armchair travelers ample time for hope and anxiety, while giving newspapermen headaches on how to track developments that potentially shifted the balance of power at home. Yet in spite of the obstacles generated or increased by geographical distance, readers across the Low Countries remained avid consumers of the latest from the Western front.

Setting the Scene: Two Contrasting Perspectives

In order to investigate the unrolling of Atlantic events in the Low Countries in 1630, it is useful to briefly set the political scene in the western hemisphere. In 1624 the Dutch conquest of Salvador de Bahia, the capital of Portuguese Brazil, caused a shock to the Habsburg territorial monopoly in South America. The swift Luso-Spanish campaign to recapture Bahia forced the Dutch to revert to piracy and privateering, but Piet Heyn’s success in securing prizes quickly enabled the West India Company to take up its original plan of establishing a bridgehead in Habsburg America. In the summer of 1629 Admiral Hendrick Lonck embarked for Cape Verde, where around Christmas he was joined by Colonel Diederick van Waerdenburgh. Although their destination was officially a secret, it was public knowledge that the Brazilian coastline was ­vulnerable 10 11

David Randall, Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), p. 5. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip ii, transl. Siam Reynolds (2 vols.; New York: Harper and Collins, 1972), pt. 2, Ch. i: “Distance, the First Enemy”, where he devotes subparagraphs to both the dimensions of the sea and the speed of communication (pp. 358–69).

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to attack. Spanish galleons in the area were occupied by another Dutch expedition under Admiral Adriaen Pater, who had wintered in the Caribbean in an effort to capture the next treasure fleet. Sacking and pillaging poorly defended islands, Pater prepared to do more damage in the months to come. In an atmosphere of unbridled optimism, the Dutch contemplated the advent of the new year.12 For Philip iv and Olivares, the loss of the New Spain fleet was a massive failure with immediate implications, as they could meet their military obligations in the Netherlands, the Empire, Northern Italy, and the Caribbean only with recurrent infusions of American silver. The fear that a broad attack on the colonies now lay ahead caused panic in the mother country. Philip authorized his aunt Isabella, Governor of the Netherlands, to negotiate a truce to put restrictions on the West India Company, but after heated internal debate the Dutch were unwilling to sacrifice their momentum. At the same time financial problems in Spain delayed the sending of a new Indies fleet for many months, and when Don Fadrique de Toledo finally set sail in August 1629, it was clear he would not return before winter. The next calendar year would provide a real test of Spain’s geopolitical resilience.13 Given these contrasting points of departure, anticipation for Atlantic news in the United Provinces was high, and printed newspapers were the most regular means of obtaining information. Both Broer Jansz (1579–1652) and Jan van Hilten (c. 1602–1655) issued newspapers at least since 1618. Both produced a new coranto every Saturday with permission of the Amsterdam city council, a privilege which protected the publishers against pirate editions and local competitors, and gave the authorities a limited means of control. The corantos invariably opened with a section of foreign bulletins, where the oldest news was listed first, and reports were preceded by dates and places of correspondence. This section was followed by information from the coranto’s own sources. 12

13

For details on the Dutch expeditions, see Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, pp. 206–17. For Brazil’s patchy defense system, see Francis Dutra, “Matias de Albuquerque and the defense of Northeastern Brazil, 1620–1626”, Studia. Revista semestral 36 (1973): 117–66. The most detailed account of the prologue to the Dutch capture of Pernambuco remains George Edmundson, “The Dutch Power in Brazil (continued)”, English Historical Review 14 (1899): 676–99, but for a more recent assessment, see Michiel van Groesen, “Lessons Learned: The Second Dutch Conquest of Brazil and the Memory of the First”, Colonial Latin American Review 20.2 (2011): 167–93. For Spanish maritime anxiety in the late 1620s, see Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons, pp. 7–8, 90–118, 183–84. For the truce talks in the Netherlands, which continued into the 1630s, see Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World, 1606–1661 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 223–49.

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On the whole Van Hilten gave more space to exclusive stories, whereas Jansz focused on continental news from a wider variety of places.14 Their earliest bulletins on Brazil in 1624 reveal some of the intricacies of Atlantic reporting, as the news stories contained some glaring geographical inaccuracies, yet the same reports also point to the newspapers’ independence from the authorities. Twice in the space of a week, Van Hilten published stories of erratic leadership and misbehaving Dutch soldiers that the West India Company had wanted to cover up.15 Abraham Verhoeven (1575–1652), in Antwerp, did not enjoy the same editorial freedom. In applying to the Archdukes in Brussels for a licence, Verhoeven emphasized the propaganda usefulness of his newspaper, the Nieuwe Tijdinghen (‘New Tidings’), which appeared two or three times a week, and when looking at his occasional Atlantic bulletins, it is clear what he meant. The Dutch conquest of Bahia, according to Verhoeven, amounted to little more than the sacking of a few churches, and four years later he was equally ambiguous about what had happened at Matanzas. In 1629 the Council of Brabant ordered him to stop producing “news reports most incorrect and without any proper prior visitation”. Later that year he relaunched his coranto under a different title, Wekelijcke Tijdinghe. Verhoeven did not make a clear distinction between domestic and foreign news and mentioned Antwerp as one of many places where he gathered information. As a result it was virtually impossible for readers to discover which news had been copied and which was truly new.16

14

15 16

The starting point for research on early Dutch newspapers is Dutch corantos 1618–1650, a bibliography illustrated with 334 facsimile reproductions of corantos printed 1618–1625, ed. Folke Dahl (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1946), with biographies of Van Hilten (pp. 33–35) and Jansz (pp. 55–56). See also Otto Lankhorst, “Newspapers in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century”, in: Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron, eds. The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London & New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 151–59; Dirk H. Couvée, “The First Coranteers – the Flow of the News in the 1620s”, Gazette. International Journal for Mass Communication Studies 8 (1962): 22–36. Michiel van Groesen, “A Week to Remember: Dutch Publishers and the Competition for News from Brazil, 26 August – 2 September 1624”, Quaerendo 40.1 (2010), pp. 29–36. The quote is from Paul Arblaster, “Policy and Publishing in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1585–1690”, in: Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron, ed., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 185. For an exhaustive bibliography of Verhoeven’s corantos, see Brabant, L’Imprimeur Abraham Verhoeven. See also K. van Damme and J. Deploige, “Slecht nieuws, geen nieuws. Abraham Verhoeven (1575–1652) en de Nieuwe Tijdinghen: periodieke pers en propaganda in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden tijdens de vroege zeventiende eeuw”, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 113.1 (1998): 1–22.

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No News: Making Something out of Nothing

News from the Atlantic world received more attention in Amsterdam than in Antwerp. In 1630 Van Hilten included tidings in forty-nine weekly issues, whereas Verhoeven did so on only nineteen occasions. But both newspapers depended on the usually unpredictable and in any case infrequent arrivals of ships for good copy. Much of the rhythm of news from the West Indies was conditioned by the three-month-long hurricane season from early August to the end of October.17 Only thereafter would large expeditions be undertaken, and by then bad weather in Europe could result in further delays. After a fleet had crossed the ocean, news of its exploits took seven to nine weeks on average to arrive in the Low Countries. All of this meant that Atlantic headlines could not generally be expected until March or even April at the earliest. So Van Hilten’s promise to readers, in his opening issue of 1630, to follow up on his reports the next week, signaled a commercial strategy rather than a genuine belief that news would arrive. In Courante No. 2, he offered little or nothing and opted to gloss over this lack of news by creating his own: From Antwerp, 6 January: It hasn’t happened for many years that for a period of twelve months, not a single [Spanish] ship with goods or treasure has arrived from the West Indies, either for the King or for private investors, instead of more than one-hundred richly laden ships, as was the rule. However, over there one has good hope that the same will arrive towards March.18 Such writing served two purposes. Firstly it kept the Atlantic in the spotlight and nurtured the collective anticipation, as Van Hilten judged that readers wanted to know the latest, even if there was nothing to report. By including such reminders, he assured his clientele that he was keeping track of Atlantic developments, implying that if news did arrive, they would have to look no further than his newspaper. Other issues in January and February reveal the same strategy, emphasizing routine efforts by the West India Company to provision ships in support of the two Atlantic fleets and the arrival of sugar traders in Lisbon who reported rather gratuitously that Pernambuco was ready to withstand

17

18

See for a recent analysis of what he terms “the underlying ecology of the Atlantic world”: Stephen D. Behrendt, “Ecology, Seasonality, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade”, in: Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, ed., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and ­Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 44–85, esp. p. 48. Courante No. 2 (12 Jan.).

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a Dutch onslaught.19 Secondly, the bulletin was sufficiently vague so as not to jeopardize the Courante’s credibility. Credibility was a major concern for Van Hilten, particularly at times when the chances of good news arriving shortly resulted in hopeful Atlantic rumours. It presented him with the challenge of reproducing these in print without risking his reputation as a careful reporter. Van Hilten opted to meticulously describe the trails of such tales, adding dates and sources to enable readers to judge the stories’ credibility for themselves. In March, when no news had arrived from Pernambuco and tensions began to rise, Atlantic reporting in the Courante became extremely conscientious: From Antwerp, 3 March: Since my most recent [issue] two deliveries of post from Madrid have arrived in Brussels, the latest one was sent from there on the 11th of last [month], and brings no tidings from the West Indies, other than that at the beginning of February some forty ships had arrived in Lisbon from Brazil, including some which had left Pernambuco on 1 January, and until that time nothing had been heard along the coast of Dutch ships; so that from the tidings mentioned before, nothing is certain.20 Van Hilten sacrificed any lingering stylistic ambitions he may have harboured to trace the origins of information back to New Year’s Day in Pernambuco. News from Brazil could reach Lisbon a full month before it arrived in Amsterdam, and since no ships had entered Dutch ports, Van Hilten had little choice but to find out if tidings from Spain had reached the Southern Netherlands.21 Nearly half of his Atlantic bulletins originated in Antwerp. Alternatively when ships docked in Amsterdam, communications followed the opposite course. Despite his singular focus on “Spanish” news, a third of Abraham Verhoeven’s bulletins still came from the United Provinces. Atlantic news in the Low Countries, then, sporadic and infrequent, was often filtered by an enemy whose ­reports could not necessarily be trusted. Confirming it thus became an immediate priority, as a story’s credibility increased by attributing it to multiple, and potentially more reliable, sources. For the Courante’s next issue in March, Van Hilten obtained confirmation from Zeeland that, indeed, no news from the ­Atlantic had reached Lisbon as yet. Ever so conveniently, this also provided him with another bulletin.22 The most important Atlantic news, in this phase, was the enduring lack of it. But while Van Hilten constructed a weekly rhythm of reports, Verhoeven’s 19 20 21 22

Courante No. 3 (19 Jan.) and No. 5 (2 Feb.). Courante No. 10 (9 March). Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 23–24. Courante No. 11 (16 March).

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Wekelijcke Tijdinghe contained only a single bulletin between January and April. He claimed his “news” came from Osuna, but what he printed could have originated anywhere in Spain, and could have been written at any time during the first quarter of the year: Without doubt, one expects the treasure fleet towards April, since letters and dispatch boats have arrived from Havana. As reported from Cádiz, news is coming in that it is all peace and quiet in the Indies, and that 25 Dutch ships, which roamed the coasts in the area for prizes, have now left without getting any sort of result; one holds for a certainty that some of them have perished in storms and bad weather.23 Instead of following where news had not (yet) arrived to appeal to the imagination of what the future might bring, Verhoeven explained that the reason he had been mute was that nothing actually happened. The only storyline he was interested in, the arrival of American silver, seemed unlikely to come to fruition soon. For the time being, readers of the Wekelijcke Tijdinghe were left to mull over indistinct “letters and ships” and untraceable “coasts in the area”, and Verhoeven did not include any conventional elements to enhance his credibility. However, in terms of actual information gathered, the result was not very different. Presented with the same ocean of uncertainty, both newspapers attracted readers by keeping an eye on events that could lead to victories. Potential setbacks waiting to happen were not anticipated in print: Verhoeven did not refer to Brazil, while Van Hilten made no mention of the approaching treasure fleet.

Hard News: Partiality and the Issue of Credibility

In the same week that Verhoeven assured his readers that all was peace and quiet in the Indies, the West India Company registered its two main victories of the year. Adriaen Pater raided and captured the strategic island of Santa Marta near Cartagena, while Hendrick Lonck and Diederick van Waerdenburgh overwhelmed Olinda, the capital of Pernambuco.24 Few events generated as much newspaper coverage as an Atlantic victory. In 1624, also after a prolonged period of anticipation, Jan van Hilten had taken the unusual step of issuing a Courante Extraordinarij to quickly spread the news from Bahia. This time the 23 Wekelijcke Tijdinghe No. 14 (20 February). 24 Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, p. 214; Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 37–41.

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good news reached Amsterdam just in time for the regular Saturday edition of 27 April, of which the entire verso side was devoted to Brazil (Figure 5.1).25 Van Hilten’s treatment was very matter-of-fact, reporting on every stage of the invasion in the same manner as the “officially approved” version of events published by the West India Company several days later. The triumph was cause for nationwide celebrations, as the States-General sanctioned a day of public prayer and ordered soldiers along the frontiers to fire their cannons to communicate the victory and demoralize enemy troops. Details of events in Brazil must have reached Antwerp very soon, but here Abraham Verhoeven made no mention of defeat whatsoever. Not in his Wekelijcke Tijdinghe of 26 April, not on 2 May, and not in the weeks that followed. While Van Hilten eagerly assembled more information to present a complete picture of the campaign, Verhoeven reported from Dordrecht in May that “not much special was happening here”. It was not until a full month later that Verhoeven acknowledged defeat in print – not as a newsworthy event, but as part of a report on the ongoing efforts in Spain to swiftly “recapture Pernambuco”.26 In the more authoritarian society promoted by the Archdukes in the Southern Netherlands, credibility at least partly depended on the demonstration of being committed to the common interest. The all-encompassing religious conflict had turned increasingly bitter in the late 1620s in both Germany and Northern Italy, meaning that the divide between Protestants and Catholics had sharpened and extended to the way events were reported. Both parties were engaged in what Steven Shapin has described as “the public withdrawal of trust in another’s access to the world and in another’s moral commitment to speaking truth about it”.27 Whereas Van Hilten attempted to build a new standard of credibility based on providing details such as sources and dates and places of correspondence, Verhoeven applied a more traditional partisan rhetoric, still considered very appealing as part of a culture of belonging in post-Reformation Europe.28 Both north and south of the border, victories were 25

26 27 28

Courante No. 17 (27 April). The special Tuesday issue of August 1624 is facsimilated in Dutch corantos, no. 35. See also: Van Groesen, “A Week to Remember”, pp. 29–31. The scoop of the good news from Brazil was not scored by Van Hilten or Jansz, but by the Amsterdam bookseller and occasional coranteer François Lieshout, whose Seeckere tijdinghe vande Vlote … was dated 25 April 1630. A copy of this newssheet is kept in the University Library in Ghent. Wekelijcke Tijdinghe No. 44 (24 May); Wekelijcke Tijdinghe No. 45 (1 June). Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 6. For an extensive discussion of the problem of credibility in early modern England, see Randall, Credibility, pp. 95–120. Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 211–17.

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Figure 5.1 Jan van Hilten, Coranto from Germany & Italy &c. Amsterdam, 27 April 1630, verso national library, the hague, 341 a 1

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reported more often and more extensively than defeats, but only Verhoeven systematically discounted bad news, a clear example of the propaganda usefulness he had promised the authorities at the start of his career. A comparison between the Amsterdam and Antwerp corantos on one specific Atlantic event reveals how different levels of partiality can also be gauged from the words the publishers used when constructing their reports. In the first half of June, all three newspapers – including Jansz’ Tijdingen – made mention of Adriaen Pater’s return to the United Provinces after a Caribbean expedition of nearly two years that was neither a resounding success nor a complete failure.29 Pater had not managed to capture the treasure fleet as Company executives had hoped, but his presence in the area had succeeded in postponing its departure. He had rattled the Spaniards by forcing the surrender of Santa Marta, but had not joined forces with Lonck to mount a combined attack, something which the directors had specifically ordered. Van Hilten, anticipating the admiral’s return, recounted on 8 June how Pater had conquered Santa Marta, but had to abandon the island due to a lack of supplies. The following week, he restricted his coverage to one, bone-dry sentence: Admiral Pater has arrived here this week with most of his ships.30 That same Saturday, Broer Jansz presented Pater’s campaign as a success. ­Jansz had served as coranteer to the Prince of Orange and was more conspicuously patriotic than Van Hilten. News he printed was routinely mistrusted in the Southern Netherlands, where satirical pamphleteers once advised him “to lie some more about Brazil, since it is far enough away from here”.31 Jansz described Pater’s return more extensively: Several times this week soldiers […] have marched in full attire and with flying colours to the West India House, where each soldier received one Rijksdaalder as a welcome gift on top of his pay, and each officer two. The Company directors, hearing that the Admiral would come from Edam to Amsterdam, have sent some from their midst to Nieuwendam to receive the Admiral magnificently, accompany him to Amsterdam, and bring him to the West India House, where in the evening they all spent a merry dinner together.32 29 Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, pp. 207–16. 30 Courante No. 24 (15 June). 31 Henk Borst, “Broer Jansz in Antwerpse ogen. De Amsterdamse courantier na de slag bij Kallo in 1638 neergezet als propagandist”, De zeventiende eeuw 25.1 (2009), p. 86. 32 Tijdingen No. 24 (15 June).

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At least, Broer Jansz insisted, there was reason to be joyful after so many months of anticipation. Two weeks later Abraham Verhoeven vehemently disagreed, as he reported Pater’s return in a tone that was anything but objective. He derided the admiral for his lack of success and wasted no time in reminding readers that everything was being done to deny the Dutch further success in Pernambuco too: Tidings from Amsterdam: Here Admiral Pater has arrived with the stockings on his head [i.e. with a flea in his ear], ensuring that the West India Company will not make a song out of this, as it has cost a lot and rendered little or nothing. Should the same happen to Pernambuco, the Company would burst, because here we understand that in Andalucia, Biscay, Portugal, and other corners of Spain great preparations are being made to go to sea, and that Don Fadrique will immediately depart for Pernambuco once his fleet has arrived in Spain.33 This bulletin is indicative of Verhoeven’s Atlantic reporting in two ways. Throughout the year, he ridiculed the Dutch when they did not achieve the sort of success they had hoped for, using stinging rhetoric foreign to the Amsterdam corantos. Then he quickly reverted to giving optimistic updates on the approaching treasure fleet. Under the command of Don Fadrique de Toledo and Antonio de Oquendo, the combined New Spain and Tierra Firme fleets which carried two years’ worth of gold and silver had applied extreme caution, spending months in first Cartagena and then Havana. The commanders considered the risk of an oceanic crossing so great that they left behind eight large ships with part of the treasure. But the return voyage turned out to be uneventful, and in early August the fleet reached Cádiz, where a delighted crowd awaited, kneeling and praying in gratitude. The safe arrival of the fleet even generated a relación de sucesos, a form of printed news in Spain which was usually reserved for military victories and royal visits, thus emphasizing the political significance of the event.34 33 34

Wekelijcke Tijdinghe No. 56 (28 June). The news pamphlet is titled Relacion verdadera y cierta de la desseada y felize venida de la Flota de Nueva España, y galeones de Tierra Firme, y de la Armada Real del Mar Occeano (Granada, 1630). I am grateful to Francesca Trivellato for providing me with a copy. On printed news in Golden Age Spain, see Henry Ettinghausen, “The News in Spain: Relaciones de sucesos in the Reigns of Philip iii and iv”, European History Quarterly 14 (1984): 1–20. On the fleet’s arrival, see Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons, pp. 186–87, and Elvira Vilches, New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 300–1.

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In the culture of anticipation that characterized and shaped Atlantic news, the treasure fleet was to Verhoeven what Brazil had been to his counterparts in Amsterdam. Every Atlantic story in the Wekelijcke Tijdinghe was devoted partly, or more often exclusively, to Don Fadrique. Over the course of the summer, when the fleet’s arrival became a matter of when rather than if, Verhoeven began to speculate about its revenues. On 17 August he announced confidently, and with more precision than usual: Tidings from Seville from July: On 28 June a dispatch boat has arrived from Don Fadrique de Toledo, carrying letters from the aforementioned Don Fadrique that he hoped the fleet would reach Spain at the end of July or the beginning of August, with God’s support, and that the fleet comprised more than one-hundred ships and carried more than twenty million [reales].35 Finally, on the penultimate day of the month, Verhoeven could break the official news of the fleet’s return. A year had passed since Don Fadrique had left for the Indies, and anticipation for his homecoming had been high from the moment he set sail, a sentiment that was magnified by the collective memory of disaster at Matanzas. Verhoeven celebrated the cathartic occasion with a four-page issue completely dedicated to the good news from Cádiz (Figure 5.2). But his many column inches could not hide that the main news it contained, the actual amount of treasure, was disappointing: From Brussels, 24 August: Monsieur, here tidings have come from Spain that the fleet of gold and silver has arrived there at the beginning of August, without the loss of a ship, being richly laden, and one expects another fleet to arrive in October or November […] The entire amount is nine million, nine hundred and four thousand one-hundred and ninetyfour reales […] One awaits further notice from the fleet of this year with the next post.36 Verhoeven opened his bulletin with a brief salutation to invoke the credibility of an ordinary letter, but readers who had followed the fleet’s approach from week to week must have noticed that its revenues amounted to less than half the sum the publisher had predicted in previous corantos. What was presented as a climax had a distinctly anti-climactic feel to it. The wait for the next 35 36

Wekelijcke Tijdinghe No. 78 (17 Aug.). Wekelijcke Tijdinghe No. 83 (30 Aug.).

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Figure 5.2 Abraham Verhoeven, Weekly Tidings. Antwerp, 30 August 1630, p. 1 royal library, brussels, iii 33.519 a

fleet – and with it yet another period of anticipation for Atlantic news – started right away.37 37

The second fleet, under Don Tomás de Larráspuru, arrived in Spain in December, too late to be included in newspapers in 1630. See Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons, p. 187.

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Reading Newspapers: The Atlantic at Home

Publishers tried to keep readers hungry for more information to ensure the consistent purchase of their weekly editions. There were many ways of getting information on foreign affairs – hearsay and rumours, sermons and songs, pamphlets and prints – but the corantos were the only regular and most widely available carriers of Atlantic news. In the United Provinces, publishers from various towns provided local outlets for the Amsterdam newspapers in exchange for advertisements of their books in the periodicals. Every week Van Hilten sent twelve copies of the Courante to a colleague in Leeuwarden, for example, and twenty-six copies on average to another bookseller in Nijmegen. Other channels of distribution were of a more informal nature: The schoolmaster David Beck, in The Hague, received Van Hilten’s newspaper from his uncle in Amsterdam and sat down with friends “until [they] had read the printed Courant in its entirety”.38 The corantos were also being read abroad: Both Van Hilten and Jansz published French editions, and their reports were regularly translated for German and English gazettes. The weekly flow of news was considered so valuable that it could be sold for a profit, for example by the political agent Michel le Blon, who sent parcels from Amsterdam to the Swedish chancellor Axel Oxenstierna every Saturday, including that day’s copies of the two newspapers.39 Of the spread of Abraham Verhoeven’s news in the Southern Netherlands nothing is known, but for his international distribution, he relied on the trusted Tassis postal system – which connected the Southern Netherlands to just about every major news hub on the continent. English coranteers, in spite of their Protestant sympathies, regularly copied his reports too.40 In the highly literate Low Countries, as in England, the corantos were intended for a large readership at all levels of society, but here too early modern reading remains an elusive topic.41 Only a few years ago David Randall stated 38 39

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David Beck, Spiegel van mijn leven: een Haags dagboek uit 1624, ed. and transl. Sv. E. Veldhuijzen (Hilversum: Verloren, 1993), p. 143. See also: Jeroen Blaak, Literacy in Everyday Life: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Dutch Diaries (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 94. Couvée, “The first coranteers”, pp. 27–32; Dutch corantos, p. 34; Lankhorst, “Newspapers in the Netherlands”; Nicholas Brownlees, The Language of Periodical News in SeventeenthCentury England (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 25–53; Marika Keblusek, “The Business of News: Michel le Blon and the Transmission of Political Information to Sweden in the 1630s”, Scandinavian Journal of History 28 (2003): 205–13. Paul Arblaster, “Antwerp and Brussels as Inter-European Spaces in News Exchange”, in: Brendan Dooley, ed., The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 202–3; Van Damme and Deploige, “‘Slecht nieuws’”, pp. 18–19. Michael Frearson, “The Distribution and Readership of London Corantos in the 1620s”, in: Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Serials and their Readers, 1620–1914 (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1993), pp. 1–25.

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that “we will never have more than a hazy idea of who read military news”.42 Fortunately there is one reader in the United Provinces who commented on a regular basis on what newspapers reported and how he assessed their credibility. That reader is Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581–1647), arguably the leading Dutch poet, playwright, and historian of his generation, and no stranger to politics either. His father Cornelis served eight terms as burgomaster of Amsterdam, and Pieter himself was in 1609 appointed sheriff (drost) of Muiden, a relatively undemanding position which enabled him to write his plays and, later on, the Neederlandsche Histoorien, a monumental twenty-seven-volume description of the Dutch Revolt. Since the castle of Muiden where Hooft resided lay more than ten miles east of Amsterdam, he relied on letters and newspapers to follow foreign affairs. The Amsterdam merchant Joost Baek, his brother-in-law, sent him newspapers every week, and it is in letters to Baek that Hooft comments on the weekly tidings.43 What sort of newspaper reader was Pieter Hooft? For someone of Hooft’s lineage, the essence of credibility was trust, which depended on social authority. Anonymous reports in printed corantos issued by publishers with an eye for commerce were perceived as distinctly inferior to traditional letters written by people whose status guaranteed their credibility. Hooft, then, was a highly critical reader, who repeatedly complained that newspapers reported lies – a common trope – and were always one step behind the news. If we compare his news consumption to that of Hugo Grotius, whose overriding interest in 1630 was in the secret Dutch-Spanish truce talks that hardly made the news,44 Hooft attached a lot of weight to the military and political incidents that formed the corantos’ staple of news. Reviewing the contemporary media landscape, Hooft rated Jan van Hilten’s newspaper as more reliable than that of Broer Jansz, but admitted that “one can always find something in one newspaper that is not available in the other”.45 His critical attitude towards the Amsterdam corantos did not stop him from reading both, and he read foreign newspapers too. No wonder that he occasionally confessed to Baek that the papers had occupied him until late at night.46 42 Randall, Credibility, p. 14. 43 Hendrik W. van Tricht, Het leven van P. C. Hooft (2nd rev. ed.; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), pp. 155–65. Hooft’s correspondence has been edited and published in exemplary fashion: De briefwisseling van Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, ed. Hendrik W. van Tricht et al. (3 vols., Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink, 1976–1979). 44 Bernard L. Meulenbroek, ed., Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, vol. iv: 1629–1630–1631 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964). 45 Hooft to Baek, 25 Aug. 1631 (Van Tricht, Briefwisseling, nr. 474). See also Dutch corantos, pp. 17–18. 46 Hooft to Baek, 18 Aug. 1630 (Van Tricht, Briefwisseling, nr. 378).

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Hooft concentrated mainly on events unfolding in Europe, especially in the War of the Mantuan Succession. He made no mention in his letters of the Dutch victory in Brazil, and only once in 1630 did he comment directly on the activities of the West India Company, one day before Jan van Hilten published an English rumour – false as it later turned out – of Admiral Pater’s raid on the island of Trinidad.47 “I hear that the West India Company has captured another island”, Hooft wrote indifferently. He was concerned not so much by the attack as by the fact that the newspapers sheepishly copied an unsubstantiated report, and, on top of that, were late (again) in doing so. He used the rumour of Pater’s invasion as a scathing metaphor for lazy journalism: The Dutch corantos shall not ground here. In Amsterdam, even though they are scroungers, they are in like-minded company, and being educated there, who knows where they might be of use for the ensuing business they contain. For me, they have been discharged, if ever they had been recruited. With such company, I would not dare to muster any attack which required a serious effort.48 Hooft, of course, did not stop reading newspapers as he so menacingly suggested. Several intriguing letters of September and October 1630 show exactly why he continued to read them. They deal with a niggling uncertainty over the exact amount of treasure Don Fadrique had brought to Spain. Just like Verhoeven, Jansz and Van Hilten had followed the fleet’s progress throughout the year, so Hooft had been well informed about its whereabouts.49 In May Van Hilten reported that the admiral had anchored in Havana and would soon set sail for Europe, “even though many in Portugal and Spain are so dejected by the loss of Pernambuco that they cannot believe it and hold it for a lie”. In June, he passed on rumours from Antwerp – not mentioned by Verhoeven – that the fleet was still in Cartagena, that the story that it had already called in Havana was made public only “in order to encourage the populace” in Spain, and that Don Fadrique would not arrive until September or October. Van Hilten, unlike his Antwerp colleague, did not speculate on the fleet’s likely revenues until late 47 48 49

Courante No. 19 (11 May 1630). In reality Pater only passed Trinidad en route to Santa Marta, see Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean, p. 214. Hooft to Baek, 10 May 1630 (Van Tricht, Briefwisseling, nr. 356). Michel Morineau, Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux métaux. Les retours des trésors américains d’après les gazettes hollandaises (xvie-xviiie siècles) (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press / Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1985), pp. 60–71. A comparison between Courante No. 14 and Tijdingen No. 14 (both 6 April) indicates that Jansz sometimes had more Atlantic news than Van Hilten. Here, too, Jansz’ rhetoric regarding the treasure fleet was distinctly more partisan than that of his colleague.

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August, when rumours of its imminent arrival intensified. Then he first copied Verhoeven’s estimated sum of twenty million reales, but rectified the story the following week with a formal announcement of the exact amount.50 The inconsistent reports about the amount of treasure puzzled Pieter Hooft. On 10 September, three days after Van Hilten’s announcement of the correct sum had appeared, he expressed his doubts on the figure the newspaper had mentioned. To his brother-in-law he wrote: With this letter I return to you the corantos, which I fear have gotten so used to lying, that in their estimation of the Indian treasures, they have told us less than the truth. Because 9 million and 900 M. reales is much lower than eighteen million, which was reported to you from Antwerp. Indeed, others have told me, with stiff jaws, of twenty. When you know something more definite, I would like to hear it.51 It is clear what happened here. Baek and Hooft, always eager for news, had heard the reports of twenty million reales that had been put into print on an almost weekly basis by Verhoeven for more than a month. Whether or not their source was the Wekelijcke Tijdinghe is unclear, but the huge difference in the amounts which had suddenly arisen unsettled Hooft. Moreover, the actual revenue was much lower than that of previous treasure fleets.52 Hooft routinely blamed the Amsterdam newspapers for the confusion, but five days later, he had learned that for once they were accurate: Who knows what to expect next if the newspapers have learned to speak the truth on the cargo of the Indian fleet? Because surely the rumours from the Spanish side have been dispersed to make their riches look grand, and cannot be more wrong.53 Hooft’s grudging surprise that the newspapers had mentioned the true amount quickly gave way to his delight that the Spanish crown did not receive the 50

Courante No. 21 (25 May); Courante No. 26 (29 June); Courante No. 35 (31 Aug.); Courante No. 36 (7 Sept.). 51 Hooft to Baek, 10 Sept. 1630 (Van Tricht, Briefwisseling, no. 388). 52 Morineau, Incroyables gazettes, p. 61 mentions the following amounts as reported by the Amsterdam newspapers: Nov. 1626: 17,217,686 reales; Nov. 1627: 13,300,806 reales; (Sept. 1628: 0); April 1629: 12,488,000 reales. 53 Hooft to Baek, 15 Sept. 1630 (Van Tricht, Briefwisseling, nr. 390). The figure of eight million constitutes the difference between the actual treasure and the amount reported in the corantos.

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massive financial injection he had first feared. Two weeks later, he acknowledged that the newspapers should occasionally be trusted: [The newspapers] hold [an armistice in the Mantuan War] for the imagination of the Austrians, to keep heart for those on their side, as they did when they manufactured the riches of the Indian fleet.54 By now, Hooft unequivocally blamed Habsburg propaganda – and not the Amsterdam newspapers – for rigging the figures. In October, in another diatribe against unreliable corantos, he made an exception for news which had just arrived from Antwerp – and which had reached him through Van Hilten’s Courante five days earlier – that the Spanish crown was temporarily withholding from private investors their share of the treasure: There is certainty in Antwerp that the merchant in Spain will have to shed some of his silver feathers.55 In just over a month of reading news on the treasure fleet, Hooft had gone from accusing the Amsterdam corantos of lying to accepting that what they reported was reliable. Episodes such as this one were a reward for Van Hilten’s efforts to check his sources and attribute his Atlantic bulletins and probably go a long way towards explaining why even well-informed readers continued to read the weekly newspapers.

The Follow-Up: Digesting Atlantic News

As autumn arrived in Europe, the major Atlantic events of the year had passed. Both Van Hilten and Verhoeven reverted to their low-key reporting of the first three months of the year, with one marked difference. The Dutch capture of Pernambuco had transformed the balance of power to the extent that Verhoe­ ven had to acknowledge Brazil as another frontline. The bias remained – on both sides of the border – and customary anticipations once again pointed in opposite directions. According to the Wekelijcke Tijdinghe, the Dutch faced hunger and drought in Pernambuco, whereas in the Courante this plight was reserved for the Portuguese in the province’s interior. In this case both were

54 55

Hooft to Baek, 29 Sept. 1630 (Van Tricht, Briefwisseling, nr. 398). Hooft to Baek, 17 Oct. 1630 (Van Tricht, Briefwisseling, nr. 413); Courante No. 41 (12 Oct.).

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right.56 But while some of the newspapers’ contents were diametrically contradictory, the reverse happened as well. Since both the Amsterdam and Antwerp corantos now presented readers with a weekly trickle of information, it became appealing to copy each other’s reports. Copying was one of the everyday mechanisms of newspaper making in early modern Europe, and the infrequency of Atlantic news made it at times inevitable. Van Hilten, however, was prudent enough not to rely on Verhoeven’s coranto. Of his thirty Atlantic bulletins from Antwerp, only the erroneous figure of the treasure fleet’s revenues can be traced to the Wekelijcke Tijdinghe. Verhoeven was not nearly as restrained: He literally copied Van Hilten’s news or modified it to make Dutch setbacks appear more momentous than they were in reality. Two last examples will suffice. On Saturday 16 November Van Hilten reported that: The [Dutch] vessel Orangienboom with 24 cannons, destined for Pernambuco with victuals, has some days ago perished off Dunkirk.57 The news from Dunkirk had already reached Antwerp, where Verhoeven had put it in print and interpreted it as a boost for the Habsburg cause in Brazil. The Courante, however, was the first to mention the ship’s name and size, giving Verhoeven the chance to fill in the details. On 29 November, two weeks after he had broken the news himself, Verhoeven transcribed Van Hilten’s report, added the correct date and place of correspondence, and sunk the Orangienboom for the second time. Readers of the Wekelijcke Tijdinghe were left with the impression that the West India Company had lost two ships with provisions in quick succession.58 On top of such manipulations, Verhoeven also remained highly selective in his coverage of Atlantic events. Late in November, Van Hilten once again conveyed a minor disappointment for the Dutch, as their admiral Pieter Ita, returning from Brazil: confirmed the loss of a small fleet near Honduras, and also brought tidings that until 15 September, the treasure fleet had not arrived in Havana.59 Verhoeven copied the statement two weeks later:

56 57 58 59

Courante No. 51 (21 Dec.); Wekelijcke Tijdinghe No. 114 (29 Nov.). Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, p. 41. Courante No. 46 (16 Nov.). Wekelijcke Tijdinghe No. 109 (15 Nov.) and No. 115 (29 Nov.). Courante No. 48 (30 Nov.).

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[Ita] roamed the West Indian coast towards Havana until 15 September, when storms, and the lack of potential gain, made him leave. These ships bring confirmation of the loss of the previous fleet which was going to Honduras.60 Verhoeven indicated he had copied the information from Dutch corantos. He used the exact same words as Van Hilten, intimated that Ita had indeed sailed along the Cuban coast at the date mentioned in the Dutch bulletin but then deliberately omitted its final sentence which hinted at new delays for the year’s second treasure fleet. Clearly the Antwerp publisher was not interested in every story from the Western front. Instead he manipulated the flow of news to construct an imaginary Atlantic that was systematically biased in favour of the Spanish monarchy. Conclusion In the Low Countries, weekly newspapers reported on the Atlantic world on a regular basis. Jan van Hilten and Abraham Verhoeven had a decade of experience in reporting foreign affairs by means of a printed periodical and ­recognized the significance of the Atlantic world as an arena for news. Their newspapers demonstrated distinct variations in their coverage of events, meaning that different publics – occasionally at different times – were told different versions of the same events. In Antwerp, the Wekelijcke Tijdinghe exhibited a form of committed journalism inherent to a traditional culture of belonging, where good news was eagerly anticipated and bad news was blatantly suppressed. The Amsterdam newspapers, although far from impartial, did not display the same rigorous prejudice. The editorial strategy of the ­Courante, which reported from the Western front even when there was little or no copy, was fuelled by commercial considerations. Here too, good news was followed more closely than bad, but in order to keep selling newspapers to a well-informed readership, Van Hilten worked hard to establish a new standard of credibility. His painstaking methods included providing readers with details of when and where rumours and reports circulated and not withholding news of defeats. To compensate for the gaps in the arrival of fresh Atlantic news, many of the bulletins in the Low Countries originated across the border. Copying bulletins from other media, one of the cornerstones of early modern newspaper making, was an obvious solution to a chronic lack of hard news. Comparing 60

Wekelijcke Tijdinghe No. 120 (13 Dec.).

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the methods of two leading European newspapermen is particularly instructive here. Reports from across the border offered a convenient opportunity for Abraham Verhoeven to manipulate the state of Atlantic affairs. Jan van Hilten, in contrast to what historians have generally argued for early modern newspaper journalism, successfully withstood the temptation to borrow reports from his Antwerp counterpart, even though he relied on the Southern Netherlands for nearly half of his Atlantic bulletins. When possible he gathered his news from multiple sources and attempted to find confirmation at home of what he had learned from Spain through Brussels or Antwerp. Van Hilten’s efforts to ensure accuracy paid off. Even a critical reader like Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft had to admit on occasion that the Amsterdam newspapers did a respectable job. Despite the contrasting strategies of newspapermen north and south of the border, there were similarities too. Both in Amsterdam and in Antwerp, Atlantic reporting was characterized by unusually extended periods of anticipation. Hopes for the future determined the weekly concerns of the present, and developments that could potentially lead to victories were covered more ­systematically than disappointments that were likely to materialize – an ­idiosyncratic form of the partiality which defined the early modern press in general to varying degrees. In the final weeks before newspapermen expected good news from the Atlantic to be confirmed, they frantically gathered every available piece of information and constructed in print a weekly build-up to a long-awaited event. When “hard news” finally did disembark – of the successful invasion of an enemy colony or the arrival of much-needed American s­ ilver – months of anxiety erupted into a climactic form of reporting. Few events generated the extensive treatment reserved for good news from the Western front, in the form of special newspaper issues or regular issues completely devoted to a single news story. Once an Atlantic victory had been celebrated or, alternatively, defeat and disappointment had been digested, a new period of prolonged, commercially attractive anticipation could commence.

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a­ lways for the right reasons.3 The States General, the highest political body in the federation of seven provinces, organized a day of prayer to thank God for the victory He had bestowed on the Dutch. Bonfires were lit and cannons were fired across the border to demoralize Spanish troops and notify the population of the distant triumph. Thus the news of victory in Brazil quickly filtered through to all layers of society. For the West India Company, however, all of this was not enough. As a joint-stock company, it depended for its financial wellbeing on a healthy share price, and thus on public approval. For this reason the Heeren Negentien, the federal board of nineteen directors, was determined to manage the news and control how the victory would be stored in the collective consciousness. To achieve this, they took media matters into their own hands and decided to do so by visualizing the news. Francis Haskell, in his seminal study History and Its Images, identifies the dilemma that the West India Company directors faced as one of establishing credibility: [A] certain skepticism about the reliability of written history became particularly intense in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The ­accusations of tampering with, or misinterpreting, documents which ­polemicists hurled at each other during the period following the Reformation must surely have encouraged the belief that figured sources [my italics] were somehow more valuable than written ones in describing events “as they actually happened”.4 The directors, apparently in tune with the times, employed the Amsterdam engraver and publisher Claes Jansz Visscher to design a so-called nieuwsprent or “news map” – a single sheet of paper that combined an illustration of the geographical setting and the unfolding of the battle with a printed caption. Visscher was one of the most talented printmakers of the Dutch Golden Age, and had good connections to the urban authorities in Amsterdam. His workshop was located on the corner of the Kalverstraat and Dam Square, right next to the old city hall, and within easy walking distance of both the waterfront and the Stock Exchange, where many of his customers convened. As a resolute Calvinist at a time when religious orthodoxy was in the ascendancy throughout the United Provinces, he was ideally suited for the Company’s aggressive information strategy. He had already proved his worth as a loyal and skillful 3 See Chapter 5 in this volume. 4 Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 86.

Chapter 7

Beyond Law and Order: Encounters at Arguin and the Beginnings of the Dutch Slave Trade, 1633–1634 On 29 January 1633, three ships of the Dutch West India Company arrived at the tiny island of Arguin, situated in a bay along the coast of what today is Mauritania, Northwest Africa.1 A contemporary watercolor by the Amsterdam artist Johannes Vingboons offers a good visual impression of the sheer desolation which characterized the island (Figure 7.1). A treeless rock on the edge of the Sahara desert measuring no more than 12 square kilometres, Arguin was situated in a small natural bay just south of Cabo Blanco. It was an important node in the Atlantic trade in natural gum, a product which was used in early modern Europe for medicinal purposes, as well as in the textile industry.2 The Portuguese had set up a trading post on the island as early as 1445, and had later constructed a basic fortress to defend the island against European competitors. Merchants from the United Provinces had been participating in the gum trade since the late 1620s, but for the West India Company, Arguin was probably important mainly because of its strategic location halfway between European waters and the West African Gold Coast. Since 1625, when the Dutch had lost 441 soldiers in an unsuccessful attempt to capture the Portuguese stronghold of Elmina, the West India Company had been reluctant to attack Habsburg positions on the West African coast. Yet encouraging reports from Brazil, where Company troops were on the verge of taking over the sugar 1 This article was first published in Dutch as “Recht door zee: Ontvoering, muiterij en slavenhandel in Arguin, 1633–1634”, in: Michiel van Groesen, Judith Pollmann and Hans Cools, eds., Het gelijk van de Gouden Eeuw: Recht, onrecht en reputatie in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden (Hilversum: Verloren, 2014), pp. 57–71. Here it appears in revised form. I am grateful to Henk den Heijer for pointing out to me that the engraving by Frans Post, labelled “Arx Archin”, which I included in the initial article in Dutch, in fact represented not Arguin but Axim, on the Gold Coast. 2 There is hardly any scholarship on the Dutch expedition to Arguin in 1633. This paragraph is largely based on Henk den Heijer, Goud, ivoor en slaven: Scheepvaart en handel van de Tweede Westindische Compagnie op Afrika, 1674–1740 (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1997), pp. 14–16. On the exact date of the attack, see Reizen naar West-Afrika van Pieter van den Broecke, 1605–1614, ed. Klaas Ratelband (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950), pp. lxxvi–lxxvii. The only author providing more details on the battle between the Dutch and the Portuguese is Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche gewesten (Amsterdam, 1676), p. 370, but Dapper’s descriptions are often unreliable.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_009

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Figure 7.1 Johannes Vingboons, View of the castle at Arguin from the sea. [Amsterdam], c. 1665 Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 4.VELH.619 19

plantations of Pernambuco, required a reconsideration of the Dutch strategy. When the West India Company had been established in 1621, the directors (Heeren xix) had taken a principled stance against the trade in enslaved laborers from West Africa. But by the early 1630s the Dutch were slowly preparing to drop their objections. The attack on Arguin can be regarded as the first step in this process. The island was not only the main Atlantic gateway for the trans-Saharan slave trade, but also a crucial stepping stone for a renewed attack on the Portuguese stronghold at Elmina, and perhaps even, in due course, the elimination of all Habsburg positions on the West African coast. At Arguin, the garrison of fourteen Portuguese soldiers was no match for the invaders. On 5 February, forty Dutch soldiers led by commander Laurens Cameels took possession of the castle.3 3 On the misguided attack on Elmina in 1625, see Expeditie naar de Goudkust: Het journaal van Jan Dircksz Lam over de Nederlandse aanval op Elmina, 1624–1625, ed. Henk den Heijer (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2006). On the position of Arguin in the transatlantic slave trade, see Ivana Elbl, “The Volume of the Early Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1450–1521”, Journal of African

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The encounters at Arguin also had far-reaching legal consequences for the Atlantic efforts of the Dutch West India Company. It represented the first time the Dutch would exercise territorial sovereignty on the African continent as stipulated in the Company’s charter from 1621. As long as Dutch sailors and soldiers remained on board, or inside the walls of the fortresses in their possession, the legal situation was pretty straightforward. The so-called exterritoriality of trading factories outside Europe was an almost universally accepted legal doctrine, exploited with great success by the Dutch East India Company in Asia.4 For employees of the West India Company, this meant that they were subject to Dutch criminal law, and to other articles of Roman-Dutch civil law. But what happened when one left the Company premises, and interacted with the local inhabitants? Did employees of the West India Company realize where Dutch jurisdiction ended, and what would happen beyond those boundaries? And how could they know whether their assumptions of geopolitical jurisdiction were shared by the local population? In order to tackle these problems, Dutch merchants at Fort Nassau near Moree, Ghana, had concluded a treaty with local rulers in 1612 that determined the legal boundaries between Europeans and Africans.5 But after 1621, the situation was different. The States-­ General had given the West India Company the constitutional right to exercise full legal power in the colonies they would acquire, and had provided the Company with the military support to back up their claims. This article studies the moral difficulties the Dutch encountered on a desolate island in the Atlantic Ocean when proclaiming territorial sovereignty, as well as the ad hoc solutions they had to come up with when relations with the local population did not fit the legal system they wanted to impose. The case of Arguin enables us to witness the application of Dutch laws and the flexibility of Company servants when realities where not as neat and tidy as they had anticipated. Exploring

History 38.1 (1997), pp. 33–37, 41–44. In the sixteenth century, the trade declined: Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 257. The numbers of Portuguese and Dutch soldiers in Arguin are mentioned by Antonio van Diemen, who was on his way to Java in the East Indies, and who encountered the Vlissingen skipper Cornelis Roelemans at Cape Vincent. See L.C.D. van Dijk, Algemeene Konst- en Letterbode 66 (May 1854), p. 159; Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Jaap Bruijn, Femme Gaastra, and Ivo Schöffer (2 vols.; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979), nr. 0431.1. 4 Jan A. Somers, De voc als volkenrechtelijke actor (Deventer: Gouda Quint, 2001), p. 26. 5 Henk den Heijer, “Met bewillinghe van de swarte partij: Nederlands recht op de Goudkust in de zeventiende eeuw”, Pro Memorie 5.2 (2003), p. 350. At Goeree, in Senegal, a similar settlement may have been reached, but information on this has not survived.

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developments in Arguin also serves to explain why the West India Company, in later years, would act differently. Documents which have survived in the Nationaal Archief in The Hague demonstrate that the directors of the Company’s Zeeland Chamber, who were in charge of early ventures along the West African coast, were presented with moral problems of various kinds in the first two years after the successful invasion of the island. Relations with local inhabitants at Arguin were characterized by fundamental misunderstandings, the designated leaders of the Dutch garrison turned out to be hopelessly inept, leading to mutiny and murder, but also to private initiatives to enter the transatlantic slave trade – a practice which at the time was still strictly forbidden by the directors of the West India Company. The situation at Arguin ­quickly became so desperate, that the Company’s new strategy on the West African coast was in great peril. A group of individual Dutch traders, on course for the Senegambia region, was unpleasantly surprised by the mayhem they encountered at the island. Not only did they meticulously report their experiences to the directors in Zeeland, they also pragmatically solved the situation at Arguin to the benefit of the West India Company, allowing the directors the time to formulate a permanent solution to the various legal issues the Dutch encountered in West Africa.

Encounters at Arguin

In theory, the legal situation the Dutch faced in Arguin in February 1633 was simple. Four years earlier, in 1629, the States-General had issued the Ordre van Regieringe soo in Policie als Justitie in de plaetsen verovert en te veroveren in WestIndiën (“Order of Government both in Policy and Legal Matters in Settlements Conquered and to be Conquered in the West Indies”). This proclamation, originally devised after the conquest of the Brazilian capital Salvador de Bahia in May 1624 but subsequently extended and improved, was meant to prescribe legal issues that were not explicitly regulated in the Company charter of 1621. It proclaimed that Roman-Dutch law, as current in Holland (and especially Amsterdam) and, to a lesser extent, in Zeeland too, would be adopted in Africa and the Americas. Roman-Dutch law, uncodified yet purposely suited to the practices of the province of Holland in the late Middle Ages, encompassed both civil law and criminal law. For the West India Company, federal lawyers had added several articles of international law (ius gentium). In Article ii of the Company charter, it was stipulated that the West India Company had the right to “make contracts, charters, and alliances with the princes and the ‘natural people’ (naturellen)” between the Cape of Good Hope and the easternmost point of

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New Guinea.6 Article 43 of the Ordre van Regieringe re-iterated that all inhabitants of settlements under the rule of the Company, including local inhabitants, were subject to the same regulations, both in civilibus and in criminalibus. This also meant that it was not allowed for Company employees to enslave local people, something that was confirmed once again in Brazil several years later.7 Another document which was relevant for the situation in Arguin, the Vrij­ heden en Exemptien (“Privileges and Exemptions”), allowed individual merchants to make a contractual agreement with the West India Company to serve as the “patroon” of their own colony, as long as they succeeded in bringing a substantial number of settlers to the territory in their possession. The first charter, devised in Zeeland in March 1628, quickly led to a similar ruling in the Company’s Amsterdam Chamber in June 1629.8 Soon thereafter patroonships would be established in New Netherland, with Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s proprietary manor Rensselaerswijck, around current-day Albany in the H ­ udson ­Valley, the prime example.9 Yet the first patroonship in the Dutch Atlantic world dated back to the Spring of 1627 – so even before the Vrijheden en Exemptien regulated the practice. It belonged to the Vlissingen merchant Abraham van Pere, and was situated along the Berbice river, on the so-called Wild Coast in the Guyanas.10 Van Pere, who represented the interests of the major shareholders in the board of directors of the Zeeland Chamber, also displayed an interest in becoming the patroon of Arguin. In October 1632 he agreed with the other Zeeland directors to co-finance the conquest of the island – part public, part private in other words – after which he would enjoy a monopoly on trade in the Cabo Blanco region. Presumably Van Pere was not just interested in the 6

Johannes de Laet, Iaerlijck Verhael van de verrichtinghen der geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie, eds. S.P. L’Honoré Naber and J.C.M. Warnsinck (4 dln.; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1931–1937), i, p. 8. 7 Antonie J.M. Kunst, Recht, commercie en kolonialisme in West-Indië vanaf de zestiende tot de negentiende eeuw (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1981), pp. 57–61; Jacob A. Schiltkamp, “Legislation, Government, Jurisprudence, and Law in the Dutch West Indian Colonies: The Order of Government of 1629”, Pro Memorie 5.2 (2003): 320–34. 8 Kunst, Recht, commercie en kolonialisme, pp. 144–47; Van Cleaf Bachman, Peltries or Plantations: The Economic Policies of the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland 1623– 1639 (Baltimore and Londen: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 97–109. 9 Jaap Jacobs, “Dutch Proprietary Manors in America: The Patroonships in New Netherland”, in: Lou Roper and Bertrand van Ruymbeke, eds., Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 301–26; Janny Venema, Kiliaen van Rensselaer (1586–1643): Designing a New World (Hilversum/ Albany: Verloren & suny Press, 2011), pp. 241–67. 10 G.J. van Grol, Grondpolitiek in het West-Indische domein der Generaliteit; een historische studie (3 vols.; The Hague: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij, 1934–1937), ii, p. 25; Doeke Roos, Zeeuwen en de Westindische Compagnie (1621–1674) (Hulst: Van Geyt, 1992), pp. 23–26, 29.

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gum trade and the hunting of turtles, but also in the option of transporting slaves from Arguin to his patroonship in Berbice. Once before, several years earlier, Van Pere had already received extraordinary permission from the Company to ship six enslaved Africans to the Guyanas. He may have speculated that what had hitherto remained an exception might become the rule.11 The contract between Van Pere and his fellow directors provided Arguin with an unprecedented legal status, even within the narrow confines of the emerging Dutch Atlantic empire.12 Formally, the island resorted under the authority of the Chamber of Zeeland, just like the more southerly island of Goeree was the responsibility of the Chamber of Amsterdam. Under the contract with Van Pere, the Zeeland directors retained the authority over military matters, whereas the patroon was responsible for the support of the settlers he was contractually obliged to bring to the island – in this case mainly fishermen, alongside a few merchants and their servants. Expeditions to Arguin would be co-financed by the Zeeland Chamber and Van Pere. In contrast to other Dutch factories along the West African coast, Arguin would not have its own Council of Justice. The commander, a Company employee, would settle military issues, while the commies, a functionary in the service of Van Pere, would have jurisdiction of issues relating to the settlers. The contract also sheds light on the appeal of such a desolate island for a businessman like Abraham van Pere. In the months preceding Van Pere’s interest, two Dutch ships returning from “West India” had intercepted an English vessel who had five “Barbarijers”, probably Berbers from the Cabo Blanco region around Arguin, on board. Once they had arrived in Middelburg, the Africans had offered Van Pere to help him conquer “Fort Argina” if only he would be willing to take them there. The Africans also pledged the support to the Dutch cause of the “barbarissen and moors of the region”. Inspired by this offer, Van Pere asked his colleagues for permission to fit out a fleet of three ships – the Regenboog, the Noortsterre, and the Jager – to exploit this opportunity. After the three ships had succeeded in defeating the Habsburg defenders, the West India Company immediately began to integrate Arguin into a newly devised geopolitical strategy for Africa. The island would become a key post for traders in gum and hides in the Senegambia region, 500 kilometers to the south, where French merchants, mainly from Normandy, had provided fierce 11 12

Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 13. Nationaal Archief (NA), Oude West-Indische Compagnie (owic) 42, fols. 63–64 (25 Oct. 1632). A good survey is offered by Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa: Empires, Merchants, and the Atlantic System, 1596–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 29–31, 39, 72. In Portuguese Africa, too, Arguin formed an administrative exception.

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Figure 7.2 Anon., manuscript map of the castle at Arguin, c. 1633? Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 4.VEL.744

competition for the Dutch since the late 1620s.13 Maps of Arguin and its castle with walls as high as nine meters were carefully studied by the directors in Zeeland before being copied and forwarded to their colleagues in Amsterdam (Figure 7.2).14 Several directors were assigned with the task of systematically reading the papers of the Portuguese governor of the island in the hope of obtaining information regarding trading contacts with the local inhabitants.15 Abraham van Pere decided to send his son Daniel to the island to serve as chief-merchant (commies), and received generous support from his fellow regents. From September onwards, the Zeeland directors made arrangements for a substantial expedition to Arguin with 180 soldiers or at least “as many 13

G. Thilmans, “Les planches sénégalaises et mauritaniennes des ‘Atlas Vingboons’ (xviie siècle)”, Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire 37, serie B, no. 1 (1975): 95–116. 14 NA, owic 21, fol. 158r (12 May 1633); NA, 4.VEL 744. See also: Bea Brommer and Henk den Heijer, Comprehensive Atlas of the West India Company i, the old wic, 1621–1674 (Voorburg: Atlas Maior, 2011), p. 352. 15 NA, owic 21, fol. 159r (23 May 1633).

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soldiers as could be got” to recuperate the fortress if the Habsburgs had managed to take back control. If the fortress was still in Dutch hands, the expedition was ordered to expand Dutch influence along the West African coast.16 The appointment of Daniel van Pere as the main civil officer in Arguin turned out to be an unfortunate one. According to the nineteenth-century Zeeland historian Edelhard Swalue, writing to encourage provincial pride, Van Pere junior was chosen because of his “courageous nature”, but shortly after he had arrived at Arguin, his decision-making let him down.17 On 20 or 21 July 1633 he left the fortress accompanied by eight soldiers to trade in gum at Port d’Arco – a regional marketplace along the coast to the south of the island. In order to find his way there, the “Moors” had offered to take him there in one of their small boats. The “Moors” of the region, as the Dutch called them, were probably nomadic Beni Hassan, Arab traders from Yemeni descent who dominated the southwestern Sahara region and had subjected the local Berber population.18 Perhaps the Beni Hassan viewed the transition from Portuguese to Dutch rule at Cabo Blanco as the ideal opportunity to diminish ­European influence in the region. Whatever their strategy may have been, Van Pere never returned to Arguin. The Dutch troops who had remained on the island quickly suspected something was wrong when the local inhabitants, who had built their dwellings against the walls of the fortress, suddenly left. The soldiers panicked, and held their leading officer, Commander Cameels, accountable for the sudden decline in Euro-African relations. In a rebellious atmosphere, and without clear leadership from either Company officials or the employees of the patroon, they decided to put Cameels in chains. It took a long time before order would return to Arguin, not least because the lack of a strong Dutch presence on the Gold Coast meant that the island was not (yet) located on one of the main shipping routes in the Dutch orbit. Most West India Company ships sailed straight to Brazil, crossing the Atlantic after taking in water at Cape Verde. The Dutch ship Sperwer, which passed 16 NA, owic 21, fol. 181r (26 Sept. 1633). For the administrative organisation of Arguin between 1634 and 1678, see Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in West Africa, 31. 17 E.B. Swalue, De daden der Zeeuwen gedurende den Opstand tegen Spanje (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1846), pp. 315–17. Swalue here mentions a seventeenth-century document which I have not been able to trace. 18 Ulrich Rebstock, “West Africa (tenth-twelfth/sixteenth-eighteenth centuries)”, in: Maribel Fierro, ed., The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 480–502, esp. pp. 480–83. As far as I know, there is no literature on Dutch relations with the Beni Hassan. For an exploration of Dutch relations with the adjacent sultanate of Morocco, see Maartje van Gelder, “The Republic’s Renegades: Dutch Converts to Islam in Seventeenth-Century Diplomatic Relations with North Africa”, Journal of Early Modern History 19.2/3 (2015): 175–98.

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Cabo Blanco in October 1633, some three months after Van Pere’s disappearance, could not even locate the island and sailed on to the Senegambia region.19 It was not until eight months later, in March 1634, that three ships from Zeeland finally reached Arguin. The skippers and merchants in charge of this small fleet were astonished when they learned what had happened to Van Pere and his men. They immediately notified the directors of the Zeeland Chamber, and it is thanks to their letters that we can get a clear idea of what had happened on the island in the meantime, and thanks to their pragmatism that the legal position of both the West India Company and patroon Abraham van Pere were ultimately re-established.

Re-establishing Order

In January 1634, the Tijger and the Noortsterre left the port of Middelburg, carrying 100 and 25 soldiers respectively. Their assignment was to sail to Arguin to see if extra troops would be required there, before taking the remaining men to Recife where an ongoing guerrilla war obstructed Dutch progress. The experienced Joos Coeck, who had served in Pernambuco during the invasion of Olinda, was in charge of this small expedition.20 At the end of the month, a third ship left Zeeland to trade in the estuary of the Senegal river. Skipper and oppercommies of this ship, the Moriaen, was Dierick Ruiters, author of the pilot guide Toortse der Zee-vaert (“Torch of Navigation”), and veteran of both Brazilian campaigns of the West India Company.21 Since returning from Pernambuco, Ruiters had shifted his interests to trade in the Senegambia region, partly because he had already enjoyed some success there in previous years, and partly because his relationship with the Zeeland directors had become distinctly icy in the early 1630s. By supporting Ruiters’ annual expeditions to Senegal, the directors removed one of their most unpredictable ship’s captains from the main stage of Dutch Atlantic ambitions, Brazil. After Ruiters had assessed the chaos at Arguin, he returned to his ship in “Sleepers Bay” (Slapersbaai) where the three ships lay anchored, and informed the directors in ­Middelburg in typically blunt fashion:

19 NA, owic 50-21 (21 Oct. 1633) is a letter from the Sperwer’s skipper, navigator, and merchant to Daniël van Pere (who had already been obducted at the time). According to the address on the back of the letter they had “Argijn niet konden vinden”. 20 NA, owic 21, fol. 187v (27 Oct. 1633) & owic 22, fol. 2v (12 Jan. 1634). 21 On Ruiters, see the introduction in Toortse der Zee-vaert, ed. S.P. L’Honoré Naber (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1913). See also Chapter 3 of this volume.

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The Noortsterre has returned here from the Castle at Arguin on 11 March, and has brought [as prisoners] all the officers and soldiers whom it had encountered at the castle because of the great disorder among them: the soldiers has held their commander captive for around seven months, and they testify that the commander had not been seeing eye to eye with Mr. Daniel van Pere. […] We understand from those who we have brought over from Arguin that some three or four weeks ago, they had spoken to some Moors who had told them that Mr. Daniel van Pere and two others were still alive, & very skinny.22 Discord, mutiny, and kidnapping were serious problems at the best of times, but on a tiny, desolate island along the West African coast, they required all the available support that could be found. Ruiters indicated to the directors that Captain Coeck and his two skippers Cornelis Roelemans and Cornelis Pietersz Hoofe had requested him to stay to help solve the matter, and that he had offered to do so “as long as we are here” – a choice of words which implied that he was not prepared to let the failings of the Company get in the way of his own trading venture. A French ship from Dieppe had passed Arguin on its way south towards the Senegambia region, and Ruiters was eager to leave too: I only wish that the situation would have been better for the Company, and it hurts me to witness this. I have warned the Heeren before, at their own request, when the Moors were still in Middelburg, that they were a very poor and barbarous nation, who one should not have believed too lightly but treat with great care.23 Apparently Ruiters had warned the directors to be careful when dealing with the five Berbers who had been brought to Middelburg, but Abraham van Pere had not heeded his advice. Ruiters, moreover, added that he had never 22 NA, owic 50–55 (22 March 1634), fol. 1r-v: “Het noortsterretjen is de 11e meert al hier weder van het casteel Argijn gecomen en hebben met hun gebracht (als gevangen,) alle de Officieren en soldaten, welcke op het casteel voor desen gelegen hebben, doe door dien daer een geheele diemult onder hun geweest is: de Soldaten hadden den commander ontrent de seven maenden gevangen gehouden, en getuijgen dat den commander niet en hadde met Sr. Daniel van Peris connen accorderen […] Wij verstaen uijt hun die van het casteel sijn datse over 3 a 4 weken met mooren hebben gesproken, die seijden dat Sr. Daniel van Peris met noch twee int leven waren; & was seer mager”. 23 Idem, fol. 1v: “Ick weinste dat de dinghen voor de compagnie hier anders hadde gestaen […] en moet dit met herte leet aensien; ick heb de Heeren voor desen gesecht, op hun eijgen versoeck, aleer daer oijt na was getracht, als de mooren nog tot middelb[urg] waren, dat de mooren waren een heel beroijde en oock barbarische natie, diemen niet soo licht most gelooven, maar voorsichtelick daer mede handelen”.

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believed the Dutch attack on Arguin to have been prudent, “because the Dutch can gain little profit in Portuguese waters, as I know all too well from experience”, a clear reminder of the hardship Ruiters had suffered in Brazil, where he had been a prisoner of the Habsburgs for thirty months after trading illegally in the vicinity of Guanabara Bay, near Rio de Janeiro. He concluded his letter from Sleepers Bay by giving the directors another piece of advice: Given the current situation, I believe that the Heeren must stop their wars against the Moors that were started deliberately and through a lack of order […] and most importantly there must be a man who knows how to deal with the Moors. […] When one seeks to return to peace with them, one should never mention the name of Mr. Daniel van Pere, as if one did not know him.24 Ruiters could not have been much clearer. That same day, the Moriaen departed for the Senegal estuary. Dierick Ruiters may have been eager to emphasize the directors’ complicity in the chaos, but he had also assisted in re-establishing order at Arguin. Faced with so much confusion, Coeck, Ruiters, and the two ship’s captains of the fleet destined for Recife had decided to have all the remaining officers and soldiers removed from the island and sent back to Zeeland on the Noortsterre. Because they estimated – correctly as it would later turn out – that Daniel van Pere had been murdered by the local inhabitants, and because the authority of Lieutenant Cameels had been put into question, the four men agreed to name one of their own officers as the new commander at Arguin. The ideal candidate for this role was Johannes Beverlandt, one of Ruiters’ companions on the Moriaen. Beverlandt had visited the region before, and had some first-hand knowledge of local customs. This was an important requirement for Captain Coeck and his ad hoc councilors, because they wanted the new commander “to try to re-establish relations with the Moors, and to attempt to free the remaining Dutch prisoners if they were still alive”. But Beverlandt did not want to stay at Arguin, and explained in a separate letter to the directors in Zeeland that he had rejected the honorable position “for reasons known to myself”. If the regents were interested in why he had refused, he would be more than 24

Idem, fols. 1v–2r: “en ter wijle het nu soo is (alst is) mijn duijnckens onder corectie; als het de Heeren believen te soude, moet voor eerstdesen haeren oorloogen tegens de mooren door quade ordre en moetwillicheijt hier begaen […] nedergelecht werden, en voornemen moet daer een man wesen die met mooren weet om te gaene. […] Indien men met de mooren weder vrede wil soecken, moet van Sr. Daniel van Peris niet geroert werden, al ofte men hem niet en kende”.

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willing to elaborate on this in person once he would return from Senegal.25 In the same letter, Beverlandt explained to the directors why relations between the Dutch and the local population had deteriorated: Regarding the unrest and discontent from the Moors, we understand that it has been caused by the incapacity and lack of consideration of Commies Van Pere […] in dealing with the Moors. He refused to recognize their interpreters, and to acknowledge their old customs and laws.26 The clash between two different legal traditions, or at least between different perceptions of legal customs along the West African coast, was a familiar problem for European traders. One of the causes for misunderstanding was that many African communities did not consider land possession a significant parameter, in contrast to European laws and customs. But at the same time, some privileges of the West India Company at Arguin were recognized also by the local population, for example the right to levy tax. According to Olfert Dapper, writing in the late 1660s, the population at Arguin paid a tribute to the Company of one-fifth of all the fish they caught. This practice, which the Dutch had inherited from the Portuguese, was not uncommon along the West African coast. On the Gold Coast, for example, the Company pledged to protect the local inhabitants from hostile invaders.27 But even if such an agreement had also been established at Arguin, this did not mean that Daniel van Pere had the right to subject the Beni Hassan to Roman-Dutch law. Neither the Company charter nor the Ordre van Regieringe mentioned Dutch involvement in local issues. Van Pere, then, had clearly crossed the line here, also in the eyes of the West India Company. Johannes Beverlandt, however, intimated that Van Pere’s lack of understanding had not been the only obstacle to a fruitful trading relationship with the Beni Hassan. Already before Van Pere’s arrival in Arguin, the Dutch skipper Cornelis Huijge and a handful of his men – participants in the initial expedition to Arguin in February 1633 – had increased existing tensions on the island 25 NA, owic 50-54 (22 March 1634), fol. 1v: “om de preuve te doen de Mooren weder tot accoort en handelinge te bringen en te trachten dan de voorsz gevangenen te losse soose nog int leven mochten zijn” and “om redenen mij moverende”. 26 Ibid.: “Nopende de onlust en miscontentement vande mooren verstaen wij gecauseert te wesen door d’incapaciteijt en nonkennisse vanden Commijs van Peres […] hoe met de Mooren gehandelt dient, geweijgert hebbende de Tolcken en andere oversten haere Costuijmen en oude gerechticheden”. 27 Dapper, Naukeurige beschrijvinge, p. 370. Den Heijer refers to a similar contract between the West India Company and the inhabitants of Axim on the Gold Coast in 1642, see “Met bewillinghe van de swarte partij”, p. 357.

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shortly after the conquest of the fortress when he had “captured several Moors, and transported them to the West Indies”.28 Not only was it extremely unwise to transport people against their will to Berbice or Pernambuco with whom the West India Company hoped to build a trading relationship in West Africa, it was also against Company policy. In search of a definitive strategy regarding the transatlantic slave trade, the West India Company for now confined its employees to trading in slaves only if they were captured at high sea, as part of privateering expeditions against Habsburg ships.29 The officer at Arguin who was assigned to the task of prohibiting the trade in enslaved laborers, according to Beverlandt, had been given a considerable sum to look away as the Africans were smuggled on board. These clandestine and inhumane practices led the West India Company to suffer from “great prejudice, and other Dutchmen and other servants of the Company in many locations were innocently murdered”.30 Perhaps Beverlandt regarded the kidnapping of Van Pere by the Beni Hassan as a form of retribution for the covert trade in slaves. No wonder he rejected the honor of becoming the next commander at Arguin. Ultimately Cornelis Pietersz Hoofe, skipper of the Noortsterre, was willing to accept the command over the fortress at Arguin. In an official document, written and signed on board the Tijger on 20 April 1634, twelve leading officers, merchants, and skippers – including Coeck, Ruiters, and Beverlandt – ­notified the directors in Zeeland of their decision, made in the light of the “great confusion” and “disobedience of the soldiers” at Arguin, to put Hoofe in charge of the settlement as commander, with instructions to “regain the favor of the Moors and re-establish trading relations”.31 Hoofe would be supported by ­Pieter ­Couwenburgh, chief-merchant on Dierick Ruiters’ expedition to Senegal, and, most importantly, a cousin of the patroon of Arguin, Abraham van Pere.32 In this way, the decision made on location by those who happened to be present there neatly reflected the shared responsibility for the settlement at Arguin of 28 NA, owic 50-54, fol. 1v: “eenige Mooren [hadden] genomen, en in Westindien vervoert”. 29 Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 12–17. The Leiden-based director of the Company’s Amsterdam Chamber, Johannes de Laet, later intimated that the Company had managed to ship and sell 2,356 slaves in this fashion: Ernst van den Boogaart and Pieter C. Emmer, “The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596–1650”, in: H.A. Gemery and J.S. Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 355–59. 30 NA owic 50-54, fol. 2r. 31 NA, owic 50-53 (20 March 1634): “confusie”, “ongehoorsaemheyt der soldaten”, and “weder te rug tot haer faveur inde handelingen sien te crijgen”. 32 That Couwenburgh had a kinship relation with Abraham van Pere is not mentioned in the document, but is confirmed by NA, owic 50-58 (11 Apr. 1634). Presumably this was so evident for the Zeeland directors that it did not need to be mentioned specifically.

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both the monopolistic company and the private investor with whom the directors had signed an agreement according to the stipulations of the Vrijheden and Exemptien.33 The official document concluded with the clause that Hoofe would be entitled to a salary equivalent to that of Daniel van Pere, and that all of this should be considered only a temporary answer to an urgent problem, enabling Abraham van Pere and the Zeeland directors to work out a more permanent resolution in due course. The letters written by Dierick Ruiters and Johannes Beverlandt must have provided the regents in Zeeland with a good impression of the situation at Arguin. Yet Ruiters and Beverlandt were trading on their own accord, albeit with the consent of the West India Company. They had not been under orders to evaluate the situation at Arguin, they just happened to be in the area at the right time. Their letters probably served only to confirm the eyewitness accounts of members of the official expedition under Joos Coeck sent to the island by the Zeeland directors. Hence two more letters, almost identical in style and content, were sent to Zeeland from Arguin in April 1634 – both written by Johan Simonsz Lacher, a member of Coeck’s expedition. Not only were these letters longer and written at a later date to include more recent developments, they also advised the regents at home how to deal with the perpetrators who returned on board of the Noortsterre. The first of the two letters, signed only by Lacher himself, once again related what the Dutch skippers had found in March when they had arrived at Arguin. With the benefit of hindsight, the words Lacher used to describe the chaos were more unforgiving than those of Ruiters and Beverlandt three weeks earlier. “Command was placed in the hands of ignorant folk”, Lacher wrote scornfully, “who by their good authority have gone so far that it embarrasses me to write about it at greater length”.34 Since their initial observations in March, the crew of the Noortsterre and the Tijger had gathered more information about what had gone wrong in the relationship with the Beni Hassan, and who exactly could be held responsible for disobedience and mutiny. “If the honorable directors would be interested in the truth, they should ask the commander of the castle at Arguin, Laurens Cameels, or his sergeant and Capo des Armes”.35 He concluded his letter with a personal opinion on what was required for a 33 Kunst, Recht, commercie en kolonialisme, pp. 144–45. 34 NA, owic, 50-58 (11 Apr. 1634), fol. 1r: “het commande aen een Partie onweetent volck was gegeven, die het door haar goede commande soo verre hebben gebracht dat ick mijn schame daer veel vandt te schriven”. 35 Ibid.: “Indien mijn heeren bewinthebberen daer het rechte bescheyt van gelieven te weten, sullen het selve van de Commandeur vandt Casteel Argijn genaempt Laurens Cameelis het beste cunnen weten ofte vande Sergeant ende Capo des Armes”.

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successful future of the trading post at Arguin. The directors clearly regarded the island as an important strategic position in the Atlantic world, Lacher inferred from the number of soldiers who participated in Coeck’s expedition, but even the 18 to 20 men who were assigned to be left behind at Arguin before the ships would cross the ocean towards Brazil, in addition to a small garrison of 25 soldiers, would not turn the outpost into a profitable one for Company and patroon “unless we would trade with the Moors in negroes, which we are not inclined or allowed to do”.36 The other issue left to be decided on was the sentence of the mutineers. Serious criminal offences in the Dutch orbit were resolved by a council which existed of at least six high-ranking Company officials. Lacher’s second letter to the directors in Zeeland had a more official status, and was signed by ten men including Coeck, Roelemans, Hoofe, and Couwenburgh. It explained the punishments handed out at Arguin according to the rules of the West India Company, and advised the directors on further legal steps to be taken once the main culprits, named as three officers and three soldiers, returned to Zeeland.37 First, of course, Lacher reported that they had “condemned them like we always do”, meaning that the monthly wages of the soldiers had been withheld for the entire period up to 1 April 1634, and the officers had been demoted to the rank of soldiers, with a lower salary, and put to regular duties at the discretion of the councilors. Then, crew members of the Noortsterre and the Tijger had gone ashore to find local inhabitants who were prepared to testify against Lieutenant Cameels, his sergeant, and the Capo des Armes. The first attempt was a failure, as the Beni Hassan ran away as the boat of the West India Company approached. The second attempt was more successful. [The Dutch] lured them towards the castle where nine of them were gathered. We spoke with an interpreter who had lived near the fortress, and asked them why they had suddenly left the houses they had built against the castle walls. They said they had done so because the Dutch had dismissed the man who was first their interpreter, and replaced him with another man – because he who is the interpreter is the leader of the Moors.38

36

Idem, fols. 1r-v: “doort handelen van de mooren met negers, het welcke bij ons qualick wil ofte can gedaen wesen”. The “negroes” Lacher mentioned were probably black Mauritanians who had remained in the region and forced into slavery by the Beni Hassan. 37 Den Heijer, “Met bewillinghe van de swarte partij”, pp. 358–59. 38 NA, owic 50-60 (12 Apr. 1634), fol. 1v: “creghen haer met schoone woorden bij haer ende brachten der 9 int casteel: Spracken oock met een tolck die bij het casteel gewoont hadde die wij vraghden waarom dat sij vandt casteel waren gegaen. Seijde het meest was

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The Zeeland sailors and soldiers who had conquered Arguin in February 1633, then, had made a grave miscalculation in dealing with the local population. The Beni Hassan had subsequently captured Van Pere who had interfered with local customs. In the chaotic fallout of this series of misunderstandings, only three Dutchmen had not participated in acts of mutiny and treason. The officers decided to allow these three men to remain at Arguin, even though one of them, the provisioner Jan Dircksz, had helped others in drowning a crippled African man, and was deprived of his salary for the months until 1 April 1634. With this verdict, the judicial process at Arguin was concluded. The Tijger continued its voyage, first to the mouth of the Senegal river where fresh water and wood were taken in, and then on to Recife, where upon arrival on 10 June 1634 Joos Coeck informed the Political Council dryly that the fortress at Arguin was “in a sober state”.39 The Noortsterre arrived in Middelburg in the first week of July, where the trial against the mutineers would start in earnest.

Doing Justice

The directors in Zeeland began to act as soon as the Noortsterre had anchored. They contacted Johan van de Poele, the provincial prosecutor, and forwarded him all the documentation they had received from Arguin to establish how to proceed, and “which confessions or denials would be overseen by this Chamber”. The province and the Zeeland Chamber agreed that two directors would be present when the interrogations would commence. Until that time, the six mutineers were locked up in Westpoort, the municipal prison in Vlissingen. Then the directors appointed three from their midst, including Abraham van Pere, to settle any loose ends and report to the Heeren xix, the ceos of the West India Company. The directors agreed that the immediate response to the chaos at Arguin had been satisfactory. When preparing the ship Regenboog for a new expedition to the island, in August 1634, they did not send a new designated commander of the settlement. Cornelis Hoofe would remain in charge at Arguin, where apparently he did a good job, because several years later he would be appointed commander of another trading post in the Dutch Atlantic managed by the Zeeland Chamber, Fort Kijkoveral in Essequibo.40 g­ ecommen om datse hem die eerst tolck was hadden afgesedt ende een ander in sijn plaetse gemaeckt – wandt die daer tolck is als hooft over de mooren sijn”. 39 De Laet, Iaerlijck Verhael, iv, p. 35: “in een soberen staet”. 40 NA, owic 22, fols. 29v–30r (10 July 1634); fol. 34r (1 Aug. 1634); fols. 35v–36r (10 Aug. 1634); fol. 39r (31 Aug. 1634); Roos, Zeeuwen en de Westindische Compagnie, p. 35.

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The judicial process in Zeeland proceeded smoothly, partly because of the efforts of the Dutch skippers at Arguin. The prosecutor could rely on the written testimonies of several experienced Company employees and nine West African eyewitnesses, and they had a clear idea of who the main suspects were. The investigation focused squarely on the three officers – Lieutenant Laurens Cameels, Sergeant Martin Stijfs, and the Capo des Armes who remained unnamed. It is not entirely clear what the charges against Cameels might have been. Based on the letter of Dierick Ruiters, it appears that he did not get along well with Daniel van Pere before the latter disappeared, and Cameels may have also been responsible for trying to replace the leader-cum-interpreter of the Beni Hassan with one of his compatriots which ultimately may have led to Van Pere’s death. Sergeant Stijfs could be held accountable for the captivity of Cameels, and in more general terms for the disorder of which, as Johannes Beverlandt had put it, “according to our examination the sergeant is the main author”.41 By the end of September, the provincial court in Zeeland judged, “regarding the matter of Camelius and the Sergeant who are still imprisoned in Vlissingen […] that the West India Company is entitled to pursue criminal charges and punish them to death”. It seems that both Cameels and Stijfs realized that the only thing that could save them was to co-operate with the prosecutor. Already in the first week of September, they had declared that the three soldiers deserved to be released, because they had been disobedient only when requested to catch fish and to bury some of their deceased comrades. According to the officers, there was no reason to charge them for their role in the chaos at Arguin. After this plea, the three soldiers were quickly released, and they subsequently even succeeded in a request for payment for the months they had spent in the service of the Company at Cabo Blanco.42 Soon enough, the Zeeland directors also ordered the release of the three officers. In December, the names of Cameels and Stijfs resurfaced in the minutes of the directors’ meeting. The document still referred to them as former prisoners for “their rebellion” at Arguin, but it is not clear what the sentence for this crime, if any, had been. Perhaps the Company in retrospect adjudged the mutiny to have been a spontaneous one triggered by an exceptional situation, in this case the disappearance of Van Pere, and not a preordained one, for which sentences could be severe.43 The lieutenant and the sergeant had been given 41 NA, owic 50-54 (22 Mar. 1634), fol. 1v: “wij int ecxsamineren bevinden de Chergant de meeste Auteur is”. 42 NA, owic 22, fols. 43v–44r (25 Sept. 1634). 43 Jaap R. Bruijn and Els S. van Eyck van Heslinga, “De scheepvaart van de Oost-Indische Compagnie en het verschijnsel muiterij”, in: Idem, eds., Muiterij: Oproer en berechting op schepen van de voc (Haarlem: De Boer Maritiem, 1980), pp. 21–23; Herman Ketting, Leven,

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sufficient encouragement to apply for their deducted wages with the Zeeland directors as well, but this request was denied, indicating that the two officers may have regained their freedom, but not their honor.44 That was the end of the matter for the Zeeland directors and, ironically enough, also the end of the geopolitical significance of Arguin in the Dutch ­Atlantic world. In September 1635, word reached Middelburg that Cornelis Hoofe had successfully re-established trading relations with the Beni Hassan at Cabo Blanco, which meant that the trade in gum could now begin in earnest. But one month later, in October, the Zeeland directors changed their geopolitical strategy and effectively relegated Arguin to the fringes of the Atlantic world when they decided to send the ship Eendracht to Guinea and Angola to start up their participation in the transatlantic slave trade.45 Dutch troops in Pernambuco had finally gained access to the province’s lucrative sugar plantations by defeating the remaining Portuguese guerrilla troops. The words of Johan ­Simon Lacher from April 1634, that the only profitable trade in West Africa was the trade in enslaved laborers, acquired a prophetic quality when the Heeren xix decided to put aside any lingering moral objections against the enforced submission and transportation of other human beings. From that moment onwards, everything changed. Instead of becoming a trading post in its own right, Arguin turned into a stop-over for Dutch ships destined for the Gold Coast. In August 1637, a fleet of the West India Company from Brazil conquered Elmina, and soon several other Portuguese positions would fall into the hands of the Dutch too – at Sao Tomé, and, most importantly in September 1641, at Sao Paulo de Luanda.46 Except for a brief English interlude in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Arguin remained a Dutch possession until the end of the Franco-Dutch War in 1678. But like the Dutch before them, the French did not know quite what to do with it. They dismantled the fortress and abandoned the island, which in 1685 was appropriated by the Elector of Brandenburg.47 werk en rebellie aan boord van Oost-Indiëvaarders, 1596–1650 (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2005), p. 256. 44 NA, owic 22, fol. 52v (11 Dec. 1634). 45 NA, owic 22, fol. 115v (22 Oct. 1635). See also Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 46–49, who emphasizes the partition of the Senegambian coast into a southern region where European merchants participated in the slave trade, and a northern region including Arguin where the Dutch ultimately lost out to the English and the French. 46 Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 1600–1650: Angola, Kongo en São Tomé, ed. René Baesjou (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000). 47 There is scholarship on Brandenburg rule in Arguin (1685–1721), a small booklet which unfortunately I have not been able to consult: Till Philip Koltermann, Zur brandenburgischen Kolonialgeschichte: die Insel Arguin vor der Küste Mauretaniens (Potsdam: unze Verlag, 1999). See also: Den Heijer, Goud, ivoor en slaven, pp. 181–84. A survey of the history

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The difference between European and African legal systems remained a point of concern also for later generations of Dutch administrators on the West African coast. Even well over a century after the fiasco at Arguin, in 1760, Director-General Jan Pieter Theodore Huydecoper found out only after he had arrived in Elmina that the Codex Justinianus and a theoretical treatise on ­Roman-Dutch law by the seventeenth-century legal scholar Simon van ­Leeuwen which he had brought to the Gold Coast were of very little use to him there. He realized that to function properly at Elmina, he had to get acquainted with the local laws and customs.48 If Commander Laurens Cameels and commies Daniel van Pere has done the same at Arguin in February 1633, a lot of trouble could have been avoided. Yet the chaos at Arguin provided an important lesson for the directors of the West India Company. The stories of clandestine trading in enslaved laborers on the island, the kidnap and murder of Daniel van Pere, and the rebellion of the officers and soldiers against their ranking officer were still fresh in the minds of the Heeren xix when they had to make a few critical decisions about their geopolitical strategy on the West African coast.49 Firstly, they decided that there would be no new patroonships in Africa based on the Vrijheden en Exemptien, presumably hoping that further clashes between representatives of the Company and a patroon like at ­Arguin could be avoided. Secondly, as successor to Cornelis Hoofe as commander at Arguin, they appointed Joos Coeck, who returned to the island in March 1637. Hence they followed up Dierick Ruiters’ advice that Arguin ­needed a commander “who knows how to deal with the Moors”. In the wake of events at Arguin and in Brazil, the directors also considered their participation in the transatlantic slave trade inevitable if they wanted to make a profit in Africa. For the directors, slaves quickly became a commodity like any other, but in order to avoid the clandestine shipment of enslaved laborers in the future, the Company retained the monopoly on the slave trade – even after the late 1630s when they allowed free trade in other Atlantic ­commodities such as sugar and brazilwood. And finally, after the conquest of Elmina in 1637 the West India Company would conclude treaties with local of Arguin – including the Dutch period – can also be found in Théodore Monod, L’Ile d’Arguin (Mauritanie): Essai historique (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, 1983). 48 Rob Krabbendam, “Reading in Elmina: The Private Library of Jan Pieter Theodoor Huydecoper in West Africa, 1757–1767” (MA thesis, Leiden University, 2012), pp. 35–36. 49 In De West-Afrikaanse reis van Piet Heyn, 1624–1625 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959), p. 89, editor Klaas Ratelband mentions that two directors of the Zeeland Chamber were part of the committee which decided about the West India Company’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade.

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princes along the West African coast in which the boundaries of the respective jurisdictions were clearly demarcated. The Company’s reputation at the Gold Coast recovered to the extent that the Dutch were occasionally requested to be arbiters in local conflicts between different African groups.50 Not every development in West Africa after 1633–1634 could be directly related to the problems the Dutch had encountered at Arguin. Yet the painful mistakes which had been made there contributed to a more prudent political and legal strategy along the Gold Coast amidst the immorality of the transatlantic slave trade in which the Dutch would henceforth participate. 50

Den Heijer, “Met bewillinghe van de swarte partij”, pp. 358–62.

Chapter 8

The Printed Book in the Dutch Atlantic World In 1708 the Amsterdam publisher Nicolaas ten Hoorn produced a book with the intriguing title Description of the Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes. Often cited as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, Krinke Kesmes describes how a Spanish adventurer who had served in the Dutch navy in the Third AngloDutch War decides to expand his trade into Spanish America and across the Pacific Ocean. Caught in a storm, the author ends up in the utopian kingdom of Krinke Kesmes, where the supervisor (“the Garbon”) introduces him to local customs and ideas. Ultimately, invigorated by the experience, the Spaniard returns to Europe a richer and wiser man. In the eighth and final chapter, just before leaving the imaginary kingdom, the author invites the Garbon to come to his ship. In a brief reversal of roles, he then exposes his own intellectual framework by showing his distinguished guest the books he has carried along from Europe. In his bookcase, he immediately reaches for Adriaan van Berkel’s Voyage to Rio Berbice (1695), a wonderful example of what in modern advertising would be called “product placement”, because that volume had been printed by Nicolaas’ father Jan ten Hoorn. Upon learning about the Spaniard’s catalogue of books, the Garbon remarks in admiration: “Dear Sir, as far as I know, you have no poor books, I wish you much joy from them, along with a useful pastime, and that you may derive wisdom from them”. Thus encouraged, the author then shows him some of the other books he possesses, including Baltasar Gracián’s Criticón and The Art of Worldly Wisdom, as well as the works of René Descartes in Spanish translation, and sixteen books of Euclid, also in Spanish. All these books, the author concludes, “I presented to [the Garbon] with all my heart”.1 Krinke Kesmes is a work of fiction, and was intended to be read that way, so there is good reason not to approach it with an eye for verisimilitude. But the level of detail regarding the contents of the fictional bookcase nevertheless invites the question how realistic this catalogue of printed books might have 1 Henrik Smeeks, Beschryvinge van het magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes (Amsterdam, 1708). For the English quotations and a brief introduction of the book, I used The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes, ed. David Fausett, transl. Robert H. Leek (Amsterdam and Atlanta: ­Rodopi, 1995), pp. ix–xliii, 118–19. This article was presented as a paper at the Books in Motion-­ conference at the Gotha Forschungszentrum of the University of Erfurt, and at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston in 2016. I am grateful to both audiences for their comments and suggestions.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_010

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looked around 1700? Which books did people pack when they left the Dutch Republic for a future in the Atlantic world? Which books did they order after having settled in Recife, New Amsterdam, Elmina or Paramaribo? An ambitious early attempt to establish a printing press in Dutch Brazil failed in 1643 because the master printer died prematurely,2 meaning that during the entire seventeenth century, readers in the Dutch colonies depended for their reading matter on shipments from Holland. So were the contents of libraries in the Dutch Atlantic comparable to those in the mother country? Or can we establish a reading practice that was somehow different from that in the United Provinces? These questions, to be fair, are elementary to cultural historians and certainly to scholars of the printed book, but they are virtually terra incognita for specialists of the Atlantic world. Despite the preeminence of the Dutch Republic in the production of printed books in early modern Europe, our knowledge of the export of books to and book ownership in the Dutch Atlantic world is at best sketchy. This article aims to be a first step towards filling that scholarly gap. Due to the size of the task, I will focus for now only on the period of the first West India Company (1621–1674).3 Dutch books arrived in the Atlantic world well before Dutch colonists did, as inquisitorial records in South America testify. In 1608, according to one cleric in Buenos Aires, Flemish merchants from Lisbon conducted a subversive campaign by hiding books in cases that officially contained only wine and salt. Several years later, in 1616, the inquisition in Lisbon even went so far as to inform Philip iii about Protestant books that were destined for the Americas.4 The main culprit, in the eyes of the inquisition, was the Hispano-Dutch polemicist 2 Frans L. Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1998), p. 56. 3 First indications are that the pattern discussed below becomes a lot more varied certainly in the second half of the eighteenth century. See for example Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 106–23 and appendix A & B; Rob Krabbendam, “Reading in Elmina: The Private Library of Jan Pieter Theodoor Huydecoper in West Africa, 1757–1767” (unpublished MA thesis, Leiden University, 2012). Both libraries – of David Nassy and Jan Pieter Huydecoper – also contain many books printed in the seventeenth century. 4 Eddy Stols, “De Zuid-Nederlandse boekdrukkunst op de Portugese routes van de eerste mondialisering”, in: Idem and Werner Thomas, eds., Een wereld op papier: Zuid-Nederlandse boeken, prenten en kaarten in het Spaanse en Portugese wereldrijk (16de–18de eeuw) (Acco: Leuven/ The Hague, 2009), pp. 149–50. The work by Aventroot found in Lisbon was almost certainly his Carta de Ioan Aventrote al poderosisimo Rey de Espania, printed by Paulus van Ravesteyn in Amsterdam in 1614. On Aventroot’s propaganda, see Werner Thomas, “El hombre que intentó convertir al rey de España. Hans Aventroot (1559–1633)”, Foro Hispánico 3 (1992): 45–66; and Benjamin Schmidt, “Exotic Allies: The Dutch-Chilean Encounter and the (Failed) Conquest of America”, Renaissance Quarterly 52.2 (1999), pp. 457–60.

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Joan Aventroot, a man who had the explicit ambition to convert the Spanish king to Protestantism. Aventroot’s campaigns in the Atlantic world continued after the foundation of the West India Company in 1621.5 In 1628 Spanish soldiers discovered a box in the Río de la Plata estuary that had been left there by a Dutch vessel which contained copies of a pamphlet that called on the population of Peru to revolt against the king and the pope. The pamphlet, Aventroot explained, had been meant to make up for the failure of a previous Dutch expedition, the so-called Nassau Fleet, to distribute Protestant catechisms in South America. This time, somewhat predictably perhaps, things again did not go according to plan. The captain who was responsible for distributing the books in Buenos Aires had returned with all but 75 of the 3,000 copies he had been given.6 Logistics and sheer distance, then, compromised these early intellectual attempts. But even if delivered correctly, the impact of Dutch books in Habsburg America could not be taken for granted. A man from Haarlem who worked on the sugar plantation of the Antwerp-born Schetz family in Brazil, and who later was arrested on suspicion of Lutheranism, complained that others ridiculed him for reading a book on the passion of Christ.7 With the arrival of Dutch political power in the Atlantic world, the situation improved. In 1624, after the West India Company had successfully completed the conquest of Salvador de Bahia, the capital of Habsburg Brazil, Dutch printed matter infiltrated South America. In Salvador, crews replaced illustrations of Catholic martyrdom they found in the Jesuit convent with an image they had taken from Holland – in this case a print of the so-called “tyranny of Alva” that served as a reminder that the war in Brazil was intimately connected to the hardships previous generations had endured in the Low Countries.8 As part of the same expedition, the first printed books arrived. In this opening phase, the distribution of books was effectively monopolized by the Reformed Church.9 Comforters of the sick had a checklist of twelve printed titles they 5 Resoluties der Staten-Generaal, 2 June 1627 reveals that Aventroot had asked the States-­ General for a ship with 30 men to distribute copies of his pamphlet in “the South Sea”, but to no avail. 6 Joan Aventroot, Send-brief aen die van Peru. [Kn. 4001] (Amsterdam, 1630), pp. 7–8, 13. Schmidt, “Exotic Allies”, p. 457, mentions that as many as 8,000 copies were printed, but I have not been able to verify that number. Cf. Thomas, “El hombre que intentó convertir”, p. 58. 7 Stols, “Zuid-Nederlandse boekdrukkunst”, p. 149. 8 Michiel van Groesen, “Herinneringen aan Holland: De verbeelding van de Opstand in Salvador de Bahia”, Holland 41.4 (2009): 291–303. 9 For an extensive examination of religious control over “the colonial library”, see Danny L. Noorlander, “The Reformed Church and the Regulation of Religious Literature in the Early Dutch Atlantic World”, Itinerario 42.3 (2018): 375–402.

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were given before embarking for the Americas.10 The list was as succinct as it was predictable. At the top it listed the Bible (in Dutch and in Spanish), John Calvin’s Institutiones, and a book called Schatboeck der christelyke leere, an introduction to the Heidelberg Catechism translated into Dutch with comments by Festus Hommius, a staunchly Calvinist minister and a respected translator of theological texts. These three spiritual heavyweights were followed by several books with a more practical objective. They included (unspecified) books of psalms of which at least one needed to have musical annotations, Heinrich Bullinger’s Huysboeck, a treatise in pastoral theology that contained fifty of the Swiss reformer’s most memorable sermons, and Cort begrijp der christelijke religie by Theodore Beza, another canonical text of Reformed Protestantism. The only author to be represented twice in the short list was the English Puritan William Perkins. His first title, Reformatus Catholicus (or gereformeert Catho­ lijck in Dutch), was a treatise written with the objective to draw Roman Catholics to the Reformed Church by emphasizing the many similarities between the confessions; the second, Tractaet van de gevallen der conscientie had the same brief, and was an even more popular treatise for a whole generation of students of Protestant theology. Then came William Bucanus’ Loci Communes and Franciscus Landsbergen’s Christelijcke overdenckinge des doots, and finally, the list contained a few generic references to “books for comforters of the sick and prayer books”.11 This short list is a fair representation of the Dutch Atlantic world that many ardent shareholders of the West India Company had signed up for in the early 1620s. Inside the boardroom, however, the Company directors were more ambivalent about the expansion of religious orthodoxy. In the charter of June 1621, the issue of religion was conspicuously absent. Only when the Company failed to attract sufficient capital, anonymous pamphleteers in the United Provinces clarified that the Dutch would introduce the gentiles and savages to the Holy Scripture and bring Reformed Protestantism to the Americas.12 Soon enough, 10 11

12

Rijksarchief Zeeland, Archief Classis Walcheren 73, fol. 1r. See also Willem Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 324–25. This short list may well have been prescribed by Joh. P. van den Broeck, Geestelijcke spooren (Amsterdam, 1622), see Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission, p. 326. The book titles in this article have been identified by means of the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (www. kb.nl/stcn). Korte Onderrichtinghe ende vermaeninge aen alle liefhebbers des Vaderlandts, om liberalij­ cken te teeckenen inde West-Indische Compagnie. [Kn. 3363] (Rotterdam, 1622), [B3v]: “dat wy middel sullen hebben om het heylighe Evangelium onder de Heydenen en wilde menschen te propageren, daer wy dan oock sonderling naer sullen moeten trachten: ende dit

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in 1623, the Amsterdam consistory negotiated that a minister and three comforters of the sick would be employed on ships bound for the West.13 On paper, the directors wholeheartedly endorsed this arrangement.14 In reality, however, religious orthodoxy turned out to be at odds with the Company’s mercantile objectives. As early as 1629, the Company drew up an ordinance directing wic officials to accord liberty of conscience to “Spaniards, Portuguese, and natives of the land, whether they be Roman Catholics or Jews”.15 That notion would become the accepted practice in Dutch Brazil. Church authorities loudly voiced their disapproval. In 1638, the authoritative Zierikzee minister Godfried Udemans condemned Company policy in no uncertain terms: “Concerning the issue whether one should allow the Portuguese living under our jurisdiction in the East and West Indies, for political reasons, to openly worship according to the rules of the Papist Religion? To that we answer unequivocally: No”.16 The discrepancy between principled theologians like Udemans and the pragmatic bureaucrats of the West India Company becomes increasingly obvious when we look at a wishlist of books the Classis Recife sent to the Heeren xix for use in Brazil that same year: We have deemed it necessary to inform Your Mightynesses that in all towns and fortresses we are in need of books for our ministers and comforters of the sick, and we request that you send us 12 Bibles of the new translation [i.e. the so-called Statenbijbel of 1637], as many Psalm-postils by Dominie [Abraham] Schultetus, Bullinger’s Huysboeck, Taffin’s Boetveerdicheyt des Leevens, and a series of Psalmbooks, some a.b.c. books in Dutch, and some catechisms for the children.17 behoort insonderheyt te bewegen in dese Compagnie te teeckenen, alle de gene, die de voorplantinghe van den waren Gods-dienst lieff hebben, ende van herten begheeren”. 13 Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission, pp. 290–93; Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), pp. 84–85. 14 For the Reformed orthodoxy of the wic directors, see Danny L. Noorlander, “‘For the Maintenance of the True Religion’: Calvinism and the Directors of the Dutch West India Company”, Sixteenth Century Journal 44.1 (2013): 73–95. 15 Jonathan Israel, “Religious Toleration in Dutch Brazil, 1624–1654”, in: Idem and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624–1654) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p. 18. 16 Godfried Udemans, ’t Geestelyck roer van ’t coopmans schip (2nd rev. ed.; Dordrecht 1640), p. 357: “Aengaende de […] vrage, of men de Portugijsen, die onder onse Jurisdictie, in Oost- ende West-Indien wonen, om eenighe Politijcke redenen, niet en soude moghen toelaten de openbare oeffeninge van de Paepsche Religie? Daer op antwoorden wy rondt uyt, neen”. 17 Nationaal Archief, owic 53-26, fol. 1v: Classis Recife to xix, 4 March 1638.

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Despite the fact that in the previous fourteen years Dutch Brazil had not developed along the lines the clergy had envisaged, their list of books to be purchased and read had not changed. Throughout the middle third of the seventeenth century, religious literature was at the heart of any library in the Dutch Atlantic world, and the same titles surfaced again and again in both private and more corporate inventories of books. Yet de facto toleration of Roman Catholics and Jews, and a reluctance to convert African slaves to Reformed Protestantism, meant that the religious books the ministers desired were not as influential as they would have liked. Instead, in an environment that was generally unreceptive and sometimes quite hostile to zealous attempts at conversion, the distribution of Reformed books could lead to problems. Individual ministers in Pernambuco were robbed of their books with alarming regularity, leading to requests for sending yet more copies of the same titles.18 Across the ocean, in Africa, the picture was the same. Here too, the small libraries of Dutch officials in Elmina and Fort Nassau were dominated by the same authors: Bullinger, Taffin, Perkins, and Schultetus featured alongside Bibles and catechisms – interspersed only by the odd nautical treatise.19 Dom Garcia ii, the King of Kongo and a political ally of the West India Company, in 1645 even ordered an auto-da-fé of Dutch catechisms – a very public rejection of Reformed Protestantism that jeopardized the Company’s commercial and political future in West Africa.20 Back in Brazil, also in 1645, the West India Company made an inventory of books lying in one of their warehouses in Recife (Figure 8.1).21 Better than any other document, this inventory demonstrates how slowly the Dutch Atlantic world had developed into a market for printed books, and also how little had changed in the approach of the authorities to distributing reading matter. The numbers of copies had significantly increased since the Dutch had first settled 18

19 20

21

NA, owic 22, fol. 140r, 17 March 1636. Here minister Jodocus van Stetten asked for new books after his old ones “had been confiscated by the enemy”. The Heeren xix resolved to send him Calvin’s Institutiones in Dutch, the Acts of the Synod of Dordt in Latin, and the regulations of the classis in Zeeland. Vijf dagregisters van het kasteel São Jorge da Mina (Elmina) aan de Goudkust (1645–1647), ed. Klaas Ratelband. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1953), pp. 367–69, 372, 383. Klaas Ratelband, Nederlanders in West-Afrika, 1600–1650. Angola, Kongo en São Tomé (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2000 [1950]), p. 221; Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 212. The main (but not the only) source for this auto-da-fé is Giovanni Francesco, Breve Relatione del successo della missione de’ Frati minori Capuccini […] al Regno del Congo (Milan, 1649), pp. 87–88. I am grateful to John Thornton for this reference. NA, owic 60-80, Memorie vande volgende boeken althans berustende opt magazijn der stuckgoederen [te Recife], 9 juni 1645.

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Figure 8.1 List of books in a warehouse in Recife, 9 June 1645 Nationaal Archief, owic, nr. 60, 80, fol. 1r

in northeast Brazil. Altogether there were now well over 7,500 books ready for consumption in Recife. Yet the nature of the books had not changed. Bibles, psalmbooks, catechisms, and a.b.c. books dominated the list. Several things stand out. Firstly there were many books that were to a varying degree outdated.

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The Company, for example, still possessed 102 copies of a book that commemorated the death of stadtholder Maurits, by now more than twenty years in the past. The list also contained 90 copies of a pamphlet celebrating the victory over Spain in Wesel – in 1629. It is difficult to imagine that any reader in the mid-1640s would still be interested in these titles.22 It is important to note that these books were probably not purchased all at once. The list also mentioned 85 copies of the Haarlem minister Daniel Souterius’ Nuchteren Loth (“Sober Lot”), a book of sermons that warned against the consequences of drunkenness.23 The directors of the West India Company in Zeeland ordered 25 copies of this work in September 1634, and the way their purchase was formulated suggests that this was the first time they bought this title, which they noted “was highly useful for reading on board, and to be sent to Fernabocq”. Either the book must have been successful, and several further purchases were made, or other regional chambers independently also had decided to buy the volume, thus leading to an accumulation of copies in Recife.24 Whether there was a lack of organization as a result of the Company’s federal set-up is uncertain, but what is clear is that their policy to bring books to the Atlantic world was flawed. This can best be shown by looking at titles that were printed in other languages than Dutch. The second aspect of the 1645 inventory to catch the eye, is the large number of books that had the obvious intention of converting Portuguese sugar planters to Protestantism. They included (still) William Perkins’ Reformatus Catholicus (203 copies), and several other titles in Spanish, including 124 copies of Cipriano de Valera’s Los dos tratados del papa first printed in 1588,25 hundreds of psalmbooks, dozens of Bibles and New Testaments, and no less than 2,200 copies of a Spanish catechism!26 22

More generally, the overwhelming majority of the literature in Recife had been printed before 1630. This was also noted for New Netherland by Willem Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission, p. 325. 23 Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission, p. 324. 24 owic 22, fol. 40r (11 Sept. 1634): “Is geresolveert dat men sal coopen vijf en twintich boucken gemaeckt by Daniel Souterius dienaer des Goddelijcken Woorts tot Haerlem gheintituleert Nuchteren Loth, aengaende dronckenschap seer nut om’t schepe te lesen en naer Fernabocq te senden”. Souterius, incidentally, was successful in convincing the wic of buying his books. Three days later, the Zeeland directors bought 24 copies of two further titles (owic 22, fol. 41v). 25 Possibly Cipriano de Valera, Los dos tratados del papa. (2nd rev ed., Madrid, 1599). On Cipriano de Valera’s books, see A. Gordon Kinder, “Religious Literature as an Offensive Weapon: Cipriano de Valera’s Part in England’s War with Spain”, Sixteenth Century Journal 19.2 (1988): 223–35. 26 Perhaps Catechismo que significa Forma de instrucion que se enseña en las escuelas y yglesias reformadas (1628).

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Unfortunately, only four days after this list was drawn up, Portuguese sugar planters launched a major revolt against the West India Company that lasted for nine years and would ultimately lead to the fall of Dutch Brazil, meaning that virtually none of the Spanish books in the warehouse reached their intended readership. Yet the fact that these titles remained unused in Brazil was not just the result of unforeseen geopolitical developments. Nine years earlier, in 1636, minister Jodocus van Stetten in a letter to the directors in Zeeland expressed the need for a Bible in Portuguese. He also complained that the catechisms he had at his disposal were of little use in Brazil, unless they were translated into Portuguese. “I mean Portuguese”, he explained, “not Castilian, as you gentlemen had the other [catechisms] translated, all of which are useless here”.27 Stetten’s colleague, the Spanish convert Vicente Joachim Soler, immediately sent a manuscript that met the requirements to the Dutch Republic. But in this instance the discrepancy between missionary ideals and Atlantic realities becomes strikingly clear. The Classis Amsterdam, who were assigned to deal with the matter, concluded that the best course of action was to use the Heidelberg catechism in Spanish, “for the greater unity of the churches in Brazil and in the home country”. The classis effectively forced the West India Company to buy hundreds of copies of a Spanish edition of the catechism that had recently been printed, and ordered to send them to Brazil. In addition, the classis advised against printing Soler’s Portuguese manuscript because, as one historian of the church in Brazil has put it, “the book put matters in ways that were not exactly correct and that were even dangerous”.28 The manuscript was returned to the West India Company. Hence decisions made in patria meant that a useful and even desired book never appeared in print and thus never crossed the Atlantic in substantial amounts, whereas at the same time the number of volumes that was lying idle in a Recife warehouse was deliberately expanded by yet another shipment of books that had been deemed unnecessary, and quite explicitly for that matter, by those who could know. Small wonder, then, that there were still 2,200 unused copies of a Spanish catechism on the eve of the planters’ revolt. Perhaps, in hindsight, the church’s ambition to convert the sugar planters of Pernambuco to Calvinism was unrealistic – with or without the right books. But what about the native Americans? Pamphlet literature in the United Provinces 27

owic 51-85, fol. 2r: Jodocus â Stetten to Chamber Zeeland, 16 July 1636: “Ic sprecke van Portuges, niet Castiliaens gelic u E.E. de anderen hebt late translateren, de welcke alle sonder profit alhier seijn”. 28 Schalkwijk, Reformed Church, p. 157.

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had insisted for decades that the “poor and innocent Indians” had to be liberated from Spanish tyranny in order for them to be instructed in the right (Protestant) fashion.29 This brings us to a third observation based on the list of 1645. At the very top of the list, mention was being made of 2,951 Vraeghboekjes, an indiscriminate term for probably another catechism. The only book that can realistically be identified as such is a trilingual catechism – in Dutch, Portuguese, and Tupi – that went by the title of Eenvoudige ende korte onderwyzinge uyt Godes Woord in de Brasiliaensche, Nederduytsche ende Portugeesche talen. The booklet caused a minor storm in the United Provinces as once again the West India Company and the Reformed Church were at odds over the matter. The catechism, desired by Calvinist missionaries in Brazil and almost certainly written by one of them, David á Dooreslaer, was sent in 1641 to Enkhuizen to be printed, under the watchful eye of the local directors of the West India Company and the local consistory. Once again the Amsterdam classis expressed its doubts about the orthodoxy of the text, but the Company decided to have the catechism printed anyway. Against the wishes of the States of Holland, alerted to the matter by the Amsterdam classis, the Company shipped the books to Brazil in February 1642. But by the time the books had arrived in Recife, the balance of power had shifted at home, and the Company wrote to Brazil advising its officials (and through them the ministers) not to use the catechisms. Dooreslaer, by all accounts, was furious. In a letter to the church authorities at home, he explained that the Tupi language was indeed so barbarous that it could not properly convey the word of God, but that in difficult circumstances this was the best he could do. The issue provoked controversy on either side of the Atlantic, but the books were probably never used beyond the odd copy here or there, perhaps explaining the 2,951 copies in the Recife warehouse.30 What stands out amidst this grotesque yet ultimately familiar tale of Atlantic mismanagement are two things: First, distance was an impediment for the distribution of books: such a concerted mismatch of supply and demand would not have lasted for a decade if not longer in the Dutch Republic or even in Europe. Second, other literature – that is books that were not written and printed with the intention of maintaining or expanding the Reformed faith – were virtually absent in Brazil. The 1645 warehouse list contains hardly any titles that colonists would have read to take their minds off the hardships of 29

Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, c. 1570– 1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 30 Schalkwijk, Reformed Church, pp. 218–29 tells the story of the trilingual catechism in great detail, with further (circumstantial) evidence that the catechism is identical to the 2,951 Vraeghboekjes in the 1645 inventory.

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life in the tropics. Among the 7,500 books, we find only 105 almanacks (of eight different years), a small number if we take into consideration the popularity of these works in the Dutch Golden Age.31 At the bottom of the list we find as few as eight copies of a play by Terentius, and five copies of Aesop’s Fables. Together with a handful of dictionaries, these works are the only ones in the inventory without an overtly pious undertone. The evidence of the titles of which only a few copies remained is not unambiguous. It is of course possible that most of the copies of Aesop’s Fables the West India Company had transported across the Atlantic had already been sold, and that the fact that there were only five copies left in the warehouse should be interpreted as a token of the popularity of Aesop’s Fables in Brazil. Yet all the other evidence from ­Recife (as well as from West Africa) appears to indicate that as long as the Dutch were carving out an empire at the expense of the Iberians, books for leisure were not a priority. Hence what was on offer in Pernambuco and on the Gold Coast, in modern eyes, was pretty sterile: Bibles, catechisms, and psalmbooks – lynchpins of even the most modest of private libraries in the Dutch Republic – intertwined with literature intended to convert Catholics to Protestantism, mostly in Spanish. Two general factors have to be taken into account to explain this disappointing panorama of the printed book in the Dutch Atlantic world. First, chronology: The Dutch managed to hold on to their prized colony in Brazil for only twenty-five years, sixteen of which were marred by war, hunger, and social unrest. More than half of the colony’s European inhabitants were soldiers, and although some of the newly arrived – like the German ensign Johann Philipp Mulheiser (in Pernambuco), the administrator Johan Farret (on Curaçao) or the Amsterdam fiscaal and poet Willem Godschalck van Focquenbroch (in Elmina)32 – devoted their spare time to writing poetry, many of them could not read and those who could were no bookworms. Even potentially more highbrow collections of Dutch regents and administrators in Brazil – of which no information has survived – would probably have paled in comparison to the more pluriform aristocratic libraries of some of the Portuguese planters which

31 32

Jeroen Salman, Populair drukwerk in de Gouden Eeuw. De almanak als lectuur en handelswaar (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1999). Michiel van Groesen, “Van vaandrig in Brazilië tot dichter in Dordrecht: het album amicorum van Johann Philipp Mulheiser (ca. 1603–ca. 1677)”, De zeventiende eeuw 24.2 (2008): 196–209; Joanne van der Woude and Jaap Jacobs, “Sweet Resoundings: Friendship Poetry by Petrus Stuyvesant and Johan Farret on Curaçao, 1639–1645”, The William and Mary Quarterly 75.3 (2018): 507–40; Riet Schenkeveld-van der Dussen, “De poetica van een ­libertijnse zelf-voyeur”, De nieuwe taalgids 82 (1989): 2–15.

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had been amassed over several generations.33 Secondly, the price of books was a concern. Elsewhere in the Dutch Atlantic orbit – in Flatbush, Long Island – Reformed colonists were charged at least four times as much as customers in Holland for a catechism book.34 The price difference is of course understandable when we take into account the costs of transportation, but at the same time many of the books we find in the Recife inventory were cheap. A fourhundred percent increase in price to what potential readers were used to at home would deter at least some, perhaps many. In these difficult circumstances, individual colonists often did not possess more than a dozen books, judging from the situation in early Suriname. In 1672 Jacob Dimmese, a former ship’s captain living in Paramaribo, had an inventory of his belongings made up which contained references to twelve books, in print and in manuscript.35 Some of the entries refer to private papers, such as a “handwritten journal” and “new account of his last voyage”, or were otherwise work-related, such as the pilot guide Schat-kamer der grooten see-vaerts-kunst. Among the printed books, we find a huyspostille and a “large” book of psalms (in quarto), the Calvinist Willem Teellinck’s Lusthoff der Christelijke gebeden (first printed in 1628 but reprinted many times since), the first edition of the equally pious Donder-slagh der Goddeloosen of which no modern copies survive, an undefined “sequel” (Vervolgh) to the fifteenth-century Italian humanist Bartolomeo Platina’s ’t Leven der Roomse pausen (in the Dutch translation of 1650), and several unspecified titles that also point to a devout lifestyle. Suriname in the early years under the Dutch was a society in considerable disarray, and its book culture must have been even more barren than in Brazil.36 Immediately after the Dutch takeover in 1667, the States of Zeeland sent two copies of an unspecified Beschryvinge van West-Indien, probably a recent translation of the militant anti-Catholic account by the sixteenth-century Milanese traveller Girolamo Benzoni, to the handful of Dutchmen in Suriname, and there are further snippets of information regarding the shipment of individual books. Yet it would take decades for the colony to prosper, and even longer for books to arrive in greater numbers.37

33

Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 183–84. 34 Eric Nooter, Between Heaven and Earth: Church and Society in pre-Revolutionary Flatbush, Long Island (unpublished PhD dissertation, Free University, Amsterdam, 2000), p. 132. 35 I owe the reference to Dimmese’s inventory of books to Suze Zijlstra. 36 Suze Zijlstra, Anglo-Dutch Suriname: Ethnic Interaction and Colonial Transition in the ­Caribbean, 1651–1682 (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2015). 37 Cohen, Jews in Another Environment, pp. 106–23.

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In New Netherland, like in Brazil, there was no printing press (not until 1697), but at least there seems to have been a more concerted effort to import a variety of books from the mother country. The many differences in the demand for books, and by extension the book cultures that developed in South and North America, can only be explained by demographical and social factors. Ever since its foundation in 1624, a moment shrouded in modesty at the same time the West India Company sent twenty-six warships to Brazil, New Netherland was destined to be a settlement colony. Although free from the ravages of war, this choice brought its own set of problems: The Dutch Republic did not have large minorities that were pushed towards the New World by religious intolerance like the English, nor did they advertise their colony as a venue for social rise and distinction for noblemen like in Spain. New Netherland’s design of proprietary manors famously failed to succeed, apart from the patroonship Rensselaerswijck. More generally, the Dutch lacked the demographic surplus of other European countries to populate a province in the Americas. Yet ­despite these obstacles, New Netherland had developed into a prosperous settlement colony of more than 5,000 European inhabitants by 1664, the year DirectorGeneral Peter Stuyvesant had to surrender the colony to the English. Most of the Dutch colonists decided to stay in New York – a good indication of their relative success in building a future in the New World. Most importantly in this context, many of the colonists came from the middle classes, and literacy rates were much higher than anywhere else in the Dutch Atlantic world. The historian A. Gregg Roeber has estimated that around 1700, “perhaps 80 percent of males and 60 percent of females were fluent in written and printed forms of the Dutch language”.38 In New Netherland, like in the South Atlantic, the sources to examine the circulation of books are few and far between. Yet the picture that emerges is profoundly different. Although there are many private inventories that do not contain any reading matter, and several that contain only the bare necessities (a Bible, a psalmbook), there are also documents that reveal that some personal collections amounted to a small library. The very well-to-do Margrieta van Varick is by all accounts an exception. Her inventory of January 1697 included no less than 37 Dutch books in quarto, 46 in octavo, and 4 in folio – alongside a Bible and an (Old?) Testament which were bound with golden clasps. The 38

A. Gregg Roeber, “German and Dutch Books and Printing”, in: Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. i: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 300. On New Netherland in general, see Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

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books, she listed in her will, were to be divided equally amongst her children.39 More representative perhaps of book ownership in New Netherland are a few surviving inventories from the town of Beverwijck, located along the Hudson River in what is currently the city of Albany.40 The initial picture is quite similar to that in Brazil. In July 1632, the Amsterdam patroon Kiliaen van Rensselaer ordered the local sheriff Rutger van Soest to “read aloud some chapters from the Holy Scriptures, for which purpose a Bible is herewith sent to them as well as a huyspostille Schulteti”, a book that was also in use in Brazil and Elmina, and, much later as we have seen, in Suriname.41 Six years later Van Rensselaer sent “eight small books called de Practijcke der Godtsaligheyt, very useful for the families”, a volume the consistory of Amsterdam recommended its ministers to pack when leaving for the Atlantic world.42 Yet among second-generation settlers in Beverwijck we find private collections that are more substantial than elsewhere in the Dutch Atlantic world. The farmer Jan Gerritsz van Marcken, who was banished from New Amstel on the Delaware in 1659, moved to Beverwijck where four years later he owned sixteen books “great and little”, and “2 books with maps”.43 When Gabriel Leendertsz in 1654 auctioned some of his belongings, he sold among many other things two Bibles and a Heidelberg catechism, seven unspecified books (to four different people), and Johan van Beverwijck’s Schat der gesontheyt. Judging by their size, albeit still modest, and by what little we know of their contents, the libraries of New Netherland included more diverse reading matter – works we do not find in the collections in battleground towns like Recife and Elmina. On his first visit to New Netherland in 1654, the trader Jeremias van Rensselaer carried seven books along, including a book titled Hendrick de Grote probably written by P.C. Hooft, Vondel’s Joseph, and a panegyric on stadtholder Frederick Hendrik. In the 1670s, Jeremias developed an interest in religious literature beyond the predictable light religious fare we find elsewhere, including Adrianus 39

Deborah L. Krohn and Peter N. Miller, eds., Dutch New York between East & West: The World of Margrieta van Varick (New Haven and London: New York Historical Society & Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 343–46. 40 Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652–1664 (Hilversum/Albany: Verloren & suny Press, 2003), pp. 324–26. 41 Van Rensselaer Bowier Manuscripts, being the Letters of Kiliaen van Rensselaer, 1630–1643, ed. A.F. van Laer (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1908), p. 208. 42 Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission, p. 323 – who estimates that this translation of Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Godliness “may well have been the most popular spritual treatise of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic”. 43 Early Records of the City and County of Albany, eds. J. Pearson and A.F. van Laer (4 vols.; Albany, 1869), i, p. 344.

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Cocquius’ Ware Practycque der Godt-Geleerdheit – the second volume of which he asked his brother in Amsterdam to buy and send to him.44 The demand for books, and the absence of a printing press, created new commercial opportunities. That Gijsbert van Imborch, physician in the village of Esopus (Kingston), possessed a series of medical books is no surprise. On his deathbed in 1665, when an inventory of his belongings was made up, he owned volumes written by the likes of Andreas Vesalius and Nicolaes Tulp, for example, in a private library that altogether amounted to some forty titles including works by authors as diverse as Livy, Emanuel van Meteren, Sebastian Franck, and Paolo Sarpi.45 Van Imborch, however, had served by life as a kind of improvised bookseller of some standing. In 1652, he had a shipment of Bibles, testaments, and catechisms sent over from Holland in order to sell these in New Netherland. When the demand for books was disappointing, he asked Stuyvesant for permission to organize a lottery. He was granted his wish, on the condition that “the price of books was increased a little in comparison to what he had paid in Holland”, a third of the revenues of which Van Imborch had to hand over to the deaconry in Esopus.46 What was on offer and what was sold in 1655 is unknown, but ten years later Van Imborch’s inventory reads like a small bookseller’s stock catalogue. It includes 83 copies of the History of Tobias, 8 Histories of David, 23 Histories of Joseph, 100 catechisms, 102 a.b.c. books, and 48 copies of Jacobus Borstius’ Kort begrijp der Christelijke Leere – amidst many other books that were intended for the pious and the young.47 Many titles in Van Imborch’s catalogue overlapped with the warehouse list of the West India Company in Recife, but twenty years later – and 5,000 miles further north – it did at last show a bit more variety. All of these initiatives to bring books to Manhattan and the Hudson Valley may have been haphazard and incidental in nature, but together they created a more lively Dutch book culture than can be established for the more populous (and occasionally rather romanticized) settlement in northeast Brazil. Books circulated and were avidly sought after. The diary of Jasper Danckerts, who travelled across New York in 1679–1680, tells us as much. Danckerts, a follower 44 Venema, Beverwijck, pp. 324–25. The auction inventory can be found in Early Records of the City and County of Albany, i, pp. 206–7 – but I follow Venema’s slightly different reading of the list. 45 A. Eekhof, De Hervormde Kerk in Noord-Amerika (1624–1664) (2 vols.; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1913), ii, pp. 163–64. 46 Eekhof, De Hervormde Kerk, ii, p. 164: “Dat de boecken … een centjen sullen verhoocht worden boven hetgeene sy in Hollant gecost hebben, van welcke winst een derde sal ­gegeven worden aen de dyaconye deser steede”. 47 Ibid.

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of Jean de Labadie, had a keen interest in books. In Manhattan, he met a man from Middelburg, who had been an apprentice to Jacques Fierens, printer, at the Globe in the Gi[st]straat, and, although I had been often enough in that house, and he knew my face, he did not know me particularly. He came to this country with Cornelis Everts of Zeeland, and had assisted in taking it from the English in 1674. He had remained here since and married. He sometimes bound old books, and was the only bookbinder in the country.48 All the people Danckerts met during his travels he questioned about the books they owned and liked (or disliked). The picture that emerges here is suddenly quite diverse. Danckerts was presented with lots of religious literature, mostly recommended by fellow Labadists, but also with Les Pensées de Pascal, a book by the Flemish physician and chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont (in English), and an edition of Virgil’s Aeneid. It is evident that Danckerts had brought many books to New York himself, because he generously distributed Labadist writings. He also acquired books, none more exotic than “one of the Old Testaments in the Indian language, and also almost the whole of the New ­Testament, made up with some sheets of the new edition of the New Testament, so that we had the Old and New Testaments complete” – quite an achievement because Danckerts had been informed that many Indian Bibles and Testaments “were carried away, and burnt or destroyed”.49 Upon his return to Amsterdam, he immediately went to the bookshops to fulfil his promises to friends in North America to send them reading matter they had ordered. One colonist wanted a good new Bible, which, Danckerts wrote, “cost us twenty-eight guilders, because it was the last one of Ravensteyn’s edition. […] We put it on board of the ship […] which would leave in a month’s time”.50 The oceanic crossing meant that the Dutch colonist had to wait for his new Bible just a little bit longer, but ultimately he received what he had desired. “The Garbon”, the supervisor of the island kingdom Krinke Kesmes, was impressed by the variety of books in the hold of a fictional Dutch ship shortly after 1700. If inhabitants of the Dutch Atlantic world would have seen the books the anonymous skipper had brought along, they would probably have been impressed too. In reality, Gracián, Euclid, and Descartes did not cross the ocean. 48 49 50

Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679–1680, eds. Bartlett Burleigh James and J. Franklin (New York: American Historical Association, 1952), pp. 81–82 (27 Oct. 1679). Idem, 264 (8 July 1680). Idem, 296 (9 Oct. 1680).

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In the embattled Dutch Atlantic world of the seventeenth century, only the Reformed Church had the means and the will to transport books across the ocean in large numbers. The discrepancy between orthodoxy at home and a more muddled practice in the Americas, however, meant that this process was far from smooth – especially when compared to the Jesuit campaigns orchestrated from the Southern Netherlands to stock their New World convents with spiritual literature.51 The focus was on two aspects: maintaining the beliefs of the colonists, fueled by a whole string of canonical texts of Reformed Protestantism. And, secondly, attempting to convert Catholic colonists who inhabited the Dutch orbit by means of the distribution of books in Spanish. Both tendencies began with the foundation of the wic in 1621 – and occasionally even earlier – and continued at least until the end of the 1640s when the Dutch Atlantic empire slowly began to disintegrate. Seen through the lens of the printed book, much of the Dutch Atlantic world never reached maturity, and many of the books that were transported across the ocean never reached their intended readers. The only colony that was deliberately designed to become a true settlement colony, New Netherland, appears to have been an exception to this rule. Here the book world gradually extended beyond the immediate designs of the Reformed Church. With the benefit of time, and the promise of a future in the New York area, a second generation of settlers assembled more varied collections of printed books. Here, too, Bibles, catechisms, and schoolbooks featured, but ultimately a book culture developed that slowly began to resemble that of the mother country they had forever left behind. 51

Dirk Imhof, “De Officina Plantiniana en de Moretussen: De Spaanse edities van de Moretussen en hun boekhandel met Spanje en Latijns-Amerika in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw”, in: Eddy Stols and Werner Thomas, eds., Een wereld op papier: ZuidNederlandse boeken, prenten en kaarten in het Spaanse en Portugese wereldrijk (16de–18de eeuw) (Acco: Leuven/The Hague, 2009), pp. 79–80.

Chapter 9

Arnoldus Montanus, Dutch Brazil, and the Re-emergence of Cannibalism The signing of the Capitulation of Taborda on 26 January 1654, and the triumphal entry of the Portuguese commander-in-chief Francisco Barreto into Recife two days later brought an end to nearly twenty-five years of Dutch rule in northeastern Brazil. The takeover was a courteous affair. Sigismund von Schoppe, the veteran German commander of the West India Company, ­ceremoniously handed Barreto the keys to the city. Barreto in turn pledged to treat the defeated inhabitants of Recife well, including – to their own ­surprise – the large Sephardic community of Dutch Brazil who had good reason to fear the return of Roman Catholicism. On paper, the peace terms may have been generous, but most of the population of Dutch Recife decided to leave Brazil anyway, setting sail for the Caribbean or Europe, and thereby effectively ruling out another reversal of fortune. At home in the United Provinces, nobody could quite believe the colony’s downfall, even though the Luso-Brazilian campaign to reconquer Pernambuco had been gaining momentum ever since it had started nine years earlier. But the reality was clear: Forever gone were the days of Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, who had ruled the colony for more than seven years as a successful governor-general with a passion for art and science. Gone also was the export of sugar to the United Provinces, a profitable trade in the late 1630s and early 1640s which had dwindled after the moradores revolted against their Dutch oppressors. What remained was a subdued sense of pride in the problems their troops had caused the enemy, a nostalgic longing for Verzuimd Brasil (“Neglected Brazil”), a flurry of remonstrances to the West India Company and the States General from returned colonists, soldiers, and former indigenous allies, as well as protracted negotiations with Lisbon over financial compensation, a diplomatic issue not completely settled until 1669.1 Two years later, in 1671, the book De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (“The New and Unknown World”) appeared in Amsterdam. This luxurious work, printed in folio and decorated with numerous copper engravings, was written by Arnoldus Montanus, a Reformed minister from the town of Schoonhoven 1 Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 241–58; Evaldo Cabral de Mello, O negócio do Brasil: Portugal, os Países Baixos e o Nordeste, 1641–1669 (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1998).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_011

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Figure 9.1 Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, title-page Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm KF 61-4633

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in Holland, and published by Jacob van Meurs, the leading producer of geographical treatises in the United Provinces at the time (Figure 9.1). De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld – no longer as unknown as Montanus made it out to be – comprised a history of European expansion in America, and was ­dedicated by Van Meurs to Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen. The description of Brazil, as both readers and the dedicatee would have expected, was the longest and most detailed chapter of the book, filling almost one-hundred and eighty pages.2 In this article, I will investigate how and why Arnoldus Montanus’ chapter on Dutch Brazil transformed European knowledge of that prized Atlantic possession at a time when the Dutch were forced to disengage from Brazil. Which episodes did Montanus choose to highlight in his description of Brazil in the wake of the Dutch surrender, and which episodes did he omit? Which sources from the abundantly available descriptions of the colony’s history did he use, and how did his editorial decision-making transform readers’ knowledge of Dutch Brazil? And: Which images did Montanus and Van Meurs decide to include, and how reliable were these illustrations? The answers to these questions can help shed new light on representations of Dutch Brazil which made an impact beyond the period of Dutch territorial rule in the colony, not just in the United Provinces, but also – through its different translations – in an international arena.

Arnoldus Montanus and Jacob van Meurs

Born in Amsterdam to an immigrant family from the Southern Netherlands in 1625, and educated in theology and philosophy at Leiden, Arnoldus Montanus embarked on a career as a writer of historical works in the early 1650s. He started by publishing two biographies, one of the late stadtholder Frederik Hendrik, the other of admiral Johan van Galen, who had been mortally wounded in the Battle of Livorno that was part of the first Anglo-Dutch War. Both works must have been commercial successes, as second and third editions appeared within a few years for which Montanus made corrections and extensions to the original texts. After his next book, an account of the disastrous war the Dutch fought against Cromwell’s England, Montanus shifted his attention to Asia with De Wonderen van ’t Oosten (“The Miracles from the East”), followed by an edition of Johan Albrecht van Mandelslo’s voyages to Persia and India which, for commercial purposes no doubt, was published as a sequel to Montanus’ Wonderen. Montanus’ reputation as a productive and versatile author of 2 Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (Amsterdam, 1671), pp. 358–535.

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historical works must have quickly increased. The majority of books he subsequently wrote, all published in the vernacular, were aimed at a relatively broad readership with mostly Orangist and Voetian sympathies. He produced several anti-Catholic and anti-Libertine works in the late 1650s and early 1660s, alongside school texts and publications on the history of Amsterdam and on the House of Orange. Montanus returned to writing overseas histories at the request of Jacob van Meurs, an Amsterdam bookseller who had first made a name for himself in the early 1650s by publishing Jesuit treatises, but then specialized in the publication of historical works. In the mid-1660s, Van Meurs began to devote his attention to presenting national and international readers with a round-up of seventy or eighty years of Dutch overseas expansion. From his workshop on the Keizersgracht, he assembled a team of authors and translators, like Olfert Dapper, Johan Nieuhof, Lambert van den Bosch, Jan Struys, and the German poet Philipp von Zesen, to produce monumental works on the non-European world with great regularity. Montanus joined Van Meurs’ enterprise in the late 1660s. His works were not as scholarly as those by Dapper or even Nieuhof, but Montanus’ writings clearly captured the imagination of readers both at home and abroad. Montanus and Van Meurs collaborated only twice. Their first combined effort was Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen der Oost-Indische Maatschappij in ’t Vereenigde Nederland, aen de Kaisaren van Japan (“Memorable Embassies of the East India Company of the United Netherlands to the Emperors of Japan”) which appeared in 1669 and received extremely critical reviews.3 Contemporaries criticised the volume’s illustrations with such vigour that they discarded the authority of the book altogether. The Antwerp Jesuit Cornelius Hazart wrote a pamphlet in reaction to the images in Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen, taking particular offense at depictions of naked women that were not supported by the text. “Why are these reproduced as they are?”, he asked. “And if they do go about naked, why bother to give us a picture of the fact? Was it not enough to state it verbally, since there was matter enough to provide other excellent prints?”4 Another critic, Engelbert Kaempfer, claimed that the plates “depart a long way from the truth, and do not show things as they were, but as 3 Isabella H. van Eeghen, “Arnoldus Montanus’s Book on Japan”, Quaerendo 2.4 (1972): 250– 72; Reinier H. Hesselink, “Memorable Embassies: The Secret History of Arnoldus Montanus’ Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen”, Quaerendo 32.1 (2002): 99–123; Arnoldus Montanus, Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen (Amsterdam, 1669). 4 Quoted in Van Eeghen, “Arnoldus Montanus’s Book on Japan”, p. 256. Another (understandable) complaint voiced by Hazart was Montanus’ long-winded style of writing, filling page after page with unnecessary and unsubstantiated details.

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the Draughtsman imagined them to be”.5 Overall, according to Kaempfer, “this work [did not justify] the costs of Printing”, but he acknowledged that the book on Japan was sought after, and had been received with enthusiasm.6 Presumably this was the very reason why Montanus and Van Meurs were unfazed by the criticism. Montanus’ book on the New World once again included many illustrations, the chapter on Brazil alone containing thirty-one plates and maps. And just like their previous co-operative effort, this title was popular too, both at home and abroad. De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld was translated into English by John Ogilby – who regularly translated Van Meurs titles – and issued in London in 1671, and then into German under the name of Olfert Dapper, a translation Van Meurs published himself in 1673.7 Further editions and translations of Montanus’ two treatises continued to appear, but when the minister died in 1683, he had not made any other original contributions to Van Meurs’ catalogue. Three years before, the death of Van Meurs had signaled the end of the ambitious publishing project. One more volume of overseas histories, Johan Nieuhof’s posthumous account of his experiences in Brazil and Asia, appeared with the imprint of Van Meurs’ widow in 1682.8 After Van Meurs had passed away, other Amsterdam publishers began to produce histories of the non-European world to fill the void that had been created by his death. Both for Montanus’ volume on Japan and for De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, Van Meurs took the initiative, and a comparison of both works with the other titles in his catalogue demonstrates the influence the publisher had on his authors. Few of Montanus’ previous chronicles had included illustrations whereas for Van Meurs, a printer-bookseller as well as copper engraver, the combination of texts and images had become something of a trademark.9 5 Van Eeghen, “Arnoldus Montanus’s Book on Japan”, p. 257. 6 Ibid. 7 John Ogilby, America: Being the Latest, and Most Accurate Description of the New World (London, 1671); Arnoldus Montanus, Neue Welt (Amsterdam, 1673). The German translation identifies the author as “Dr. O.D.”, a reference to Olfert Dapper on whose name Van Meurs had obtained a privilege for several volumes in the Holy Roman Empire. The translation from Dutch into German was done by Johann Christoph Beer. See Van Eeghen, “Arnoldus Montanus’s Book on Japan”, pp. 262–63. On Van Meurs in general, see Guido van Meersbergen, “De uitgeversstrategie van Jacob van Meurs belicht: de Amsterdamse en ‘Antwerpse’ edities van Johan Nieuhofs Gezantschap”, De zeventiende eeuw 26.2 (2010): 73–90; M.M. Kleerkooper and W.P. van Stockum jr., De boekhandel in Amsterdam, voornamelijk in de 17e eeuw (2 vols.; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1914–1916), pp. 416–24. 8 Hesselink, “Memorable Embassies”, pp. 101–4. 9 The anonymous artist could have been Jacob van Meurs himself, but judging from the different styles on show, he cannot have been responsible for all engravings of his geographic project.

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The scathing attacks on the iconography of Montanus’ volume on Japan, by Hazart and Kaempfer, were therefore to some extent misguided. There may in fact have been little reason to question the minister’s efforts for Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen. Since Montanus had already written successfully on Asia before the late 1660s, he had been an obvious choice for Van Meurs’ Japan project. In that volume’s dedication to the States of Gelderland and the burgomasters of Zutphen, Van Meurs explained Montanus’ authorship by stating that he had written fifty-three books, which were “well-known throughout the world”.10 Montanus did not, however, have any previous experience with writing on Brazil or other parts of America. Van Meurs must have recognized the minister’s intellectual flexibility during their first collaborative project – and once again, in his dedication to Johan Maurits, Van Meurs endorsed Montanus as “well-known through multiple writings” – but is tempting to speculate that the author’s inexperience with the central theme of this work meant that Van Meurs claimed an even larger share of the responsibility for making De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld.11

Montanus, Van Meurs, and the History of Dutch Brazil

Although the chapter under discussion here was simply titled Brasil, Montanus effectively wrote about Dutch Brazil, as everything was placed in the context of the rise, zenith, and fall of the colony between 1624 and 1654, when the West India Company ruled first in Bahia and later, more extensively, in Pernambuco. De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld lamented the loss of the colony. The publisher, in his dedication to Johan Maurits, reminisced about the time “when a Prince of Nassau carried victorious standards in America […] and graced [its] rough soil for eight years, to the fear of Portugal, to the progress of Dutch might, and to the awe of the whole world”.12 Montanus, in the main text, also lauded the governor-general. The Heeren Negentien, the federal board of 10

11 12

Van Meurs in Montanus, Gedenkwaerdige Gesantschappen, [*4r]: “Dit heerlijk werk is uit d’aenteikeningen in Japan gehouden by een gebragt: en […] uitgebreid door Arnoldus Montanus, wiens boeken tegenwoordig ten getaele van drie en vijftig, de weereld genoegsaem bekend zijn”. Van Meurs in Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, [*3r]: “… Arnoldus Montanus, uit veelvoudige schriften bekend”. Van Meurs in Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, [*3v]: “[…] die over America zeeghaftige standaerden voerde […] hoe een Nassouwsche Vorst haer woeste boodem acht jaer betreeden heeft, tot schrik van Portugal, voort-zetting der Nederlandsche moogendheid, en verwondering des gantschen aerdboodems”.

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nineteen West India Company directors, had made an excellent choice when they appointed Johan Maurits to lead Dutch Brazil: Everyone’s eyes rested on count Maurits of Nassau, not only reputable for the integrity of his noble blood, tied by marriages to kings and emperors, but also for his smart knowledge of warfare, the fruits of which are unknown to no-one: With his offensive against Spinola in the Palatinate, and in the famous sieges of Grol, Bois-le-Duc, Venlo, Maastricht, Rijnberk, and Schenkenschans he assembled great glory.13 With this particular choice of words, Montanus professed his sympathy for the Orangists, two years after the young William iii, perceived by many as the stadtholder in waiting, had reached legal majority and began to position himself as the rival of the regent regime led by Pensionary Johan de Witt.14 And yet the minister was not as unambiguously hagiographic in his assessment of Johan Maurits as Van Meurs, in his dedication, or as Caspar Barlaeus, who had written an earlier history of Dutch Brazil in the immediate aftermath of the count’s return to Europe.15 In contrast to these and other contemporary biographers, who cited Johan Maurits’ forced departure from the colony as the main reason for its downfall which began soon thereafter, Montanus insisted that Johan Maurits had repeatedly requested to be relieved of his duties, but that the Heeren Negentien had asked him to remain in Recife.16 The structure of Montanus’ chapter was by all means traditional, opening with a description of the colony’s landscape, its climate, its flora and fauna, and the crops and natural riches Brazil produced. Then the author turned his attention to the different captaincies of Portuguese Brazil, beginning in the south and gradually working his way – in space and time – to the captaincies that were to form Dutch Brazil from 1630 onwards. On his way north along the 13 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, p. 465: “Ieders oog viel op graef Maurits van Nassauw, niet min aenzienelijk wegens de luister van een hoog adelijk bloed, door houwelijken vermaegschapt aen kaisers en koningen; maer ook ten aenzien der schrandere oorlogs-kennis, welker proeven niemand onbekend zijn: als die tegen Spinola na de Paltz optoog, en in de vermaerde belegeringen van Grol, ’s Hertogen-Bosch, Venlo, Maestricht, Rhijnberk en Schenkenschans groote eer behaelde”. 14 Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 791–95. 15 Caspar Barlaeus, Rerum per Octennium in Brasilia (Amsterdam, 1647), recently translated into English for the first time by Blanche T. van Berckel-Ebeling Koning (Caspar van Baerle, The History of Brazil under the Governorship of Count Johan Maurits of Nassau, 1636–1644. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011). 16 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, p. 504.

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Brazilian coast, Montanus succinctly told readers about the arrival of Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500, the interlude of “Antarctic France” in Guanabara Bay in the late 1550s – without mentioning the religious turmoil which characterized its short-lived existence – the production of sugar in sixteenth-century Portuguese Brazil, and the arrival of French Jesuits in the Maranhão in the 1610s. One inexplicable mistake in this opening part of the chapter indicates Montanus’ unfamiliarity with Brazilian history and geography. When discussing the Abrolhos Islands off the coast of Porto Seguro, the minister recounted in gruesome detail the story of a Dutch vessel being shipwrecked in 1629. In reality, the Batavia, a ship of the Dutch East India Company, sank near the archipelago which was known as the Houtman Abrolhos – some forty miles west of mainland Australia!17 For the knowledgeable readership in the United Provinces, thoroughly familiar with such spectacular maritime stories of mutiny and disaster, this must have been a glaring error, yet the same tale reappeared in the English and German translations of 1671 and 1673 respectively.18 Although no critical reviews of De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld have survived, it is likely that such errors only substantiated the notion that Montanus was not particularly capable as an author of overseas histories. Wrapping up his geographical survey, Montanus changed the subject by concluding that “on this Brazil, finally, the United Netherlands bravely buckled the armor”.19 This was the start of the narrative with which Dutch readers were thoroughly familiar through newspapers, pamphlets, and chronicles. Montanus recounted the establishment of the West India Company, the capture and loss of Salvador de Bahia, the successful conquest of Recife, the heroics of Adriaen Pater who neutralised the first Habsburg attack on Pernambuco, the destruction of Olinda, and the gradual expansion of Dutch power in northeast Brazil. The three major themes in Montanus’ rendition of Dutch Brazil were Johan Maurits’ military campaigns and his period as governor-general in Recife, the Portuguese Revolt, and the fallout of the Dutch surrender in the United Provinces. Like contemporary authors, he accused the trio of Wouter van Schoonenburg, Hendrick Haecx, and Sigismund von Schoppe for their apathetic handling of the situation when a Portuguese fleet arrived before Recife in December 1653. The soldiers complained about irregular payments, victuals were in short supply, the arsenals of the Company were empty, and the 17 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, pp. 380–81, beginning with the words: “Alhier verongelukte ’t schip Batavia den tweeden pinxterdag des jaers sestien honderd negen en twintig …”. 18 Ogilby, America, pp. 498–500; Montanus, Neue Welt, pp. 426–28. 19 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, p. 399: “Om dit Brasil eindelijk gespte ’t Vereenigde Nederland stoutmoedig ’t harnas aen”.

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enemy offered high financial rewards to officers prepared to defect. Additionally, prices of bread went through the roof, and amidst all the turmoil, Recife could no longer be protected from the Portuguese onslaught. Some ten months later, in the autumn of 1654, hearings on the fall of the colony took place in The Hague. Here Van Schoonenburg was accused of a lack of leadership, supposedly at times not leaving his room in Recife for fourteen days. Von Schoppe had known that there was plenty of food still available in the besieged town, but had preferred to negotiate with the Portuguese commanders before inevitable dearth would weaken his position; a conduct arguably even worse in the eyes of the public at home.20 The illustrations of Brazil’s geography included by Montanus and Van Meurs were all familiar too. The seventeen maps and bird’s eye views of Brazil were based on images made either by Claes Jansz Visscher, the Amsterdam print publisher who had been employed by the West India Company to depict naval and military triumphs in the Atlantic World, or by Frans Post, the landscape painter in the service of Johan Maurits whose drawings were turned into copper engravings for Barlaeus’ Rerum per Octennium.21 However, for the fourteen illustrations that accompanied the text, Montanus and Van Meurs opted for a different strategy. Despite the wide availability of images of Dutch Brazil made by artists and scientists in Johan Maurits’ entourage, like Albert Eckhout, Zacharias Wagner, and Georg Marcgraf, the minister and his publisher in 1670 opted to rely mainly on the illustrations of an earlier generation, like those made by the De Bry family for their collection of voyages in the early 1590s.22 This 20

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The most scathing attack on the negligent High and Secret Councillors of Dutch Brazil was published anonymously in Middelburg in 1655, under the title Kort, Bondigh ende Waerachtigh verhael van’t schandelijck over-geven ende verlaten vande voornaemste Conquester van Brasil. See also Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 243–44. On Post’s oeuvre, including his drawings, see Pedro Corrêa do Lago and Bia Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post 1612–1680: Catalogue Raisonné (Milan: 5 Continents, 2007); On Visscher’s Atlantic news maps, see Michiel van Groesen, “Lessons Learned: The Second Dutch Conquest of Brazil and the Memory of the First”, Colonial Latin American Review 20.2 (2011): 167–93. There is abundant literature on the iconography of Dutch Brazil. Alongside the catalogue raisonné of Frans Post by Corrêa do Lago and Corrêa do Lago mentioned in the previous footnote, see Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout: Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006); Quentin Buvelot, ed. Albert Eckhout: a Dutch Artist in Brazil (Zwolle: Waanders, 2004); and Barbara Berlowicz, Albert Eckhout volta ao Brasil (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet, 2002); Peter J.P. Whitehead and Marinus Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th Century Brazil: Animals, Plants and People by the Artists of Johan Maurits of Nassau (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, 1989). On De Bry, see Michiel van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

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remarkable editorial decision, combined with the emphasis Montanus and Van Meurs placed on the indigenous population of Brazil in both these images and the chapter’s text reveals some of the objectives they had with De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, and will therefore be examined in detail in the following two paragraphs.

The Indigenous Population of Brazil

Throughout his chapter, Montanus devoted considerable attention to Brazil’s native inhabitants, perhaps as part of a more wide-ranging predilection for the marvelous and the exotic that characterizes his writings. In the chapter’s opening section, reserved for the introduction of the colony and its natural riches, Montanus mentioned the Tapuya Indians for the first time. The West India Company distinguished between the coastal Tupi-speaking Potiguars and Tobajaras on the one hand, and the Tapuyas, the indigenous communities that lived in the sertão or the dry hinterland of northeastern Brazil, on the other. The term Tapuya was originally a Tupi term for the various native peoples who did not speak the Tupi language. The Portuguese used it as a generic term for hostile and cannibalistic inhabitants of the interior, but although the Dutch continued to use the term, they also relied on the military support of these indigenous warriors – albeit reluctantly – during their struggle against the Portuguese.23 Montanus set the tone in this description by claiming that among the inhabitants of Brazil, whether Tupi or Tapuya, “men were all very much alike, and it is the same with women. So that the noticeable distinctions between one human being and another over there are absent unlike in any other country”. The Tapuya were by all accounts the most uncivilized indigenous group, and thus received special attention. Montanus indicated that they enjoyed drinking alcohol, and emphasized that “he who drinks and vomits the most, is held in the highest esteem”.24 23

For a discussion of the term Tapuya, see Pedro Puntoni, A Guerra dos Bárbaros: Povos Indígenas a a Colonizaçao do Sertao Nordeste do Brazil, 1650–1720 (Sao Paulo: Hucitec, 2000), pp. 61–64. For Dutch–Tapuyan relations, see Ernst van den Boogaart, “Infernal Allies: The Dutch West India Company and the Tarairiu, 1631–1654”, in: Idem et al., eds., Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil (The Hague: Stichting Johan Maurits van Nassau, 1979), pp. 519–38. 24 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, pp. 364–65: “Mannen gelijken zeer na malkander, en inschelijk ook de vrouwen: zulx ’t merkelijk onderscheid tusschen mensch en mensch aldaer zoo zeer geen plaets heeft, als onder andere landaerd […] Wanneer d’aipii genoeg heeft uit-gegist, beginnenze ’s morgens vroeg van ’t eerste huis in ’t dorp,

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This opening section, based on the account of the Portuguese chronicler Gaspar de Lemos, was accompanied by four illustrations. The first two engravings of the local population, in terms of composition, were reminiscent of contemporary costume books.25 Both images reveal the engraver’s familiarity with the larger than life-size ethnographic portraits painted in Brazil by Albert Eckhout or, more likely, some of the copies that were more readily accessible in northern Europe. When we look at the first of these two engravings, however, it is immediately clear that the artist responsible for the design conflated different ethnic identities, just like the author had done by indicating that all Brazilians looked alike. The image, supposedly depicting the native Brazilians encountered by De Lemos and Cabral in 1500, pairs Eckhout’s Tapuyan man with his African woman, a descendant of black slaves transported to Brazil from Guinea or Angola (Figure 9.2). The second illustration correctly combines a very similar Tapuyan man, albeit with a somewhat darker complexion, with a Tapuyan woman – also clearly recognizable as deriving from Eckhout from the basket she carries with a strap around her head. The engraver omitted the human foot in the woman’s basket – the one reference to cannibalism clearly visible in Eckhout’s painting – but only in order to depict a Tapuyan couple, a few pages further on, where both are apparently deliberating whether to sink their teeth into a human leg, accompanied by four more Tapuyas roasting the remaining human body parts (Figure 9.3). The iconography in this section was completed by a fourth illustration, a depiction of the ritual dance of the ­Tupis copied from Theodore de Bry’s 1592 edition of the Hessian traveler Hans Staden’s popular mid-sixteenth century captivity tale. For Europeans, since Cabral’s discovery, Brazil had increasingly become synonymous with cannibalism. Hans Staden’s account, first issued in German in 1557 and translated and exhaustively reprinted in subsequent decades, had presented early modern Europe with a first-hand report on anthropophagous practices in Brazil. Staden, who spent nine months (not nine years as Montanus claimed elsewhere in his volume) as a captive among the Tupi Indians, experienced cannibalism as a test of his Christian faith and described the indigenous habits in a vivid, personal, and straightforward manner without too

25

en zuipen aldaer alle kruiken leeg, en alzoo voorts hut aen hut, ter tijd niet een druppel over-blijft. Hy behaeld de grootste eer, die meest drinkt en braekt”. “Caspar Lemmius”, cited as the source for this description by Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, p. 359, is a latinised version of Gaspar de Lemos, who in 1500 was sent back to Portugal by Pedro Álvares Cabral with news of the discovery of Brazil. Montanus, for example, could have used Jéronimo Osório’s De Rebus Emmanuelis Regis (1571), which in turn relied on earlier accounts of Portuguese overseas ventures, and which had been translated into Dutch for the first time in 1661–1663.

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Figure 9.2 Anon., “Inhabitants of Brazil whom Cabral encountered”, in: Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, p. 359 Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm KF 61-4633

many ethnological pretensions.26 Later narratives of cannibalism, particularly the one written by the Huguenot minister Jean de Léry and first published in 1578, confirmed these disconcerting customs. De Léry’s Histoire, which lacked Staden’s directness, added an elaborate ethnological comparison of Tupi cannibalism with the Christian Eucharist, constructing an analogy of spiritual nourishment. De Léry thus placed his observations within an existing European framework of interpretation which allowed for an understanding of cannibalism. Unlike in Staden’s account, where the majority of the images focus on the practice of ritual cannibalism, De Léry’s woodcuts have a solemn, reverential quality. They show the Brazilians at full-length, and can be considered precursors to the ethnographic portraits by Albert Eckhout.27 Michel de 26 27

Neil L. Whitehead “Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism”, Hispanic American Historical Review 80.4 (2000), pp. 742–45. A Dutch translation appeared in Antwerp as early as 1558. Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, p. 96. Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, p. 107.

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Figure 9.3 Anon., “Tapuya Indians roasting human flesh”, in: Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, p. 370 Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm KF 61-4633

Montaigne, following up on De Léry’s “allegorization of the savage” in his essay On Cannibalism, also refrained from condemning the Brazilian cannibals.28 Montaigne even gave a fictitious Tupi Indian the opportunity to respond to European condemnations of his culture. The influence of Montaigne’s cultural relativism on the Dutch view of South America is difficult to gauge.29 His name is not mentioned in the list of authors 28

29

Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 68–80, 94–100. The first Dutch edition of De Léry’s Histoire appeared in 1597, but several other editions are known to have circulated in the Northern Netherlands, most notably America Pars Tertia issued by the De Bry family. This volume also included Staden’s account of his captivity. Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), i, pp. 202–14. No Dutch translations of Montaigne’s work appeared until 1674, four years after the publication of Montanus’ work on America.

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whose treatises Montanus had used in composing his book.30 This list contains some older authorities such as Jean de Léry (but not Hans Staden!), but shows that Montanus mainly relied on more recent Dutch works, written by the likes of Caspar Barlaeus, Johannes de Laet, Roelof Baro, and Johan Nieuhof. Their information on the Brazilian Indians had quickly surpassed the knowledge of sixteenth-century writers. They reported that although some of the natives, most notably the Tapuyas, had at times remained a practical nuisance for the Dutch colonists, who occasionally even took them as slaves, Johan Maurits had managed to stay on friendly terms. He regularly sent the Tapuyas gifts, employed them to patrol the coast against Portuguese aggression, and in May 1644 took some of them back home to the United Provinces.31 All these accounts of native Brazilian customs written during the period of Dutch rule with which both Montanus and his readers were thoroughly familiar added yet more layers to the sensational early stories of man-eating in Brazil. Staden’s travel account, reprinted three more times in the wake of the Dutch invasion of Pernambuco, lost its broader appeal in the United Provinces around 1640. However, the engraver Van Meurs employed to decorate De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld deliberately manipulated the existing iconography of (Dutch) Brazil. He reverted to the older, more stereotypical and to some extent more comfortable visual program, despite his obvious familiarity – directly or ­indirectly – with the more recent imagery produced by the artists in Johan Maurits’ entourage. This is reinforced by illustrations depicting captaincies further to the south, where the West India Company never managed to expel the Portuguese, and where – one could argue – the iconography of Dutch Brazil could not be applied. Still in the opening section of his chapter on Brazil, Montanus discussed the extreme fierceness of the Guyamures, the Aimoré tribe who lived in the forests near Ilhéus, just south of the Bay of All Saints: Round about here live the Guyamures; the most savage people of all America. They have giant-like bodies, white skins, and carry exceedingly great bows and arrows; they live without houses as beasts in the open air, devour human flesh like tigers, never fight in companies or armies, but lay in wait to surprise a single man or animal. They even eat their own children […] and are such a plague in Los Isleos that the Portuguese have been forced to abandon not only several sugar mills, but even the entire province.32 30 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, [Gggg6r]. 31 Van den Boogaart, “Infernal Allies”, pp. 528–29. 32 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, p. 383: “Rondom swerven wijd en zijd de Guyamures; geen woester volk in gantsch America. Zy hebben reusen-licchaemen, een witte

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It is true that even during Brazil’s so-called “Golden Age” of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just after the time Montanus wrote these words, the Portuguese were unsuccessful in subduing man-eating tribes in Ilhéus.33 But the point here is that, once again, the spectacular nature of his description cannot be traced to contemporary printed sources. Instead, it is remarkably similar to much older accounts such as that of the sixteenth-century Portuguese traveler Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, who claimed that the cruelties these Indians performed were “most repugnant to mankind”, and “seem to represent the extreme opposite of other men”.34 Even though Montanus could not have known Gândavo’s report – it was not printed until the nineteenth century – the Portuguese chronicler’s assessment of the Aimoré Indians’ wildness must have been precisely the reason that the minister considered the description so attractive for De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. In addition, despite Montanus’ very short description of this particular native American tribe, Jacob van Meurs decided to have an illustration made. The engraving was one of the most striking early modern images of cannibalism in Brazil (Figure 9.4). Situated in an uncultivated tropical landscape underlining the “wild”, nomadic nature of the Aimoré as described by Montanus, the engraving introduces the European readership to an anthropophagous ritual that will almost certainly have been perceived as exceptionally cruel. One whiteskinned cannibal, whose size may have even reminded readers of the Patagonian Giants who featured in so many sixteenth-century travel accounts of South America, devoured another Brazilian Indian after having apparently surprised him from behind a hedge. In the background the engraver depicted the “exceedingly great bows and arrows” which the Aimoré used to hunt their prey. The human bones and skull confronted readers once again with the gruesome nature of the incident. Only the two children in the picture, consuming animal

33

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huid, yzelijk groote pijlen en boogen: leven zonder huisen als beesten onder den blaeuwen hemel: verslinden ’t menschen vleesch gelijk tygers: vechten nooit met benden of legers: ieder loert slechts, om een mensch of beest onvoorziens te over-vallen: eeten zelf haer eigen kinderen: […] welke zedert diervoegen plaegden, dat de Portugeesen niet alleen verscheide zuiker-moolens moesten verlaeten; maer zelf ’t gantsche gewest hadden geruimt”. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 32–33; John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians, 1500–1760 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 94–96. The name Guyamures Montanus probably derived from a map of Brazil by the Amsterdam cartographer Johan Blaeu, see Hal Langfur, “Uncertain Refuge: Frontier Formation and the Origins of the Botocudo War in Late Colonial Brazil”, Hispanic American Historical Review 82.2 (2002), p. 233. Darlene J. Sadlier, Brazil Imagined from 1500 to the Present (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 47.

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Figure 9.4 Anon., “Aimoré Indians”, in: Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, p. 383 Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm KF 61-4633

rather than human flesh, offered some mitigation, as their presence suggested that anthropophagy was part of Aimoré culture rather than a “savage” nature. Nonetheless, the image corresponded very neatly with the textual description. Like the other engravings made for Montanus’ volume, it was copied for the English and German translations in the years that followed.

Catholicism and the Re-emergence of Cannibalism

How can it be explained that De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld reintroduced Dutch and European readers to this sensational variety of cannibalism? Benjamin Schmidt has argued very convincingly that in the later seventeenth century, Dutch publishers like Jacob van Meurs fuelled a sense of “exoticism” at a time when the political influence of the United Provinces in the Atlantic World

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had all but disappeared.35 Montanus’ volume of the “new” and “unknown” world is a good example of this preference for the marvelous and the strange. The conclusion of his chapter on Brazil, however, also betrays what can best be described as a form of geopolitical bitterness. The author began his concluding remarks by stating that the Dutch had been forced to leave the colony in the hands of the “perfidious” Portuguese. Just like before the arrival of the West ­India Company, the local population was now at the mercy of the Catholics, “and just like before, many Brazilians had, according to their writings, been brought into the Roman Church”.36 Portuguese Brazil, in other words, represented a step back, both in terms of chronology and in terms of Europe’s civilizing mission in the Americas. Here Montanus switched roles, and forfeited his position as a professional author with an eye for documenting historical events for that of a fiercely polemical preacher, sending out warnings to his flock of readers. It was in this second role, as a Calvinist minister, that he wrote the remainder of this chapter, which focused on the Brazilian Indians and their interaction with Portuguese colonists after the fall of Dutch Brazil. Montanus no longer bothered to differentiate between various indigenous groups, indiscriminately referring to them as Brasilianen – a Dutch term previously used only to distinguish the assimilated Tupi Indians from the Tapuyas. Once again, cannibalism took centre stage. Montanus began the chapter’s final section by praising the West India Company for training “Brazilians”, in this case probably their Tapuyan allies, to use sophisticated European weaponry and hence regulate, to some extent, their style of warfare. Before the arrival of the Dutch, according to Montanus, the Brazilians used to incite wars against each other, often inspired to do so by the colonists from Portugal. Then the author described the Portuguese “massacres” of the indigenous population in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, perhaps in an attempt to associate the colonists’ conduct with the general notion of Habsburg tyranny in the New World, a trusted form of rhetoric which had dominated Dutch Americana in earlier decades.37 Brazilian resentment in the period before Dutch rule was obviously directed at these early 35

Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 36 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, p. 532: “[…] benoodzaekt ondertusschen Brasil te laeten in handen der trouweloose Portugeesen: die zedert aldaer gelijk te vooren meenigte Brasiliaenen volgens haer schrijven tot de schoot van de Roomsche kerk bragten”. 37 Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570– 1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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European intruders, who had not only killed their ancestors, but also brought the Amerindians to slavery. Should the Brazilians have waited to be overwhelmed in their cabins by the Portuguese, Montanus dramatically asked? It goes without saying that from the minister’s anti-Habsburg and anti-Catholic perspective, they should not: “Then they slapped their armpits and their behinds with their hands, and yelled Erima, erima, toxouquinambaults comoni, ouassou, tan, tan, which is By no means, by no means, ye strong adolescents, let us avenge the deaths of our fathers”.38 Brazil, under the Portuguese, was thus plagued by incessant warfare. While these episodes may have evoked memories of (Luso-)Spanish cruelties at home and abroad, Montanus also tapped into the widespread knowledge among his readership of the Portuguese treatment of indigenous prisoners-ofwar in Brazil, in the late 1640s. Many Dutch journals and pamphlets of the time had reported that Portuguese forces, after having defeated soldiers of the West India Company, had systematically murdered the Brazilian allies of the Dutch, despite promises to the contrary. The freeman Mattheus van den Broeck, for example, recounting the defeat he and his comrades had suffered at the hands of the moradores in one of the first attacks in 1645, reported that whereas ­European soldiers of the West India Company were disarmed and released, Brazilian captives were executed. Other Dutch pamphlets corroborated Van den Broeck’s experiences, narrating horrifying tales of indigenous allies who were hanged by the Portuguese on the palisades of the stronghold they had attempted to defend.39 Later chroniclers like Johan Nieuhof, whose unpublished notes on Brazil were available to Montanus, repeated these stories of Portuguese cruelties, which were common knowledge by the time De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld appeared.40

38 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, p. 532: “Te vooren toen noch versch voor oogen stonden de bloedbaeden tegen haer landzaeten aengerecht, plachtenze elkander ten oorlog op te hitsen. […] Zullen wy wachten […] dat de Margniaten (zoo noemenze de Portugeesen) […] ons binnen de hutten overvallen? Thans kloppenze met de handen op d’oxelen en billen, en schreeuwen: Erima, erima, toxouquinambaults comoni, ouassou, tan, tan: dat is, geenzints, geenzints, gy sterke jongelingen, laet ons wreeken de dood der vaderen”. 39 Mattheus van den Broeck, Journael ofte Historiaelse Beschrijvinge (Amsterdam, 1651), p. 13; Iournael ofte Kort Discours ([Amsterdam], 1647), [B1v]. On the many true and false stories of “war crimes”, see: Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 172–73. 40 Johan Nieuhof, Braziliaanse Zee – en Lantreize (Amsterdam, 1682), p. 134. His work was published posthumously by Van Meurs’ widow. See Peter J.A.N. Rietbergen, “Zover de aarde reikt: de werken van Johan Nieuhof (1618–1672) als illustratie van het probleem der cultuur- en mentaliteitsgeschiedenis tussen specialisatie en integratie”, De zeventiende eeuw 2.1 (1986), pp. 26–27 for the history of Nieuhof’s publication. Montanus listed his

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Montanus then shifted his focus from Portuguese atrocities to Brazilian savagery. He made the textual connection between the two different ethnic groups by reflecting on the rise of the mamelucos, the progeny of a Portuguese father and Indian mother, who created a new religion in Brazil. From Montanus’ description, it is clear that he interpreted this new religion as a combination of the worst elements from both Roman Catholicism and indigenous heathendom: They elected a Mamelucan pope, bishops, and priests, subsisted the confession, read Mass and rosary devotions, called the people to prayer by drumming loudly on hollowed squashes, using books made from bark which contained many superstitious church customs. They regarded as sacred shaking, pointing their tongues, and producing hollow sounds from the chest, for which they chewed a certain herb.41 The Portuguese colonists, faced with this stunning lack of orthodoxy, were so embittered according to Montanus that they murdered the “old” inhabitants in great numbers, pushed what remained of their societies into the Brazilian interior, and enslaved the others in a ghastly manner. The conduct of the Portuguese explains why the Brazilians continued their ferocious life-style, and continued to practice cannibalism on their defeated enemies. Montanus’ subsequent description displays nothing of the cultural relativism which had characterised the accounts of De Léry and Montaigne, or the complex political realities put forward in mid-seventeenth century Dutch representations of Brazil. Instead he revels in recounting the most spellbinding and most gruesome details of Brazilian cannibalistic practices: When the Brazilians went to war, they killed and immediately fried and ate every man, woman or child they encountered. During the fighting, some warriors used human bones to whistle battle songs, or yelled at their enemies that they were bound to become their next meal. Captives were fattened to be consumed at ceremonial dinners. Prisoners in turn taunted their captors by claiming that they had eaten the captors’ fathers and brothers, or that their cousins had once sources, including Nieuhof’s notes, in Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, [Gggg6r]: “Naemen der schryvers in het tegenwoordig Werk aengetoogen”. 41 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, p. 532: “Zy verkooren een Mameluksche paus, bisschoppen en priesters: onderhielden de biecht: lasen missen en roosenhoedjens: riepen ’t volk tot ’t gebed door ’t geklop op geholde kalabassen: gebruikten boeken, van boom-schorsen gemaekt: de boeken begreepen in kris-krassen veel bygeloovige kerkzeden: stelden groote heiligheid in ’t beeven, uit-steeken der tonge en een hol geluid, voortgebragt uit de borst, tot welke verrichting een zeker kruid knaeuwden”.

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tasted very good. However, the Brazilians did not just eat their enemies. The wife of a captive who ended up on the menu of a band of victorious warriors was among the first to eat a piece of her husband’s roasted body. Old Brazilian women, Montanus continued, played a crucial part in the cannibalistic ritual, as they licked the grease that was dripping from the bodies, ordered the adolescents to prepare more such food, and painted the faces of their children with the blood of the victims. Every guest gnawed at a piece of human meat with a fierce facial expression and then treasured the remains as trophies of victory. Montanus pointed out that while the Brazilians insulted and ate each other without mercy, they were plagued by the devil, and he followed this up with a catalogue of diseases in the colony. Inflammation of the intestines, scabies, a stiffening of arteries, muscles, skin, and the nerve system, and the occurence of suffocation among the Brazilian population are only a few examples of the physical, presumably “diabolical” defects among the Indians.42 This is a particularly remarkable conclusion to a chapter which Montanus had c­ ommenced – as part of his description of the colony – with elaborate praise of Brazil’s healthy population. “No cross-eyed, lame, short-sighted, hunchbacked or otherwise disfigured people were found here”, Montanus had claimed in his introduction. Rather, “few diseases are known among them. Other than a long life, Brazilians also generally enjoyed a steady health”.43 The cutting and pasting of information from a wide variety of sources appears to have got the better of the author at this moment of rhetorical vigour. Montanus, however, must have worried less about such contradictions than about giving his readers the impression of a territory now left in the hands of the devil. Much of what Montanus presented here was based, again, on older literature, such as Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s translation of selected passages from Jean de Léry’s Histoire.44 Because of the way he structured his narrative, 42 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, pp. 534–35: “Onder verscheide ziekten, welke Brasil onderhaevig blijft, treft pians niet min besmettelijk als de Spaensche pokken, ontstaende uit geilheid […] Zommige beginnen haestig te knersen op de tanden: de mond word scheef getrokken en toe-geklemt: d’afgang ontschiet haer: loopen veeltijds gevaer van te stikken. Behalven dese quaeden, vallen taeye fluimen uit ’t hoofd en ’t rugge-been op de leeden, welke de zeenuwen en ’t geelhair verstrammen: waer by komt een koude verstijving van aderen, slagaderen, ’t vleesch, vlies en huid. Doch geen ziekte verslint of quelt in Brasil meer menschen als de roode loop, water-zucht, ’t drukken ter kamergang, ’t rood melesoen, de gal-ziekte, ontsteeking der aers-darm, de wormen, maeselen en vuurige schurfdheid”. 43 Ibid., p. 364: “Men vind hier geen scheeluwe, manke, by-ziende, gebulte, of eenigzints mismaekte […] Weinig ziekten zijn by haer bekend. Behalven een lang leven, genieten ook meest geduurige gezondheid”. 44 Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Beschrijvinge van de gantsche Custe van Guinea, Manicongo, Angola, Monomotapa (Amsterdam, 1596), [††††††2r–v].

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however, this information now appeared to apply to the period after the Dutch surrender. Montanus provided the finishing touch to his judgment of post-1654 Brazil by describing an archetypical Indian funeral. Death naturally followed the list of diseases, some of which were impossible to cure for even the best indigenous physicians. When a man had died, especially if he had been a father, others howled like wolves – one of Montanus’ comparisons of humans with wild animals which were unlikely to improve the European image of the Brazilian Indians. Then they shouted at each other with trembling voices: “This strong man has died, who has enjoyed eating so many captives whom he dragged home in acts of revenge”. Alongside the grave, the closest relatives of the deceased placed dishes with flour, fish, meat, and the drink canou-in in order to satisfy the devil to avoid that he would drag away the body. This custom, however, was not maintained by all Brazilians. Some simply ate their relatives’ dead bodies. And so the chapter on Brazil concluded, where even in the final sentence, Montanus had managed to include perhaps the most gruesome form of cannibalism, the consumption of recently deceased relatives. The chapter’s parting shot was accompanied by another graphic engraving which showed several episodes of the anthropophagous ritual Montanus described (Figure 9.5).45 By discussing the practice of Brazilian cannibalism both at the beginning and the very end of the chapter – and thus both before and after the Dutch presence in the captaincies of the northeast – the lasting impression of the colony in De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, now back under Portuguese rule, was one of exceptional savagery. It resembled older accounts of cannibalism like 45 Montanus, Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld, pp. 533–34: “Met d’hoornen inubia vorderenze ’t heir ten geschikte slagorde: andere pijpen op menschenbeenderen, te vooren geslacht. […] Zoo meenig man, vrouw of kind in haer handen vervalt, word aenstonds op de ­roosters boucans gebraeden. […] De veldslaegen gaen zeer yzelijk toe. Wanneer malkander in ’t gezicht krijgen, verheffen wederzijds een gehuil, niet ongelijk der wolven […] schreeuwen dat d’een den ander terstond ten spijs verstrekken zal. […] De gevangene gemest verstrekt tot spijs op een vroolijke maeltijd. […] De gebondene keert ’t aengezicht herwaerds en derwaerds, snaeuwt desen toe: hoort gy, ik heb uwe vader gegeten: en wederom tot andere: uwe broeder is door my gebraeden: uwe neef smaekte eertijds lekker […]. Terwijl spreekt, word hem de kop met een knodze van achteren te pletteren geslaegen. Op ’t neder-­gestorte licchaem van sijn vrouw […] en beweent ’t lijk met geveinsde traenen: alzoo onder d’eerste haers man gebraeden vleesch eet. […] De stukken, op d’houte roosters boucans te braeden geleid, nemen de oude vrouwen waer, likken ’t afdruipende vet, vermaenen de nevens-staende jongelingen, om meer zulke kost toe te brengen, en bestryken met het bloed d’aengezichten der kinderen. Ten laetsen vat ieder gast een stuk, en knaeuwt niet zonder wreed gezicht ’t vleesch ten been toe af. De beenderen worden tot zeeg-teekenen bewaert. Doch gelijk de Brasiliaenen elkander ongenaedig quellen, alzoo wordenze inschelijx gantsch jammerlijk door de duivel […] geplaegt”.

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Figure 9.5 Anon., “Cannibalism in Brazil”, in: Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld. Amsterdam, 1671, p. 534 Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm KF 61-4633

Hans Staden’s candid eyewitness report in order to re-iterate the lack of civility which in the late sixteenth century had followed early modern E ­ urope’s initial reaction of wonder and disbelief. The illustrations, all invented by an engraver employed by Jacob van Meurs, emphasize the objectives author and publisher had. Not since the crude woodcuts in Staden’s work or the engravings in Volume iii of Theodore de Bry’s America-series published in the early 1590s did the practice of cannibalism feature so prominently in visual representations of the colony. The paintings by Albert Eckhout and their many derivatives in the 1650s and 1660s, in comparison, were rather stylized images which expanded on preconceived notions of female warriors, like the mythical Amazons, and applied the type of iconographic symbolism current in contemporary Dutch painting.46 Illustrations to the work by Johan Nieuhof, the allegorical painting of the New World by Jan van Kessel, and the maps of ­America in Johan Blaeu’s 46

Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, esp. pp. 124–26.

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Atlas Maior all included references to cannibalism but did not capitalize on its sensational potential, and did not depict the Brazilians while in the process of consuming.47 The illustrations ordered by Van Meurs thus signaled a remarkable U-turn in the Dutch iconography of Brazil, and the readership of De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld was left with a distinctly horrible image of Brazil as a colony where, since the departure of the Dutch, the repugnant habits described in the sixteenth-century accounts of Staden and De Léry ruled again. The return of Portuguese atrocities, and the comeback of cannibalism to the forefront of the iconography of Brazil in De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld marked the way the United Provinces came to terms with the loss of Brazil in the late seventeenth century. This sentiment, although exotic and therefore “universally” applicable, was best suited for a Dutch audience familiar with the embarrassing surrender of Pernambuco. In the German edition of the book, also published by Van Meurs, the same narrative returned.48 But John Ogilby, in his America, which is often (but quite wrongly) considered a truthful translation of Montanus’ work, avoided making the connection between the departure of the Dutch, the return of Catholicism, and the re-emergence of cannibalism by changing the order of Montanus’ chapter. Ogilby’s chapter on Brazil did emphasize the cannibalistic rituals of the indigenous population – he did after all copy the fourteen engravings made for De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld – but he must have considered the connection between the Dutch surrender and the re-emergence of cannibalism too indirect or too unconvincing to turn into his chapter’s conclusion. He made no reference to the “perfidious” Portuguese, to the return of the “Roman Church”, or to the mamelucan amalgamation of Catholic and indigenous rituals. Instead, after his final section on cannibalism, based on Roelof Baro’s account of his encounters with the Tapuyas, Ogilby returned to the main narrative of Dutch Brazil, and concluded his chapter on an entirely different note, with translated descriptions of the splendour of Johan Maurits’ court and palace.49 So it is in the Dutch (and German) context that the “old” narrative of cannibalism returned most forcefully. After the appearance of Montanus’ work the narrative retained its recovered momentum, playing a prominent role, for example, in Romeyn de Hooghe’s illustrations to another lavishly published summary of Dutch expansion, Simon de Vries’ four-volume Curieuse Aenmerckingen

47 Ibid. 48 Montanus, Neue Welt, pp. 598–602. 49 On cannibalism, see Ogilby, America, pp. 598–600. His concluding section is on pp. 605–6.

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(1682).50 Hans Staden’s account of sensational Brazilian anthropophagy  – which had not been republished in Dutch for more than four decades – ­experienced a brief revival in the United Provinces, with reprints in 1679, 1685, and 1686.51 The Leiden publisher Pieter van der Aa provided yet another Dutch edition of Staden’s journal in 1706 – as part of his multi-volume collection of voyages – and also re-issued De Hooghe’s images of Brazil in 1710 as part of Les Indes Orientales et Occidentales et autres lieux, which was aimed at an international readership. Arnoldus Montanus must be credited, if that term can be used, with facilitating the return of cannibalism to the mainstream of Dutch representations of Brazil in a period that the alliance of the West India Company with some of the native groups, and the image of the colony as a whole slowly reverted to marvelous and one-dimensional sixteenth-century stereotypes. 50 51

Michiel van Groesen, “De geplukte Tapoeier: de verbeelding van de buiten-Europese wereld”, in: Henk van Nierop, ed., Romeyn de Hooghe: de verbeelding van de late Gouden Eeuw (Zwolle: Waanders, 2008), pp. 61–62. John Alden and Daniel Landis, European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1750 (6 vols.; New York: Readex, 1980–1997), iv, p. 683.

Chapter 10

The Atlantic World in Paperback: The Amsterdam Publisher Jan ten Hoorn and His Catalogue of Popular Americana In the final quarter of the seventeenth century, as Dutch imperial aspirations receded in the Atlantic world, a period of reconfiguration and reflection beckoned. New generations of would-be colonists and adventurers directed their increasingly modest territorial ambitions towards Essequibo, Berbice, and ­Suriname, while new generations of publishers – realizing that future ventures were unlikely to surpass those in the past for narrative quality – e­ mbedded familiar stories of the Dutch Atlantic into a discourse of exoticism which imposed itself on the European imagination at the turn of the century. The Amsterdam publisher Jacob van Meurs presented readers at home and abroad with lavishly illustrated coffee-table books on overseas continents, written by a new generation of writers including Olfert Dapper, Arnoldus Montanus, ­Johan Nieuhof, and Phillip von Zesen, thus setting the scene for a genre which reached its climax in the sixty-six volume extravaganza of Pieter van der Aa’s Galerie agreable in the 1730s. The images in these books, cherished at the high end of the Old World book market, created powerful stereotypes which exerted substantial influence on Enlightenment Europe’s conceptions of overseas societies and cultures.1 Interest in the Atlantic world around 1700 was not confined, however, to readers with a sizeable income – it never had been after all. In the lower segment of the Dutch book market, not generally studied as thoroughly as the upper echelon with its eye-catching folio’s, the publication of Americana was dominated by an Amsterdam publisher who has received very little attention from scholars so far. Between his first “American” publication in 1676 and his retirement in 1699, Jan ten Hoorn published around a dozen affordable yet attractive quarto’s, all in the vernacular, which for a generation of readers in Holland and beyond must have constituted a literary survey of the reconfiguration of the Dutch Atlantic world. This essay will focus on Ten Hoorn’s catalogue of popular Americana in the final quarter of the seventeenth century. It will demonstrate how with relatively limited means and a keen eye for commercial 1 Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 1–3, 25–81.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_012

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opportunity, an Amsterdam publisher could build a more or less coherent and recognizable series of publications on a theme which had long enjoyed a steady interest in the United Provinces. Ten Hoorn became a master in reusing and reframing book illustrations which provided his Americana with, one presumes, considerable popular appeal. Ultimately, this essay argues that Ten Hoorn’s publications reflected and shaped the latest fashion in the late seventeenth-century book trade, and demonstrates in an exemplary way the gradual evolvement from factual coverage of Atlantic narratives to more fictional stories of an unknown world beyond the horizon.

Jan ten Hoorn and the Invention of the Pirate

After beginning his career as a bookbinder, Jan Claesz ten Hoorn (1639–1714) had been publishing books in Amsterdam since at least 1671.2 From his bookshop “In the History-Writer” located opposite the Oudezijds Heeren Logement, the upmarket inn on the Grimburgwal in the medieval heart of the city, he produced mainly pamphlets and books in quarto and octavo on history and current affairs. Ten Hoorn’s early publications displayed a clear focus on European developments – mainly the aggressive foreign policy of the French King Louis xiv which affected the well-being of the Dutch Republic, and even briefly turned Utrecht into an occupied city where Catholic mass was being celebrated for the first time in almost a century.3 Ten Hoorn’s initial interest in events outside Europe appears to have been directed towards the Indian Ocean world. In 1675, he co-produced a book on the Dutch surrender of Formosa – not a topical issue since the Dutch East India Company had lost the island more than ten years before, but still a theme which Ten Hoorn and his colleague Michiel Pietersz estimated would resonate with Dutch readers. Two years later, Ten Hoorn published another work on Asia, an account of the conquest of Makassar (1669) and its aftermath by a certain Gerrit Vermeulen. Both books already displayed the hallmarks of the success of the popular Americana Ten Hoorn decided to embark on around this time: an attractive, engraved titlepage, an orderly structure with the text neatly divided into short chapters, and a handful of engraved illustrations to enhance the books’ appeal. The travel 2 For information on his life and career, albeit rather succinctly, see M.M. Kleerkooper and W.P. van Stockum jr., De boekhandel in Amsterdam voornamelijk in de 17e eeuw (2 vols.; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1914–1916), i, pp. 273–79. 3 See for example Jan ten Hoorn’s 1673 illustrated news sheet Den ommegank der Roomschgesinden gehouden binnen Uytrecht (Atlas van Stolk, nr. 2538; Hendrik Muller, De Nederlandsche geschiedenis in platen, nr. 2493a).

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account also included the candid explanatory letter from “De boekverkoper aan de leser”, signed by Ten Hoorn, which would be a recurring feature in many of his subsequent publications.4 Throughout the early 1670s Jan ten Hoorn co-operated closely with his younger brother Timotheus ten Hoorn (1644–1715), who also first worked as a bookbinder before he joined the guild as a bookseller in August 1677.5 Together, the two brothers were responsible for a sizeable part of the Amsterdam market in cheap Dutch-language books between 1675 and 1700. In order for both to survive in an increasingly saturated trade, where less than half of all new booksellers managed to stay in business for more than five years, the brothers sharply divided their respective niches.6 Timotheus opted to specialize in grubstreet genres like romance and pornography. Even though he occasionally published under a pseudonym, the authorities in Amsterdam traced some of his more unwelcome publications to his workshop, and either fined him or did not allow specific books to be sold. In his later career Timotheus would take editorial control of the Europische Mercurius, a respected news serial, and shifted his attention towards medical treatises, a genre for which Jan also displayed an interest. The notorious reputation of Timotheus ten Hoorn may have affected his brother’s standing. The two men, perhaps as a measure of their success, were criticized by Amsterdam colleagues in a 1690 pamphlet for being “miserable worms” who “did everything they could to keep their household afloat” by publising “all sorts of trash and farce”, sold by pedlars on “sluices and markets”.7 In 1676, Jan devoted his attention to the Atlantic world for the first time. In the introduction of Pertinente beschrijvinge van Guiana, the anonymous author explicitly connected his work to earlier, authoritative Atlantic treatises by Johannes de Laet, Otto Keye, and David Pietersz. de Vries – texts which had 4 Frederik Coyett, ’t Verwaerloosde Formosa, of Waerachtig verhael, hoedanigh door verwaerloosinge der Nederlanders in Oost-Indien, het eylant Formosa van […] Coxinja, overrompelt […] is geworden. Amsterdam, 1675; De gedenkwaerdige voyagie van Gerret Vermeulen naar OostIndien (Amsterdam, 1677). 5 Kleerkooper and Van Stockum, De boekhandel in Amsterdam, i, p. 280; Inger Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant: Radicale ideeën in Nederlandse pornografische romans 1670–1700 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2002), pp. 50–52, 178–80, with many further references to Timotheus ten Hoorn. 6 Claartje Rasterhoff, Painting and Publishing as Cultural Industries: The Fabric of Creativity in the Dutch Republic, 1580–1800 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), p. 99. 7 Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant, p. 175. The pamphlet is entitled Relaas van de beroertens op Parnassus, and criticizes the Ten Hoorn brothers (“ellendige wurmen”). “Ze moeten hun huyshouding besorgen, en dat is haar niet te misprijsen, alle middelen daar toe in ’t werk stellen”, including “alderhande prullen en grollen” sold “op sluyzen en markten”. Jan ten Hoorn in 1687 would also print Spinozistic works, which led to a heated discussion with the Amsterdam consistory, see G.F.L. Peeters, “Jan Claesz ten Hoorn and Spinoza’s Tractaet”, Quaerendo 13.3 (1983), pp. 239–40.

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hitherto satisfied the demand for Atlantic knowledge. The book, published in quarto, resembled those earlier texts in making a case for transatlantic migration. The anonymous author of the introduction, possibly Ten Hoorn himself, explained that he had added at the end of this treatise a calculation of the costs investors have made, their fitting out of servants (Dienst-booden), and what they required on a twelve-month voyage, and also the profits which can be expected in the colony. It does not appear strange to us to add this to this historical tale (verhaeltje) […] for those who might have an interest to sail to Guyana, and expect good fortune and the blessing of the Lord, or the opportunity to establish a viable settlement.8 The call for settlers who were prepared to seek new opportunities across the Atlantic Ocean was particularly urgent at the time Ten Hoorn’s work on Guyana appeared. In 1674, after decades of corruption and makeshift financial policy, the Dutch West India Company had gone bankrupt. In Brazil the Portuguese had continued to outnumber the Dutch, and effectively forced the surrender of the colony from within in 1654. New Netherland had been lost to the Duke of York ten years later after various Puritan groups – all much more numerous than the Dutch – had disputed West India Company land claims for decades. In Suriname under Dutch rule, English planters were encouraged by London to leave for other locations in the Caribbean, and did so in increasing numbers – their exodus reaching its peak in 1675.9 Jan ten Hoorn, in other words, was in touch with some of the most pressing political concerns in the Atlantic world at the time of the publication of his Pertinente beschrijvinge. The book on Guyana lacked some of the more fanciful features of subsequent works: it did not include illustrations, an exception among Ten Hoorn quarto’s

8 Pertinente Beschrijvinge van Guiana (Amsterdam, 1676), [*2r-v]: “dat ick den Lezer hier neffens achter dit mijn Tractaet heb bygevoeght een calculatie van de onkosten der Participanten, hun uytrusten van Dienst-booden, en wat sy op een twaelf maendige Reys van nooden hebben, en oock voornamelijck de profijten die de Colonie daer van te verwachten heeft, soo dat dese Stellingen ons niet vreemt en docht om by dit Historisch verhaeltje te voegen; maer voor al, en boven alles, moeten aengemerckt worden de Conditien, die ons de Ed. Groot Mogende Heeren Staten van Hollandt ende West-Vrieslandt hebben doen presenteeren, voor die geenen die soude mogen lust hebben om naer Guiana te varen, en haer fortuyn en zegen des heeren te verwachten, of om een aensienelijcke Colonie uyt te setten”. 9 Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), p. 191; Suze Zijlstra, “Competing for European Settlers: Local Loyalties of Colonial Governments in Suriname and Jamaica, 1660–1680”, Journal of Early American History 4.2 (2014): 149–66.

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of this period, and did not use different fonts to provide a narrative structure and make the reading experience a more easy one. But the work’s theme must have been inspiring, or lucrative, or both. Ten Hoorn’s next publication constituted a major shift in his thinking about the potential of popular Americana in the Dutch book market, and put him squarely on the path of exploiting the demand among Dutch readers for spectacular stories and tales of (often unlikely) adventure and hardship. De Americaensche Zee-roovers (1678), supposedly an eyewitness account of various buccaneering campaigns in the Spanish Caribbean written by the ship’s surgeon Alexander Exquemelin from Honfleur, would rapidly become a major best-seller not only in Dutch, but also in the different languages into which it was translated – German, Spanish, and English within six years.10 Published by Ten Hoorn in at least two editions, De Americaensche Zee-roovers sported an illustrated title-page which promised gruesome tales of death and destruction (Figure 10.1). The book’s actual contents subsequently delivered what the title-page had promised. Several loosely connected tales of piracy and privateering meant that Rock the Brazilian, François L’Ollonais, and especially Henry Morgan to whom substantial sections of the book were devoted, became household names in late seventeenth-century Europe. Their feats became synonymous with the cruelties of naval warfare and the dangers of colonial life, and their stories provided a source of inspiration for an extremely successful genre of unbridled freedom and adventure which thrived well into the eighteenth century and, some might argue, continues until today.11 The “Preface from the Bookseller to the Reader”, which introduces the volume and is dated 1 September 1678, demonstrates how Ten Hoorn’s perspective on the Atlantic world had changed in two years. Whereas he had cited authorities on West Indian affairs in the introduction to his book on Guyana, here he deliberately exoticized the contents of Exquemelin’s work by claiming that it was a region “unknown to our fellow-countrymen like no other in the entire world”, a bizarre fabrication after decades of Dutch trade and privateering in every corner of the Caribbean and on the Spanish Main.12 Ten Hoorn’s rhetoric 10

11 12

John Alden and Dennis Landis, European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1750 (6 vols.; New York: Readex Books, 1980–1997), iv, 568. The Spanish editions were probably produced in Amsterdam. That they were issued anonymously suggests that Ten Hoorn had a privilege for the domestic market which the unnamed publisher of the Spanish translation wanted to circumvent. Herman de la Fontaine Verwey, “The Ship’s Surgeon Exquemelin and His Book on the Buccaneers”, Quaerendo 4.2 (1974): 109–31, with many biographical details on Exquemelin. De Americaensche Zee-roovers (Amsterdam, 1678), [*3r]: “Dat gedeelte van America, ’t geen onder de Spaensche Heerschappy behoort […] is aen onse Landtgenooten soo onbekent, als of het selve in de geheele wereldt niet gevonden wierdt”.

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[Alexander Exquemelin], De Americaensche Zee-roovers. Amsterdam, 1678, title-page Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm O 60-828

continued by stating that the “brave enterprises and courageous expeditions of the most famous pirates” were no less impressive than the feats of the old naval heroes – men who were the subject of a specific Dutch cult he had helped to build two years earlier by publishing Lambert van den Bosch’s Leeven en daden

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der doorluchtighste zee-helden (1676).13 With this sentence, and the mindset it revealed, Ten Hoorn provided the foundation for the romantic representations of piracy which generations of armchair travelers in early modern ­Europe would eagerly embrace.14 The reliability of the tales in Exquemelin’s book appears to have been only of secondary importance, and Ten Hoorn’s repeated emphasis on the author’s credibility undermined rather than supported the text’s authority: Concering the veracity of these histories, we do not believe they can be doubted because the Author, who has described them in all honesty, has himself been present at the robberies of L’Ollonais and Morgan, and hence has a better and more direct knowledge of their circumstances than someone who would have obtained them second-hand.15 Exquemelin’s original manuscript had been written in French. The Dutch translation’s resemblance in language and style to later works published by Ten Hoorn suggests that the publisher, or one of the people in his workshop, exerted considerable influence over the eventual text. A comparison between the Dutch edition of 1678 and the extended French edition of 1686 also based on the ship’s surgeon’s notes reveals Ten Hoorn’s editorial strategy. The French edition, probably closer to the original manuscript than Ten Hoorn’s Dutch translation, did not focus primarily on piracy but on matters of interest to natural historians, with many references to geographical and biological curiosities.16 Ten Hoorn, then, must have made the conscious decision in 1678 to emphasize adventure, thus creating a whole new theme in the European book market. 13

14 15

16

Idem, [*3v–*4r]: “Van gelijken het voornaemste leven en daden van de aldervermaerste Zee-Roovers Francois Lolonois, en Johan Morgan, welker kloekmoedige onderneemingen, en dappere uytvoeringen met alle recht voor geen van de oude Zee-Helden behoeven te wijken”. On the cult of naval heroes and the significant of Van den Bosch’s writings, see Cynthia Lawrence, “Hendrick de Keyser’s Heemskerk Monument: The Origins of the Cult and Iconography of Dutch Naval Heroes”, Simiolus 21.4 (1992): 265–95. See also Chapter 11 in this volume, with further references. Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 114–21; Virginia Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), pp. 101 ff. De Americaensche Zee-rovers, [*4r]: “Wat de waerheydt van dese geschiedenissen belanght, daer aen geloven wy niet dat iets te twijfelen valt, door dien den Autheur, die dit volgens alle opreghtigheydt beschreven heeft, self in alle de Roverijen van Lolonois, en Morgan tegenwoordigh is geweest; en derhalven van alle omstandigheden beter en nader kennis hadt, als iemant die sulx uyt eens anders verhael soude moeten weten”. De la Fontaine Verwey, “The Ship’s Surgeon”, pp. 114, 121.

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The Ten Hoorn Formula

The commercial success of De Americaensche Zee-rovers shaped Ten Hoorn’s thinking about the possibilities of exotic literature. One of the key ­elements – and one of the elements which underlines the serial nature of the publications coming off Ten Hoorn’s presses – was the recognizable format of his popular Americana. All books which more or less belonged to the series were published in quarto, and were introduced to readers by a printed letter from the publisher himself. The texts were divided into short chapters, usually not much longer than three or four pages. Every chapter was prefaced by a succinct list of themes that would follow in the next few pages, printed in italics in a slightly larger font for additional clarity. The chapters were then set in gothic type as Dutch readers of printed works in the vernacular had come to expect. The books were characterized by an attractive engraved title-page, and inside, too, an important role was given to illustrations, invariably small copper engravings made by local artists such as Herman Padtbrugge and Jan Luyken who regularly co-operated with Ten Hoorn. The recycling of engravings across the various publications indicates that from the publisher’s perspective as well, the books on the Atlantic world belonged together. But it also suggests that accuracy was increasingly sacrificed for the sake of cost-effective entrepreneurship. Whereas Jacob van Meurs, for his coffee-table books, had custom-made illustrations designed for every new volume, Ten Hoorn, for his “paperbacks”, opted to use the same images several times. The engravings connected Ten Hoorn’s publications in surprising ways. De Americaensche Zee-roovers, alongside four portraits of leading buccaneers and two maps, contained six engravings of murderous campaigns in the Caribbean. Not all of those were exclusively used for Exquemelin’s work. The illustration of arguably Henry Morgan’s most famous venture, the sack of Maracaibo and subsequent defeat of a Spanish fleet in 1669, was re-used by Ten Hoorn for the second edition of Lambert van den Bosch’s Leeven en daden der Doorlughtige zee-helden (1683). Here, however, the same image depicted the attack on a fortress on Mozambique by Admiral Paulus van Caerden in the service of the Dutch East India Company in 1607.17 Yet Ten Hoorn’s editorial strategy was more refined than using identical engravings for two completely different stories. The real intricacies of his visual manipulations can be found by comparing reworked engravings. Two examples will suffice. The first one is an image, also from De Americaensche Zee-roovers, of an enslaved labourer kneeling before 17

De Americaensche Zee-roovers, pp. 102–3; Lambert van den Bosch, Leeven en daden der Doorlughtige zee-helden (Amsterdam, 1683), pp. 92–93.

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Henry Morgan at Maracaibo. Unlike the Spanish colonists in the background, who are tortured and murdered in various ways, the African – the only black man in the image – obediently kneels before the English buccaneer, and, so the text confirms, points Morgan and his men towards the location where the Spaniards had hidden their riches from the pirates (Figure 10.2).18 Three years later, for Edward Melton’s Land- en zeereizen, the image, now depicting Morgan’s campaign in Panama, not Maracaibo, was changed in several important ways. The enslaved man had been removed, and the main scene in the composition’s bottom-right corner was now devoted to the practice of making Spanish colonists drink liquid gold to satisfy their thirst for more riches – a trusted trope in Protestant imagery of the Americas. As a whole, the composition now focused even more on the murderous behavior of the pirates, emphasized by the newly added caption engraved in the plate: “The gruesome cruelties of the robbers” (Figure 10.3).19 Edward Melton’s Land- en zeereizen door verscheide Gewesten des Werelds (1681) can be regarded as Ten Hoorn’s first compendium of knowledge of the world – and as a way to tie the wide appeal of Exquemelin’s pirates to the longstanding tradition of printed Americana. Melton, a pseudonym of Godfried van Broekhuizen, did little more than to bring together several well-known stories and images. The sections on Virginia and Florida, including some of the iconography, heavily relied on the first America-volumes of Theodore de Bry from the early 1590s, while the account of New Netherland was taken almost verbatim from Arnoldus Montanus’ De Nieuwe en onbekende weereld which Van Meurs had published in 1671.20 The lengthy description of events in the Caribbean was a reworked version of De Americaensche Zee-roovers, which now received attention from a slightly more learned readership who had perhaps purchased Melton’s work for its (admittedly thin) veil of scholarship.21 Ten Hoorn readily appealed to those readers in his opening address “To the Reader”, where he pondered how seventeenth-century Europeans had emulated ancient geographers like Strabo and Pliny the Elder. Melton was presented to readers as “an English nobleman” whose “personal notes and letters” Ten

18 19

De Americaensche Zee-rovers, pp. 98–99. Edward Melton, Zee- en landreizen door verscheide Gewesten des Werelds (Amsterdam, 1681), pp. 206–7. 20 Melton, Zee- en landreizen, pp. 136–68 (New Netherland) corresponds to Arnoldus Montanus, De nieuwe en onbekende weereld (Amsterdam, 1671), pp. 123–34. The sections on Virginia and Florida (Melton, Zee- en landreizen, pp. 178–79) are taken from the texts and captions in De Bry’s America i and ii. 21 Melton, Zee- en landreizen, pp. 121–225.

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“An African man points Henry Morgan to the place where he can find his booty”, in: [Alexander Exquemelin], De Americaensche Zee-roovers. Amsterdam, 1678, pp. 98–99 Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm O 60-828

Hoorn had “received and translated” – a pointed example of the excessive editorial liberties the Amsterdam publisher no longer shunned.22 22 Melton, Zee- en landreizen, [*3v]: “Zelfs is het verschil dikwils zoo groot, en de beschrijving en aanwijzing der plaatsen, welke d’oude Grieken en Romeinen ons nagelaaten ­hebben,

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Figure 10.3

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“Gruesome cruelties performed by the robbers”, in: Edward Melton, Zee- en landreizen door verscheide Gewesten des Werelds, Amsterdam, 1681, pp. 206–7 Leiden University Library, 1366 C 18

zoo geweldig duister of verkeerd, dat de geleerden dikwils jaren lang twisten, om te weten, welke plaats Strabo, Plinius, of eenig ander Schrijver […] gemeend heeft. […] hebben wy goed gevonden, wanneer ons d’eigene Aanteekeningen en Brieven van den Heer Melton ter hand wierden gesteld, de zelve te doen vertaalen, in een behoorlijke order stellen”; [A1r]: “Engelsch Edelman”.

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The second instance where an old engraving was used for a second time, changing context and meaning in the process, was in two later publications of the Ten Hoorn firm. In 1684, Ten Hoorn had published a Dutch translation of the French friar Pierre Dan’s Histoire de Barbarie. The account fitted well in Ten Hoorn’s catalogue of publications, because like De Americaensche Zeerovers, it focused on cruel practices, this time from North Africans on the Barbary Coast at the expense of enslaved Christian sailors and merchants. The publisher added the words “en des zelfs zee-roovers” (“and their pirates”) to the original title for good measure. The volume’s many illustrations, copied for the Dutch edition by Jan Luyken, connected Dan’s work to the other books in Ten Hoorn’s catalogue. Once again several engravings from Lambert van den Bosch’s work on naval heroes featured in slightly altered form as visual representations of Algiers, Tunis, and Salé.23 One of the newly made engravings in Ten Hoorn’s Dutch translation was that of a small boat carrying enslaved Christians from their vanquished ship towards imprisonment on the coast, where they would leave only for substantial ransom money assembled in Europe (Figure 10.4).24 Seven years on, Ten Hoorn would re-use the same engraving for the travel account of Jan Erasmus Reyning, an adventurer and small-time pirate who crossed the Caribbean several times. This time the author himself, with a distinctive hat, was added to the small boat carrying the enslaved Christians, which now represented a small raiding party off the coast of Aruba (Figure 10.5).25 Reyning’s personal account had come into the hands of the publisher through the mediation of a friend, a certain David van der Sterre, and the story of how this happened offers a view of how someone like Ten Hoorn obtained attractive manuscripts to put into print. Van der Sterre, a physician on Curaçao, explained in the preface that at first he had found it difficult to convince his friend to put his experiences into writing “because of his modest ­character” – a “flaw” Ten Hoorn ascribed to his authors so often that it is difficult to be taken seriously every time. Then, when Reyning had penned down his adventures 23

Several images in Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen, en des zelfs zee-roovers (Amsterdam, 1684) were copied (and reworked) from Van den Bosch, Leeven en daden from the previous year. For example the Siege of Malacca from 1606 (Leeven en daden, 150) was reworked to become “Expedition to Algiers” (Historie van Barbaryen, p. 105). “Bossu before Amsterdam” (Leeven en daden, 38–39) became “View of Salé” (Historie van Barbaryen, pp. 202–3). 24 Dan, Historie van Barbaryen, pp. 146–47. 25 David van der Sterre, Zeer aenmerkelyke reysen gedaen door Jan Erasmus Reyning, meest in de West-Indien (Amsterdam, 1691), pp. 94–95. On Reyning’s account, see Basil Kingstone, “Jan Erasmus Reyning, Privateer and Hero”, Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 28 (2007): 229–42.

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Figure 10.4

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“Bringing Christian slaves ashore”, in: Pierre Dan, Historie van Barbaryen, en des zelfs zee-roovers. Amsterdam, 1684, pp. 146–47 Leiden University Library, 1006 C 28

(“so many miracles, the perils of life, hunger, shipwreck, different battles at sea and on land, cunning attacks, release of people, in short everything which is miraculous and worthwhile”), Van der Sterre “remembered a handshake promise he had made when he was still in Amsterdam, to my bookseller Jan ten Hoorn,

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Figure 10.5

“Reyning and several of his comrades off the coast of Aruba”, in: David van der Sterre, Zeer aenmerkelyke reysen gedaen door Jan Erasmus Reyning, meest in de West-Indien. Amsterdam, 1691, pp. 94–95 Leiden University Library, 1012 C 36

that if I had something special, I would communicate it to him”.26 Reyning’s account did not resonate with a European audience in the way E ­ xquemelin’s 26

Van der Sterre, Zeer aenmerkelyke reysen, [*3v]: “… syn verhaal van soo veel wonderen, perykelen des levens, onderwerpingen van hongers-noden, schip-breuken, verscheide battaljens so te water als te land, listige aenslagen, verlossingen der menschen, en in ’t

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observations had done, but it is evident that, thirteen years on, Ten Hoorn still tapped into the same sentiments among Dutch readers for spectacular West Indian stories of piracy and shipwreck. Whether Van der Sterre’s account of how he had provided Ten Hoorn with Reyning’s text is true is impossible to say, but Ten Hoorn did his utmost to make readers aware of the kind of publications he had already printed and, by implication, similar ones he might be producing in the near future. At the end of the preface to the second edition of Van den Bosch’s survey of naval heroes, Ten Hoorn promised more of the same: Reader: if reading this Work might be no small cause for entertainment for you […] it will spur us on to share with the world from time to time other niceties, of which the designs have already been made.27 With these kinds of announcements, Ten Hoorn intended to attract returning customers to his bookshop. One year later, he duly delivered on his promise with Dan’s Historie van Barbaryen which, like Van den Bosch’s book, was a more ambitious work in a slightly bigger format than the quarto’s the publisher reserved for popular texts. Another strategy to keep readers reading was to insert stock catalogues behind the final pages of printed books, and Jan ten Hoorn – more than most publishers in late Golden Age Amsterdam – did so with great regularity. Multiple copies of De Americaensche Zee-rovers contain a one-sheet (two-page) catalogue of works which Ten Hoorn published, and which were for sale in his bookshop. Titles which were most likely to be of interest for Exquemelin’s readers were listed first, forsaking the normal order of seventeenth-century stock catalogues in which theological and juridical books were listed before historical literature. Hence the 1678 catalogue opened with the works of Van den Bosch (including a special version on “fine paper”), the works on Formosa and the Malacca War, and the account of Guyana, all but the last one adorned with “Figures, in 4”. The catalogue also mentioned De Americaensche Zee-rovers

27

kort al wat wonderlyk en aenmerkens waerdig genoemt kan werden […] so dagt ik aen de belofte, die ik, nog tot Amsterdam sijnde, aan myn Boekverkoper Jan ten Hoorn met handtasting beloofd had, dat als ik iets besonders hadde, het selve aen hem soude mede delen”. Van den Bosch, Leeven en daden, [*4v]: “Leezer: indien u nu ’t doorleezen van dit Werk niet minder mag vermaaken […] zal het ons aanmoedigen tot van tijd tot tijd meer andere fraaye dingen, waar van d’Ontwerpen alreedts zijn opgesteld, aan de wereld gemeen te maaken”.

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itself, suggesting that the same printed sheet could be (and probably was) used in the back of other pocketbooks too.28 The final pillar under Ten Hoorn’s marketing strategy was formed by the beautifully designed title-pages. Engraved frontispieces could be used as single-­sheet flyers to announce newly published works behind the window of the bookshop, and the compositions typically included the most attractive elements of the stories which were told inside. The most striking title-page is arguably the one Jan Luyken designed for Simon de Vries’ Wonderen soo aen als in; en wonder-gevallen op en omtrent de zeeën (1687, Figure 10.6). The central figure in the composition is the allegory of Navigation, recognizable from the crown of ships’ sterns on her head topped off by the North Star, the necklace of exotic shells, the cornucopia from which the rivers flowed into the sea, and the compass on her lap. She is surrounded by images of some of the most spectacular tales human activity on the oceans could provide – p ­ rimarily encounters with miraculous sea monsters, and natural disasters including thunder and lightning, a mealstrom, and a waterspout. The frontispiece was such an important anchor for the book as a whole that the text opened with its textual explanation by the engraver, as a visual metaphor for everything the book promised to be. “About all these things”, Jan Luyken stressed, “this book will report at length”.29 The book’s contents – a series of conversations 28

29

The list is included in the two copies of De Americaensche Zee-rovers I inspected – at Leiden University Library, 456 B 8; and at the University of Amsterdam’s Special Collections, otm O 60-828: “Catalogus ofte Register van de boecken die by Jan ten Hoorn gedrukt, en te bekomen zijn: […] Leven en daeden der Doorluchtige Zee-Helden, met ­Figuren in 4.; Oock des selfs fijn papier; De Amerikaensche Zee-Roovers, met veel Figu­ ren, in 4.; ’t Verwaerloosde Formosa, met Figuren in 4.; Oostindische Voyagie van Gerrit Vermeulen, met Figuren in 4.; Pertinente beschrijvingh van Guaiana, in 4.” On the importance of stock catalogues in the early modern book market, see Bert van Selm, Een menighte treffelijcke boecken: Nederlandse boekhandelscatalogi in het begin van de zeventiende eeuw (Utrecht: Hes, 1987). Simon de Vries, Wonderen soo aen als in; en wonder-gevallen op en omtrent de zeeën (Amsterdam, 1687), [*2v]: “Des Plaet-snyders verklaeringh der titel-plaet: Ghy siet hier de Verwonderingh, te gelijck met de Zee-vaerd, vertoond in de gedaente eener Vrouwspersoon, hebbende op ’t Hoofd een Steven-kroon; boven deselve de Noord-staer; nevens haer een Compas: Door welcke Zee-vaert de Wonderen der Zeeën sijn ontdeckt, en aen ’t light gekomen. Haer Omhanghsel van Paerlen en andere dingen verbeeld de Water-gewassen. De by haer uytgaende Water-stralen geven te kennen de loopende Rivieren, welcke sigh in de Zee uyt gieten. Aen d’eene sijde nevens haer vertoonen sich wonderlijcke en vervaerlij­ cke Zee-monsteren: Aen d’andere sijde een Zee-man, houdende ’t Opschrift deeses Boecks. Boven haer siet men een Water-hoos, waer door een Schip nae boven in de lught werd opgetrocken. Voorts, ’t vergaen, en Stranden der Schepen: Wonderlijcke Landingen; seldsaeme Behoudingen, soo door geringe Boots, als op woeste, eensaeme Klippen, Eylanden, Platen, e.s.v. Een verschrickelijcke Mael-stroom, Draey-kolck of Swelgh-kuyl, alles inslockende, werd hier voor-gesteld: En eyndlijck, ee swaere verduysterde Lught, swanger van

Publisher ten Hoorn and His Catalogue of Popular Americana

Figure 10.6

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Simon de Vries, Wonderen soo aen als in; en wonder-gevallen op en omtrent de zeeën. Amsterdam, 1687, title-page Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm OG 63-4184

between four people including the armchair traveller Polylector and the seaman Marinus which covered everything from Noah’s Ark to the abundance of sea turtles in Brazil – embedded tales from the Atlantic world into a broader Storm-winden, Donderen en Blixemen, die de Zee-vaerende persoonen niet weynighmael in ’t uyterste gevaer stellen; en van al welcke dingen dit Werck in ’t breede handeld”.

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maritime narrative, just like the title-page had connected the work to prior publications which were also for sale at the bookshop on the Grimburgwal. At least one surviving copy concluded with another stock catalogue.30

From Fact to Fiction

The gradual evolvement of Jan ten Hoorn’s Atlantic publications – from traditional works of migration and settlement to new narratives of piracy and maritime disaster, and from texts by household names of the Dutch book industry such as Lambert van den Bosch, Edward Melton, and Simon de Vries to individually gathered accounts by Jan Erasmus Reyning and Adriaen van Berkel – resulted in a broad and heterogeneous back catalogue which enabled Ten Hoorn to maintain his position as Amsterdam’s leading publisher of popular Americana. Van Berkel’s Americaensche voyagien naar Rio de Berbice en Suriname (1695) was the latest in a series of works on individual American colonies – others included Louisiana and Canada31 – which unlike Ten Hoorn’s book on Guyana twenty years before emphasized ethnographic rarities and unlikely encounters with wild animals or bearded mermaids rather than more realistic concerns about the everyday problems European settlers encountered across the ocean (Figure 10.7). Ten Hoorn’s increasing preference for the spectacular and the marvelous culminated in a treatise on cannibalism, De wonderlyke historie der Mensche-Eeters (1696) which was published in octavo without illustrations beyond the attractive frontispiece (Figure 10.8), and which completed the transformation from fact to fiction in his expanding catalogue of books on the Atlantic world.32 The year 1699 formed a watershed in Jan ten Hoorn’s career. The main reason appears to have been that his eldest son Nicolaas ten Hoorn finished his apprenticeship, and on 6 January attained burgher status in Amsterdam – in the records of which he was mentioned as “bookseller”.33 Nicolaas’ name had been mentioned in the imprint of an Amsterdam book for the first time in 30 31

32 33

University of Amsterdam, Special Collections otm OG 63-4184: “Catalogus van boecken die by Jan ten Hoorn gedruckt en te bekoomen zijn”. Both books were printed in the same year and are often found together in the same convolute: Louis Hennepin, Beschryving van Louisania, nieuwelijks ontdekt ten zuid-westen van Nieuw-Frankrijk. Amsterdam, 1688; Nicolas Denys, Geographische en Historische ­Beschrijving der Kusten van Noord-America, Amsterdam, 1688. The copy I inspected is in Leiden University Library, 1413 E 26. De wonderlyke historie der Mensche-Eeters (Amsterdam, 1696). Kleerkooper and Van Stockum, De boekhandel in Amsterdam, i, p. 280.

Publisher ten Hoorn and His Catalogue of Popular Americana

Figure 10.7

223

Adriaen van Berkel, Americaensche voyagien naar Rio de Berbice en Suriname. Amsterdam, 1695, title-page Leiden University Library, 1367 E 13

1695, but it was only after 1699 that he began to publish titles with great regularity. Although his father’s name continued to appear on title-pages of printed books after the turn of the century, the number of re-impressions and new editions increased dramatically. New titles from the Ten Hoorn firm were mainly published by Nicolaas, who continued to use the address at the Grimburgwal

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Figure 10.8

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De wonderlyke historie der Mensche-Eeters. Amsterdam, 1696, title-page Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm OK 61-580

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with which readers had become familiar. In an advertisement in the Oprechte Haarlemse Courant of 16 May 1699, Jan ten Hoorn announced the impending sale of his back catalogue – first on 19 May his theological, medicinal, and historical treatises, and then three days later his unbound books and other assorted papers.34 It is not entirely clear where this left Nicolaas ten Hoorn, as his father’s back catalogue would have made for a nice start in the Amsterdam book market, but perhaps not all of Jan ten Hoorn’s possessions were sold at the public auction. The number of re-impressions in later years suggests that at least Ten Hoorn held on to his privileges and his copper plates, and occasionally he did issue new books – but the primacy of the family business had now certainly shifted to the son. Regarding the publication of popular Americana, Nicolaas ten Hoorn continued on the path set out by his father. Intriguingly, and perhaps tellingly, one of the first titles he published as a bookseller in his own right was a new version of Alexander Exquemelin’s tales of piracy, although the work was by now called Historie der Boecaniers, of vrybuyters van America (1700, Figure 10.9). “We believe it is unnecessary”, he wrote in the preface, “to introduce this work to you, because several years ago part of it has already appeared to great acclaim in the service of the common good”.35 Nicolaas ten Hoorn’s edition, however, was not based on his father’s original work of 1678. In the intervening years, Exquemelin’s writings had tripled in size, and Nicolaas followed the most recent English translation which had been printed in London the previous year.36 In terms of content, the focus had shifted from Jan ten Hoorn’s appraisal of leading buccaneers like Henry Morgan and Samuel L’Ollonais to stories of geography which Exquemelin had added to his manuscript after the first edition of 1678, and which also came to the fore in accounts which Nicolaas added to Exquemelin’s work. The illustrations were made anew as well, by the young Amsterdam engraver Jan Lamsvelt. The fondness of spectacular tales remained, however, with episodes on human fights with crocodiles (Figure 10.10) and travels along 34

35

36

Oprechte Haarlemse Courant, 16 May 1699: “Jan ten Hoorn, Boekverkoper t’Amsterdam over ’t oude Heeren-Logement, sal Dingsdag, den 19 Mey, verkopen verscheyde rare, meest nieuwe en welgeconditioneerde Godgeleerde, Medicijnse en Historise; en Vrydag, den 22 Mey, sijn ongebonde Boecken en sortering”. Historie der Boecaniers, of vrybuyters van America (Amsterdam, 1700), [*3r]: “Wy oordeelen het t’eenenmaal onnoodig, om by wyze van een Voor-reeden, veel van het volgende Werk te spreeken, nademaal al eenige Jaaren geleeden, een gedeelte van ’t zelve met een algemeene toejuychinge ten dienste van ’t gemeen in ’t licht is gebracht geweest”. De La Fontaine Verwey, “The Ship’s Surgeon”, pp. 126–27. See also Henrieke Korten, “Boeckeniers zijn gaeuw in het schieten: Jan ten Hoorns uitgave Americaensche zee-roovers” (MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2011).

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Figure 10.9

[Alexander Exquemelin], Historie der Boecaniers, of vrybuyters van America. Amsterdam, 1700, title-page Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm O 66-228

American rivers on a raft selected for depiction.37 The popularity of the pirates’ tales – this is still how Nicolaas decided to market the book – had not waned, and in 1709 he produced a re-issue of his own extended edition. 37

Historie der Boecaniers, i, 138 (Gevegt van een Boecanier met een Crocodil) and iii, p. 116 (Groot gevaar der Boecaniers, in’t afvaren van een Rivier, op hout-vlotten).

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Yet Nicolaas followed not only the tricks of the trade he had observed in the workshop of his father, but also those which had made the reputation of his uncle Timotheus. In 1708, Nicolaas published the fictional Beschryvinge van het Magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes – a prelude and inspiration to the Robinsonades of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift.38 Like the early novels in Timotheus ten Hoorn’s catalogue, some of which dealt with the discovery of fictitious lands, Krinke Kesmes was printed in octavo (Figure 10.11).39 The physical appearance of the book, in other words, distinguished it from the popular Americana of Nicolaas’ father. In addition to being a model for Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), however, Krinke Kesmes must also be understood as the natural follow-up to the increasingly fantastic popular Americana which Jan ten Hoorn had published in the 1680s and 1690s. Krinke Kesmes explicitly appealed to the readership of, principally, Exquemelin’s tales of piracy by introducing the novel’s main character as someone who had long sailed in the West Indies, more specifically to Spanish strongholds like Panama and Portobelo which had regularly featured in the histories of the buccaneers. The (fictional) author occasionally returned to Holland – just like Exquemelin and Jan Erasmus Reyning had done – meeting his friend with whom he shared his stories outside the bookshop of Nicolaes (ii) Visscher, where the latter was looking for a recently published map.40 Yet the contents of the novel, the “discovery” of the mythical Terra Australis, and the author’s encounters with the local ruler, the Garbon, belonged more to the literary traditions of the early Enlightenment than to the more popularizing trend of the final quarter of the seventeenth century. Conclusion The Amsterdam publisher Jan ten Hoorn played a crucial role in disseminating a popular “paperback” idea of the Americas in the United Provinces in 38 39

40

David Faussett, “Tall Ships, Tall Stories: Travel Liars and the Case of Krinke Kesmes”, Dutch Crossing 19.1 (1995): 58–70. Timotheus ten Hoorn, as early as 1682, published Denis Vairasse, Historie der Sevarambes, volkeren die een gedeelte van het darde vaste-land bewoonen, gemeenlijk Zuid-land genaamd. In 1708/9, so at more or less the same time as his nephew’s Krinke Kesmes, Timotheus issued Richard Bonhomme, Huwlyks-eiland, zijnde een nieuwe ontdekking van’t zuiden (1708/9). See Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant, p. 278. Hendrik Smeeks, Beschryvinge van het Magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes (Amsterdam, 1708), p. 19: “Ik kwam toe tot Amsterdam in de maand Juny 1696. Hier vond ik mijn ouden trouwen Vriend voor de deur van N: Visscher staan, siende na een nieuw uitgekoomen Kaarte”.

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Figure 10.10 Jan Lamsvelt, “Fight between a buccaneer and a crocodile”, in: Historie der Boecaniers, of vrybuyters van America. Amsterdam, 1700, i, p. 138 Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm O 66-228

the period that the Dutch West India Company had been dismantled and the imperial moment of Dutch expansion in the Western hemisphere had receded. With a series of low-cost, small-sized books in the vernacular, all adorned with simple copper engravings, he contributed to the shift in thinking about the

Publisher ten Hoorn and His Catalogue of Popular Americana

Figure 10.11

229

Hendrik Smeeks, Beschryvinge van het Magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes. Amsterdam, 1708, title-page Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm O 63-6152 (3)

Atlantic world no less than his colleague Jacob van Meurs did with the coffeetable books he issued at the same time. Ten Hoorn started his production of Americana with an ordinary travel account, as so many booksellers during the Dutch Golden Age had done. After the publication of Alexander Exquemelin’s

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hugely successful De Americaensche Zee-roovers in 1678, however, Ten Hoorn increasingly focused on spectacular tales of adventure, gradually shifting to a market formula in which fact and fiction were intertwined in a way that made it difficult for his loyal readership to gauge what was true and what had been made up. The books in-quarto on the Atlantic world, sometimes appearing several years apart, were carefully placed together in Ten Hoorn’s sales catalogues to suggest a sense of editorial cohesion, and were connected by having the same recognizable format, with graphic title-pages and short chapters that were preceded by summaries to create an easy reading experience. The relatively expensive copper engravings were used multiple times to illustrate different episodes in the various accounts. Hence, with only minor readjustments, a vessel carrying Christian slaves along the coast of North Africa could be transformed into a party of Dutch buccaneers in the Lesser Antilles, and an enslaved labourer on the Venezuelan coast could be turned into a greedy Spanish colonist in Panama, if this was what a new publication required. Jan ten Hoorn’s editorial strategy was apparently so successful that his son Nicolaas continued in the same vein. His first book on the Americas, too, was an extended edition of Exquemelin’s best-seller. In 1708, he completed the gradual shift in his father’s catalogue of Americana by producing the first entirely fictional account of the Atlantic world, Krinke Kesmes, which not only became a minor literary classic in the United Provinces, but also inspired the genre of Robinsonades that would reach its glorious and lasting peak in England two decades later.

Chapter 11

Heroic Memories: Admirals of Dutch Brazil in the Rise of Dutch National Consciousness In 1769, the Frisian nobleman, playwright, and lyricist Onno Zwier van Haren professed his love of the fatherland with a long poem entitled De Geusen (“The Beggars”), a tribute to the most glorious chapters of Dutch history. The verses began by reflecting on the triumph of a handful of rebels over the mighty Spanish troops of King Philip ii at Den Briel in 1572, and went on to summarize all the achievements of the Dutch people during the so-called Golden Age, which now, after decades of steady decline, had become a distant memory. The poem’s eleventh canto focused on the country’s colonial past, and the opening words of one of its couplets would later come to stand for the entire history of a missed opportunity in the Atlantic world: Neglected Brazil, O fertile grounds, whose nature is diamonds and gold; I hear them proclaim your surrender, now that Banckert can no longer save you! In vain has Post destroyed the churches of Olinda for our new accomplishments. With Nassau the frivolous fortune disappeared; The places, the names, that were chosen by the victorious have been lost in today’s Pernambuco.1 If the German historian Hermann Wätjen is to be believed, Zwier van Haren’s regret for a “Neglected Brazil” – or, in the poet’s native Dutch, Verzuimd Brasil – still resonated in the nation’s collective consciousness when his study of the colony first appeared in 1921, and later generations of scholars too have habitually 1 Onno Zwier van Haren, De Geusen: Proeve van een vaderlands gedicht (Zwolle, 1776), p. 69: “Verzuimd Brasil; ô ryke gronden, / Wier aard’ is Diamant en goud; / Ik hoor uw overgaaf verkonden, / Nu Bankert u niet meer behoud! / Vergeefs heeft Post Olinda’s kerken / Verwoest, voor onse nieuwe Werken. / Met Nassau wykt het wuft geluk; / De Plaats, de naamen, zyn verlooren, / Die d’Overwinnaar had verkooren / In ‘t heedendaagse Fernaambuk”. See Pieter van der Vliet, Onno Zwier van Haren (1713–1779): staatsman en dichter (Hilversum: Verloren, 1996), pp. 319–40 for an extensive discussion of De Geusen.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004348035_013

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employed the phrase to describe the loss of Dutch Brazil in the wake of Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen’s return to Europe.2 It is no surprise to see that nostalgia for Brazil in the Netherlands was connected to the memory of success under Johan Maurits, and to the famous paintings of demolished convents and churches in Pernambuco made by Frans Post. But unlike these two men, Admiral Joost Banckert – to whom Zwier van Haren gave pride of place over the others – can hardly be considered a key figure in the colony’s history, nor in its historiography. Charles Boxer, in The Dutch in Brazil, mentions Banckert’s name only twice, while José Antônio Gonsalves de Mello, in Tempo dos Flamengos, does so on only one occasion.3 How can it be explained, then, that a late eighteenth-century poet, when contemplating the Dutch past in Brazil, came up with the name of this admiral? In this chapter, I will focus on Banckert and on three other naval heroes of Dutch Brazil to establish the role admirals played in the construction of a collective memory of the colony in the Netherlands.4 In chronological order, the story begins with the accomplishments of the legendary Piet Heyn, still wellknown today for his capture of a Spanish treasure fleet at Matanzas in 1628. It continues by describing the feats of Hendrick Lonck, Jan Lichthart, and Joost Banckert – men whose names are virtually meaningless to the majority of the population of the Netherlands in the twenty-first century. It is not my aim to reconsider their credentials for entry into the pantheon of national history. Instead I want to concentrate on how and why these men lived on in the nation’s memory after the painful loss of Dutch Brazil. How can it be explained that some reputations suffered whereas others remained intact? What was the influence of the media on strengthening and lengthening certain reputations? And, more broadly, to what extent did these naval heroes help to sustain and shape the legacy of Dutch Brazil? In my search for answers, I will focus on the crucial period between the fall of Recife and the emergence of the nation-state in the late eighteenth century. Heroes from the Dutch Golden Age whose fame 2 Hermann Wätjen, Das Holländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1921), p. 8; Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 243; Henk den Heijer, De geschiedenis van de wic (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1994), pp. 49–54. 3 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 185, 189; Jose Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos: Influencia da ocupaçao holandesa na vida e na cultura do norte do Brasil (Recife: Governo do Estado de Pernambuco, 1947), p. 35. 4 The focus on admirals has the additional benefit of putting at least a slice of the ocean back into Atlantic history, see: Nick Rodger, “Atlantic Seafaring”, in: Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of The Atlantic World 1450–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 71, and Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and ­Opportunities”, The American Historical Review 111.3 (2006), p. 745.

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had survived for one hundred and fifty years had a good chance of retaining their place in the more systematically nurtured national consciousness of the nineteenth century.5

The Cult of Naval Heroes

How did these four admirals become naval heroes, and how were their reputations connected to Dutch Brazil? Piet Heyn, the first to make a name for himself, was appointed second in command of the West India Company’s first Atlantic fleet. As Vice-Admiral under Jacob Willekens, he was instrumental in the conquest of Salvador in May 1624. Unlike his superior officer, he distinguished himself in combat, and the battle for Bahia earned him the status of a brave and fearless commander. The Habsburgs recaptured Salvador eleven months later, but Heyn returned in 1627. This time, he lacked the manpower to go ashore but managed to capture or sink thirty-eight Iberian ships, and send four vessels with booty to the United Provinces. Heyn’s main tactical manoeuvre was a bold one, in which he positioned his own ship right between those of the Portuguese admiral and vice-admiral. It further bolstered his reputation as a courageous seaman, leading one contemporary Dutch author to conclude that Brazil trembled in fear at the mere mention of Piet Heyn’s name.6 Heyn, however, would never trouble the Portuguese again. After his emphatic success in Matanzas, he was killed by Dunkirk privateers in 1629. He received a state funeral and a monumental tomb in the Old Church in Delft, and his death was lamented in print by Dionysius Spranckhuysen, a Reformed minister who had praised Heyn in an earlier sermon for taking the treasure fleet, and whose

5 Lotte E. Jensen, De verheerlijking van het verleden: helden, literatuur en natievorming in de negentiende eeuw (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2008). Much of the conceptual terminology used here is, of course, indebted to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed.; London and New York: Verso, 2006). For a s­ imilar approach, see Donald J. Harreld, “‘How Great the Enterprise, How Glorious the Deed’: ­Seventeenth Century Dutch Circumnavigations as Useful Myth”, in: Laura Cruz and Willem Frijhoff, eds., Myth in History, History in Myth: Proceedings of the Third International Conference of the Society for Netherlandic History (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 17–31. 6 Nicolaes van Wassenaer, Historisch Verhael alder ghedenckweerdichste geschiedenissen (21 vols.; Amsterdam, 1622–1635), xiii, fol. 102r: “… langhs de gantsche Cust was soo groote vreese van d’Admirael Pieter Heyn, ghelijck of hy ‘tgantsche lant dwinghen soude”. For the significance of Heyn’s Brazilian expeditions of the 1620s, see Michiel van Groesen, “Lessons Learned: The Second Dutch Conquest of Brazil and the Memory of the First”, Colonial Latin American Review 20.2 (2011), pp. 179–82.

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public relations campaign, principally intended to promote the mission in America, had an obvious hagiographic tone.7 For the first Atlantic campaign after Heyn’s death, the West India Company appointed Hendrick Lonck as its admiral. Lonck, an experienced seaman who had served under Heyn at Matanzas, survived an early scare when a few of his ships encountered a sizeable Spanish fleet under Don Fadrique de Toledo in the Canary Islands. He avoided a clash by giving the impression that his squadron was much bigger than it actually was, and was roundly praised at home for keeping a cool head. After crossing the Atlantic, Lonck overwhelmed first Olinda and then, two weeks later, Recife. This time, the Dutch presence lasted long enough to ensure that Lonck would be remembered as the man who had first established the colony in Brazil. After the invasion, the admiral did not make for the Caribbean to liaise with a second Dutch fleet in the area in order to capture another Spanish treasure convoy, as the Heeren xix had ordered. Instead, as soon as the Company had secured Pernambuco, Lonck returned to Europe, and would never set sail again. Four years later, in 1634, he died at home in Amsterdam. The naval campaigns in Brazil in the 1630s and early 1640s, which supported Dutch territorial expansion along the northeastern coast, were carried out under the command of Admiral Jan Lichthart. Lichthart had lived in Lisbon and spoke good Portuguese, something which proved to be useful in the Dutch attempts to appease the colonial population. But first and foremost, he was a seaman of the toughest type, greatly respected by his enemies whom he defeated on many occasions. He helped the West India Company to secure Paraíba and Porto Calvo, and ravaged the sugar plantations around Bahia. His main achievement was the successful conquest of Maranhão in 1641, sanctioned by Johan Maurits at a time when a truce with Portugal, already concluded, still required formal ratification. After the outbreak of the Portuguese rebellion in 1645, Lichthart won one more important naval battle at Tamandaré, which saved Dutch Brazil for the time being. To the relief of the Portuguese, he died after a short illness in November 1646 and was buried in Recife.8

7 Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 226–27. The role of a biographer in constructing a naval hero’s reputation was even more emphatic in the case of Geerardt Brandt’s eulogy of Michiel de Ruyter, see Ronald Prud’homme van Reine, “Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter and his Biographer Gerard Brandt”, in: Idem, Jaap R. Bruijn, and Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier, eds., De Ruyter: Dutch Admiral (Rotterdam: Karwansaray, 2011), pp. 37–55. 8 Charles R. Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the struggle for Brazil and Angola 1602–1686 (London: Athlone Press, 1952), pp. 208–14, and throughout Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil.

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Joost Banckert, the fourth and final protagonist of this chapter, was in command of the auxiliary fleet which the Company sent to Brazil in the mid-1640s to crush the revolt and help restore order. Born in Vlissingen, in Zeeland, Banckert had also served at Matanzas, and had further proved his worth in the decisive defeat of the Spanish fleet in northern Europe, the Battle of the Downs (1639). His activities in Brazil earned him celebrity status in later decades, but it is not immediately clear why. After an Atlantic crossing marred by mutiny and discord, Banckert occupied the island of Itaparica in the Bay of All Saints in 1646.9 Although this was a bold move, the Portuguese defence measures were so effective that the Dutch found themselves confined to the tip of the island, and could not seriously disrupt trade and communications.10 When the Company was forced to evacuate the island, Banckert had already died, two weeks into his return voyage to Europe. Posthumously, he made perhaps his most lasting impression on the story of Dutch Brazil. The smell of his dead body was so horrible, according to various sources, that the majority of the crew wanted to give him a proper seaman’s grave, in order to make the remaining weeks at sea just a bit more bearable. Banckert’s two sons, who were also on board, had to use all their powers of persuasion to bring their father’s body back home. What was left of the admiral was eventually buried in Vlissingen in 1647.11 Rotten bodies did not make for shining reputations, but what did? The first scholar to advance an explanation for the admirals’ lasting fame was the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. In 1941, he pointed out that in the country’s Golden Age, service at sea had both a great nation-building effect and acted as a kind of social cement.12 As part of this maritime culture, admirals were ideally positioned to be converted into heroic icons. Unlike army officers, they were typically born in the United Provinces, usually in Holland or Zeeland, and the navy appealed to the public as a homegrown institution. This view was endorsed by Simon Schama in his thought-provoking interpretation of seventeenthcentury Dutch culture, The Embarrassment of Riches, where he suggested that the struggle against the water was an important aspect of the emerging Dutch 9

Pierre Moreau, Klare en waarachtige beschryving van de leste beroerten en afval der Portugezen in Brasil (Amsterdam, 1652), pp. 51–53. 10 Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 185–86. 11 For the most graphic account of the on-board problems generated by the smell of Banckert’s corpse, see Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld (Amsterdam, 1671), p. 522. 12 Johan Huizinga, Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century, and Other Essays (London: Collins, 1968), p. 35.

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identity that was reinforced through transformative ordeals like natural disasters and maritime battles.13 The cult of naval heroes, as art historian Cynthia Lawrence termed it in a seminal article of 1992, differed from earlier hero cults, because it did not express the triumph of a state, ruler or religion.14 Instead the officer’s own actions and character were its principal features, helping admirals to become the most recognizable Dutch folk heroes. Their supposedly modest backgrounds, as an implicit profession of more egalitarian virtues, became of prime importance in the shaping of a national identity. The cult emerged in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, when the country faced three wars with England and the demand for naval heroes was particularly pressing in the domestic political sphere.15 In 1650, the regent regime under Pensionary Johan de Witt needed to legitimize its elimination of the House of Orange from the corridors of power, in the so-called First Stadtholderless Period which lasted until 1672.16 The cult of naval heroes appears to have quickly been adopted for this purpose. It ticked all the boxes in the search for a recognizable republican identity, and was soon also embraced by authors with Orangist sympathies, which helps to explain its lasting appeal. Until modern times, the cult of naval heroes remained an established expression of patriotism especially during periods of national crisis. The timing of its first surge in the 1650s determined the place it reserved for naval commanders of Dutch Brazil. Although the West India Company had just been forced to surrender Recife, the public at home still vividly remembered its admirals for their victories in preceding decades. It is important to realize that, unlike the East Indies, the Atlantic World had featured prominently in Dutch public opinion since the 1620s, where it was presented as the arena for the country’s main offensive 13 14

15 16

Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London: Collins, 1987), pp. 24–25, 248–49. Cynthia Lawrence, “Hendrick de Keyser’s Heemskerk Monument: The Origins of the Cult and Iconography of Dutch Naval Heroes”, Simiolus. Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 21.4 (1992): 265–95. More recently scholars have focused on individual admirals, see Raingard Esser, “Der Staten rechterhant. Niederländische Seehelden in der Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts”, in: Jutta Nowosadtko and Matthias Rogg, eds., “Mars und die Musen”. Das Wechselspiel von Militär, Krieg und Kunst in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008), pp. 59–74, on Michiel de Ruyter; Henk den Heijer, “Piet Heyn en Cornelis Jol: twee zeehelden vergeleken”, in: Leo M. Akveld, ed., In het kielzog. Maritiem-historische studies aangeboden aan Jaap R. Bruijn bij zijn vertrek als hoogleraar zeegeschiedenis aan de Universiteit Leiden (Amsterdam: De Bataafse Leeuw, 2003), pp. 371–82. Lawrence, “Hendrick de Keyser’s Heemskerk monument”; Frits Scholten, Sumptuous Memories. Studies in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Tomb Culture (Zwolle: Waanders, 2003). Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 713–26.

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against the Habsburgs, aimed at the core of Spanish geopolitical supremacy. The focus on developments in the Atlantic in newspapers, pamphlets, and chronicles meant that – despite the fall of Dutch Brazil – admirals like Heyn, Lonck, Lichthart, and Banckert were still considered celebrities in the United Provinces.17 Their status as national heroes was confirmed and exploited by one type of publication in particular, the so-called “collective biographies” that began to appear in the second half of the seventeenth century. Several of these collective biographies were devoted exclusively to iconic figures of maritime discoveries and expansion, sometimes as part of an international line-up of great navigators, but increasingly in a national context. Collective biographies differed from other vehicles of naval heroics in one important respect. Funeral processions, epitaphs, medals, and paintings were designed to honor admirals already perceived as “secular saints” – men like Michiel de Ruyter and Maerten Tromp who had almost single-handedly saved the country at moments of utter despair.18 Collective biographies, on the other hand, depended for their success not so much on a few stellar reputations as on a sizeable number of men who could be presented as credible laureates. These works could thrive only by opening the doors to the hall of fame for admirals who had been victorious further away from the fatherland, in distant places like Brazil. They were written in a style that would now be regarded as didactic and moralistic rather than compelling, yet as David Bell has demonstrated for France, collective biographies formed a principal source of information for other genres, and reached more members of the public than other expressions of the cult. The popularity of the genre increased throughout the eighteenth century, when its encyclopedic knowledge was gratefully utilized in the ongoing invention of nationalism. Focusing on these works which have since “fallen into great historical oblivion” enables us to understand how, and for how long, the “great men” of Dutch Brazil lived on in the public consciousness.19

17 18 19

On the prominent place of Atlantic news in early modern newspapers, see Chapter 5 of this volume. The term “secular saints” was introduced by Lawrence, “Hendrick de Keyser’s Heemskerk monument”, p. 268. On tombs of Dutch naval heroes, see: Scholten, Sumptuous Memories. On De Ruyter, see: Esser, “Der Staten rechterhant”. David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 108–19, for a more elaborate discussion of the merits of this genre. For the quote, see p. 111.

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Collective Biographies

The first author to compile a catalogue of naval triumphs was the Leiden professor of rhetoric Antonius Thysius.20 Thysius was no stranger to the history of Dutch Brazil; in November 1644 the university’s Board of Curators had selected him to give a ceremonial speech when Johan Maurits visited the town for the first time after returning from South America.21 He subsequently wrote Historia Navalis in an attempt to acquire a prestigious post as official historian of the States of Holland. The work was already finished in 1652 or even earlier – in any event before the fall of Dutch Brazil – but because Johan de Witt and the other members of the States disagreed about Thysius’ appointment, it was not published until 1657.22 Brazil played a prominent part in the book: Historia Navalis contained descriptions of seventy-three naval battles, eight of which were fought in the South Atlantic, with an additional seven representing other victories of the West India Company that often touched on Dutch Brazil. Alongside clashes with Dunkirk privateers, naval battles in the Atlantic formed Historia Navalis’ prime subject. Of the four admirals discussed here, Thysius devoted separate chapters to Heyn, Lonck, and Lichthart. Joost Banckert was not included, reflecting the limited impact he had made on events in Brazil. Looking at the chapter on Piet Heyn, it is interesting to see – and rather counter-intuitive for anyone brought up in the Netherlands – that his two Brazilian campaigns received much more attention than the capture of the New Spain treasure fleet. Yet Heyn himself had considered his achievements in Brazil far more heroic than those in the Caribbean, and Thysius’ chapter on the conquest of Bahia in 1624 shows us why.23 Heyn, according to Thysius, could claim almost sole credit for the

20 21

22 23

Today Antonius Thysius (the Younger – his father had been professor of theology) is best known for modernizing Leiden’s university library in the 1650s: Willem Otterspeer, Groepsportret met dame (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2000), pp. 185–89. P.C. Molhuysen, Bronnen tot de geschiedenis der Leidsche universiteit (7 vols., The Hague: Nijhoff, 1913–1924), ii, p. 283. Thysius’ “Discursus Oratorius” for this occasion was published as an appendix to Franciscus Plante, Mauritiadas (Amsterdam, 1647), a eulogy in verse of Johan Maurits’ reign in Brazil. For once De Witt did not get his way, and Thysius did not secure the position he craved. See Brieven aan Johan de Witt, eds. R. Fruin and N. Japiske (2 vols.; Amsterdam: Muller, 1919–1922), i, pp. 138, 232. Heyn supposedly stated, after returning from Matanzas: “Siet hoe het volck nu raest, omdat [ick] soo grooten schat t’huys brenghe, daer weynich voor hebben ghedaen; ende te voren [i.e. in Bahia, MvG], als ick der voor hadde gevochten, ende verre grooter daden ghedaen als dese, en heeft men sich naeuwelijcks aen my ghekeert”, quoted by Johan C.M.

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surrender of Salvador. His most daring manoeuvre had been the capture of the newly-constructed water fortress at the heart of the Bay. Under heavy artillery fire from Portuguese forces, the Dutch had stormed the walls of the batteries, which rose up from the sea to a height of eight or nine feet. A trumpeteer, the first to set foot inside the fort, was killed immediately by one of the Portuguese soldiers. Heyn was the second to climb the platform, and the first to survive. The Forte do Mar was key to Salvador’s defensive strategy, and within twentyfour hours of its capture, the city was in the hands of the invaders. Thysius carefully recounted how the admiral rallied the troops, and then personally led his soldiers into battle.24 The story implied that Heyn took a place alongside rather than above the other men, a sure sign of the humble background that became a key element in the cult of naval heroes.25 Antonius Thysius played a crucial role in the making of the cult and the canonization of some of its stories, but his limelight is generally stolen by Lambert van den Bosch, an extremely productive author who appears to have been everyone’s favorite amateur-historian in the later Golden Age. Van den Bosch, who lived and worked in Dordrecht, first published on the theme of naval heroes in 1641, as part of a metaphorical account of the war in the Low Countries between the frogs (the Dutch) and the mice (Habsburg Spain). During battles at sea, the frogs were aided by lobsters, who represented the country’s naval heroes. It was very appropriate to compare the admirals to lobsters, Van den Bosch explained, because both thrived in salt water, and nature had provided both with shelled armour and “hard hands”: Once the naval heroes had something in their claws, they would not let go. Moreover, Van den Bosch ensured readers that just like lobsters – and here he claimed to rely on Gesner’s De Aquatilibus – admirals at sea had the ability to look backwards and forwards at the same time, learning from past events while anticipating future developments.26 The metaphor, although perhaps not entirely convincing, indicates Van den Bosch’s early awareness of the theme. In 1676 he published his collective biography of naval heroes, which is generally perceived as the

Warnsinck, Drie zeventiende-eeuwsche admiraals: Piet Heyn, Witte de With, Jan Evertsen (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1938), p. 47. 24 Antonius Thysius, Historia Navalis (Leiden, 1657), pp. 206–7. See also: George Edmundson, “The Dutch Power in Brazil (1624–1654); Part i – The Struggle for Bahia (1624–1627)”, English Historical Review 11 (1896), p. 242. 25 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, pp. 248–49; Lawrence, “Hendrick de Keyser’s Heemskerk monument”, p. 272. 26 [Lambert van den Bosch], Wonderbaerlijcken strydt tusschen de kickvorschen ende de muysen (Dordrecht, 1641), p. 59.

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breakthrough of the genre in the United Provinces.27 On closer examination, however, Leeven en daden der doorlughtige zee-helden (“Lives and Achievements of the Illustrious Naval Heroes”) is little more than a restructured translation of Historia Navalis. This helps to explain why, despite the rise of the genre, and a cluster of new heroes provided by three Anglo-Dutch Wars, the admirals of the pre-Westphalia period still dominated the scene. Van den Bosch, in other words, by cutting and pasting from Thysius’ work, retained an important place for the admirals of Dutch Brazil. In analyzing Van den Bosch’s contribution, we must sharply distinguish between the two different editions that appeared in 1676 and 1683. In the first edition, the author devoted separate chapters to Piet Heyn and Hendrick Lonck, both of whom he placed on the same level as international celebrities like Columbus and Vespucci. In such renowned company, Lonck reached the peak of his reputation. In the revised edition of 1683 we can witness the beginning of his relegation to the second echelon of naval heroes. This edition, triggered by the reprinting of Thysius’ Historia Navalis one year earlier, no longer concerned itself with foreign admirals. At the same time Van den Bosch extended the list of Dutch naval heroes from a handful to nearly thirty.28 The illustrious men were now introduced according to a clear, partly regional hierarchy: The volume opened with admirals from the province of Zeeland, followed by their Holland counterparts, while the final section was devoted to Lieutenant-­ Admirals, the highest-ranking navy officers. Piet Heyn’s biography was moved to this final section, and thus received additional emphasis. Lonck, on the other hand, was no longer listed alongside Heyn – or Columbus – but in the company of other, “regular” Holland admirals like Jan Lichthart. Rethinking his editorial strategy, Van den Bosch thus changed the ranking order of Brazilian naval heroes in the national pantheon. Images also helped to keep memories of Brazil alive. Whereas Historia Navalis did not contain any illustrations, Van den Bosch included portraits, and pictures of Dutch admirals in action – enhancing the lasting appeal of his work. Heyn and Lonck were portrayed in the first edition, and a portrait of Banckert, who now made the cut as one of the most distinguished Zeeland admirals, was added to the second edition, but no portrait was included of Jan Lichthart,

27 28

Lawrence, “Hendrick de Keyser’s Heemskerk monument”, p. 266; Esser, “Der Staten rechterhant”, p. 64. Both the “nationalisation” and the increasing number of illustrious men are typical of the genre’s development, see Bell, Cult of the Nation, p. 130, for a similar development in eighteenth-century France.

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probably because no image was available.29 More significant were the illustrations of admirals in action, and again the episode of the conquest of Salvador can serve to demonstrate this. Here the copper engraving, made by Herman Padtbrugge, shows the key moment of the invasion, the taking of the Forte do Mar first by the unfortunate trumpeteer, who is here depicted in what must have been the final second of his life, and then by Heyn himself (Figure 11.1). The image further reinforced Heyn’s reputation as a naval hero, and prolonged the memory of the conquest of Bahia, and the subsequent Dutch presence in Brazil. The power of images, at a point in history that Peter Burke has earmarked for its “visual turn”, cannot be overstated.30 The illustration of Heyn leading the charge retained its appeal in the eighteenth century. A second image of the attack on Salvador was published in 1787 (Figure 11.2), at yet another turbulent time in Dutch politics, when the cult of the nation picked up new momentum.31 Even then, writers of national histories still considered the story of Piet Heyn’s courageous performance in Bahia relevant to evoke a sense of unity. Some of the historical accuracy had clearly been lost, as the memory was now embellished by the survival of the trumpeteer. Heyn, as the commanding officer, is depicted in the foreground – understandable from an artistic point of view, but a questionable deviation from the carefully constructed plot – while the admiral’s long curling hair reveals how he has fallen victim to contemporary fashion. It is obvious from the inclusion of this illustration that by the late eighteenth century the memory of Dutch Brazil was not necessarily a painful one, as scholars who have focused on Onno Zwier van Haren’s verses have insisted. The victories achieved in Brazil, too, were still part of the nation’s collective consciousness. The same image was in fact re-used in a national history of 1863 (Figure 11.3), more than two centuries after the fall of Recife.32 Although here Piet Heyn, with a newly-grown moustache, looks suspiciously like Michiel 29 30 31

32

Lambert van den Bosch, Leeven en daaden der doorluchtigste zeehelden (Amsterdam, 1683), p. 283. Peter Burke, “Images as Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Europe”, Journal of the History of Ideas 64.2 (2003): 273–96. Nederlandsche reizen, tot bevordering van den koophandel, na de meest afgelegen gewesten des aardkloots (14 vols.; Amsterdam and Harlingen, 1787), xiv, p. 4: “Ondanks het geweldig vuuren, zo van de Batterye als van het Strand, volvoerde hy zo dapper en kloekmoedig deezen last, dat eerst zyn Trompetter, vervolgens hy zelve en voorts het overige Bootsvolk die Sterkte beklommen. Dit was een zeer stout bedryf”. See: Niek van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland. Van oude orde naar moderniteit 1750–1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), p. 71. J.P. Arend, Algemeene Geschiedenis des Vaderlands, van de vroegste tijden tot op heden (5 vols.; Amsterdam: Schleijer, 1863), iii, Part 4, 40.

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Herman Padtbrugge, Piet Heyn enters the Forte do Mar in All Saints’ Bay, 1624, in: Lambert van den Bosch, Leeven en daden der doorluchtighste zeehelden. Amsterdam, 1676, pt. 2, p. 50 Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm O 63-3891

de Ruyter, the volume kept alive in popular culture the memory of the capture of Salvador. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, to the best of my knowledge, no such images are available for Heyn’s success in Matanzas, and his capture of

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Figure 11.2 Anon., Piet Heyn conquers the city of St. Salvador, 1624, in: Nederlandsche reizen, tot bevordering van den koophandel, na de meest afgelegen gewesten des ­aardkloots. Amsterdam and Harlingen, 1787, xiv, p. 4 Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm O 63-5936

the “silver fleet” may have re-acquired canonical status only after the composer J.J. Viotta put the popular seventeenth-century song to music again in 1844.

Provincial Pride

Van den Bosch’s collective biography was not the only influential seventeenthcentury exponent of the genre. An alternative version of the legacy of Dutch Brazil is presented in Batavise Romeyn (“Batavian Roman”), a book written by the Amsterdam minister Petrus de Lange and first issued in 1661, the year Portugal and the United Provinces finally concluded peace. De Lange, like Van den Bosch, devotes many pages to Brazil, but two variations immediately catch the eye. Remarkably, in a catalogue of major and minor maritime battles, De Lange does not mention the conquest of Olinda and Recife in 1630 at all. Although he almost certainly made an error in omitting the campaign, it was

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Figure 11.3

Jan Frederik Christiaan Reckleben, Conquest of San Salvador, 1624, in: J.P. Arend, Algemeene Geschiedenis des Vaderlands, van de vroegste tijden tot op heden. Amsterdam, 1863, iii, pt. 4, p. 40 Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, otm O 262 B 19

another blow to the reputation of Hendrick Lonck whose status as a naval hero depended entirely on his achievements in Pernambuco. More striking still is how the minister presents the conquest of Bahia. Like Thysius and Van den Bosch, De Lange ranks the first Dutch expedition to Brazil among the most important campaigns of the Golden Age, if the length of the chapter is anything to go by. But in his version, the name of Piet Heyn is not mentioned even once. The attack on the Forte do Mar, moreover, is reduced to a single sentence. Only Admiral Willekens is referred to by name, and from the way De Lange has constructed the narrative, it is clear that according to him Willekens – and not Heyn – was the expedition’s true hero.33 At the time of the conquest, it had been a public secret that the directors of the West India Company were 33

Petrus de Lange, Batavise Romeyn; ofte alle de voornaemste Heldendaden (Amsterdam, 1661), pp. 155–59.

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disappointed in Willekens for his rather sluggish leadership in Bahia, yet it is unclear whether readers in the early 1660s remembered the fallout of the invasion well enough to be suspicious of De Lange’s account.34 Why, four decades on, would an author like Petrus de Lange make such significant changes to the accepted story of the country’s first Atlantic venture? The preface of his volume provides the beginning of an answer. Here the author promises the burgomasters of Amsterdam, to whom he dedicates the work, that he will focus on the heroic feats performed by their fellow citizens. Willekens, who had served for the West India Company’s Amsterdam Chamber, was probably rehabilitated in the local interest, at the expense of Piet Heyn, who was employed by the Chamber of the Maas and would receive plenty of plaudits anyway. Hence, with the conquest of Bahia, De Lange put yet more gloss on the glory of Amsterdam, the city pamphleteers had widely criticized in previous years, with some justification, for relinquishing Dutch Brazil. A naval hero’s geographical background was clearly an important factor in the longevity of his reputation. Joost Banckert, for example, appears to have greatly benefited from his Zeeland origins. By the late 1640s, when Banckert went to Brazil, the regents in Holland, and especially Amsterdam, had all but given up on the Company and its Brazilian enterprise. Zeeland, in one of a series of clashes with the sister province, argued for sending yet more troops and for retaining the Atlantic as a priority of federal policy.35 It is no surprise, then, that Banckert’s progress was followed especially closely in his home province. Regional histories had long been a popular genre in the Low Countries, and particularly in Zeeland, rhetoric of a “Fatherland” remained carefully limited to the region.36 Banckert’s reputation thrived in the eighteenth century as a 34 35

36

S.P. L’Honoré Naber, Piet Heyn en de Zilvervloot (Utrecht: Kemink, 1928), p. lxiv. According to the usually well-informed Arnoldus Buchelius, the Heeren xix reprimanded Willekens for having been too passive in battle. This internal discord is considered the main reason why the Dutch could not hold on to Brazil. See Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, pp. 255–58. Cabral de Mello, O negócio do Brasil, esp. Chs. 2 & 3, places the different views on Brazil in the wider context of the conflict between Holland and Zeeland about making peace, first with Spain, later with Portugal. See also Arthur Weststeijn, “Dutch Brazil and the Making of Free Trade Ideology”, in: Michiel van Groesen, ed., The Legacy of Dutch Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 187–204. Raingard Esser, “‘Concordia res parvae crescunt’: Regional Histories and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century”, in: Judith Pollmann and Andrew Spicer, eds., Public Opinion and Changing Identities in the Early Modern Netherlands (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 229–48. For the origins of particularism and the embryonic phase of national feelings in the United Provinces, see Alastair Duke, “The Elusive Netherlands: The Question of National Identity in the Early Modern Low Countries on the Eve of the Revolt”, in: Idem, ed., Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp.

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result of Zeeland particularism. Scion of a family of sea captains, he had all the makings of an archetypical naval hero. Famously, on one occasion, he ordered his young son, under penalty of death, to blow up their vessel should it fall into the hands of approaching privateers, a story that helped to cement Banckert’s reputation and must have commanded even more respect after 1831, when Lieutenant Jan van Speijk, during the Belgian Revolution, became an instant hero by detonating his own ship rather than lowering the Dutch flag. Invariably however, in Banckert’s biographies, achievements in Brazil took center stage. In 1736, the Middelburg lawyer Pieter de la Rue published an influential collective biography titled Staatkundig en heldhaftig Zeeland (“Political and Valiant Zeeland”). De la Rue’s father was a director of the Middelburg Commerce ­Company – a slaving company – so the author presumably had intimate knowledge of the province’s Atlantic past, which he used for his entry on Banckert. In De la Rue’s collective biography, Banckert attacked enemy vessels in Brazil even when he was heavily outnumbered. He once killed four hundred Portuguese soldiers, nailed another 250 as prisoners of war to the deck of his vessel, captured some of Bahia’s leading magistrates, including three Catholic friars, and brought them all to Recife for interrogation. The death of Banckert “had robbed the Fatherland of a brave seaman, bewailed by many because he was one of the best admirals ever to have served the States” – and here it appears that De la Rue was deliberately vague as to whether he referred to the provincial States of Zeeland or to the States General, in other words the nation as a whole.37 In the eighteenth century, collective biographies gradually turned into encyclopedic publishing projects, ever more ambitious and voluminous, and De la Rue’s work is an early example of this trend. His book no longer focuses on admirals alone but lists them alongside statesmen. Commanders like Banckert, long cherished for their humble backgrounds, were now being venerated in the company of men with a much more respectable pedigree, like ambassadors and university professors.38 By the time the formation of the nation-state was reaching completion collective biographies included men (and women) from all walks of life. The monumental, and truly “national” Levensbeschryving

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38

9–56; and Robert Stein, “Introduction”, in: Idem and Judith Pollmann, eds., Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 1–18, as well as several of the essays that follow. Pieter de la Rue, Staatkundig en heldhaftig Zeeland (Middelburg, 1736), pp. 129–30: “Veel verloor het Vaderland aan deezen wakkeren Zeeman, en van etlyken wierd hy beklaagd, omdat hy de getuigenis had van een der beste zeehoofden te zyn, die ooit in dienst der Heeren Staaten geweest was”. De la Rue, Staatkundig en heldhaftig Zeeland. The title-page reads “bevattende in zig de Vermaardste Mannen van Staat en Oorlog, die daar uit voortgesprooten zyn”.

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van eenige voornaame meest Nederlandsche mannen en vrouwen (“Biography of some distinguished mostly Dutch men and women”), a ten-volume collective biography issued between 1774 and 1783, still contains entries on Piet Heyn and Joost Banckert. Heyn, here, is respectfully remembered as a man who was feared by everyone. “The mere threat that [he] would come frightened and silenced the children”, a claim that is reminiscent of the alleged fear in Habsburg Brazil in the 1620s.39 In Banckert’s entry, Pieter de la Rue’s tale of the Brazilian pows and the admiral’s status as “one of the bravest naval heroes the State has ever had” are copied and presented to a nationwide readership.40 Then, in 1781, Petrus de Lange’s Batavise Romeyn was reprinted for the first time in more than a century, and two years later, Thysius’ Historia Navalis was officially translated into Dutch for the first time.41 All these publications kept the memory alive of Dutch Brazil, a colony which had ceased to exist some five generations earlier yet still managed to fill the Fatherland with a sense of patriotic pride. In a classic article, the Dutch historian Ernst Kossmann has observed that with the growth of national coherence and, eventually, the coming of a unitary state in the late eighteenth century, the culture of Holland – as the dominant province – became the culture of the Dutch nation as a whole. But, as he readily acknowledged, the success of Holland’s “regional nationalism” was never complete, and hence “Dutch national and cultural identity remained for a long time less clearly outlined than the French or the English”.42 Few topics in the United Provinces were as susceptible to the politics of particularism as maritime affairs, beginning with the institutionalization of the navy in five separate admiralties, and continuing in the similarly federal set-up of the East and West India Companies, where the Zeeland Chambers continued to exert influence for much longer than their declining economic stature and political power appeared to justify.43 By the mid-seventeenth century, Zeeland had become 39

40 41

42 43

Levensbeschryving van eenige voornaame meest Nederlandsche mannen en vrouwen (10 vols.; Amsterdam and Harlingen, 1774–1783), i, p. 182: “Overal was hy zo gedugt, dat de enkele bedreiging, dat Piet Hein zoude koomen, den kinderen schrik aanjoeg, en tot stilte bragt”. Levensbeschryving, vii, p. 340: “laatende hy den naam na, van een der moedigste Zeehelden te zyn geweest, welke de Staat immer gehad heeft”. Neerlands heldendaden ter zee (2 vols.; Amsterdam and Harlingen, 1783). The (anonymous) compiler suggests in the introduction (i, 5) that by his knowledge it had never been translated into Dutch, although he certainly knew the collective biography by Lambert van den Bosch. Ernst H. Kossmann, “The Dutch Case: A National or Regional Culture?”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 29 (1979), pp. 155–56, 165–66. For the institutionalization of the Dutch navy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the related internal strife, see Marjolein ’t Hart, “Cities and Statemaking

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Holland’s habitual rival on issues of fundamental importance for the federation as a whole – peace or no peace with Spain in Münster, for example – which explains the rise of a “regional undertow” in Zeeland, an embattled form of cultural particularism in the face of Holland’s dominance that most readily manifested itself in maritime affairs. Dutch Brazil, another of these divisive dossiers, was perfectly suited to be incorporated into this strategy. The cultivation of Zeeland’s regional identity, in which naval mythologies played a key role, only gained in strength as political influence melted away – of the province within the federation, and of the federation within Europe. In spite of the steady decline of the United Provinces’ international power in the eighteenth century, the country’s maritime orientation and the related virtues Dutch society held dear did not significantly change, and the canonization of naval heroes from the Golden Age could therefore continue uninterruptedly.

…

Verzuimd Brasil, Onno Zwier van Haren’s memorable eighteenth-century expression of grief, has long been considered emblematic of the way Dutch Brazil lived on in the collective memory of the Netherlands. In this chapter, I have demonstrated that alongside nostalgia for a “neglected” overseas possession, pride in what the Dutch had accomplished in Brazil was an equally powerful and lasting sentiment – one that was in fact an integral part of Zwier van Haren’s poem De Geusen. The victorious admirals of the West India Company and their achievements were carefully preserved in the country’s collective memory until the nineteenth century, and eventually beyond. There are multiple reasons why Brazil and its admirals were not forgotten. The demand for naval heroes increased in the 1650s, when the Atlantic triumphs were still vividly remembered by the population. At precisely the same time, a series of “collective biographies” was set in motion by a reputable scholar, Antonius Thysius, who already had a good working knowledge of Dutch Brazil. Since newspapers, pamphlets, and chronicles had presented the colony as the second front in the war against Spain ever since the conquest of Salvador in 1624, Brazilian admirals were still public figures by the time the cult of naval heroes began to blossom. The subsequent process of canonization, fostered by the likes of Lambert van den Bosch and Petrus de Lange and continued in the eighteenth in the Dutch Republic, 1580–1680”, Theory and Society 18-5 (1989), pp. 670–74; Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as FiscalMilitary States (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 162–71. For the comparatively rapid decline of Zeeland, see Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 494.

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century, helped to extend their reputations in the nation’s collective imagination. The eminence of naval heroes, by association, extended the memory of Dutch Brazil. As the eyewitness accounts of colonial rule began to fade, the reputations of individual admirals started to fluctuate. So what did an admiral need to retain his place in the catalogue of illustrious men? In order to be even considered for inclusion, a naval hero needed to have distinguished himself in battle against a familiar enemy. All four protagonists of Dutch Brazil fulfilled this most basic of requirements. But, as Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers have argued for admirals in eighteenth-century England, this was only half the story. The way in which their careers were recounted, and then encoded within the language of patriotism was at least as important.44 In order to remain attractive as a naval hero, an exemplary display of personal courage, and the narrative strength of one’s experiences in battle were very welcome additions. Daring tactical manoeuvres or victories against the odds were the perfect ingredients for this type of rhetoric.45 Hendrick Lonck and Jan Lichthart struggled to surmount this hurdle. Similarly, the fact that neither commander was killed in (or at least during) action could have been harmful to their star status, but fortune played a role too. Lonck’s reputation depended entirely on a single campaign, so if this campaign were somehow forgotten or omitted from a list of memorable victories, a once mythical reputation could suddenly become very vulnerable. And Lonck could not count on strong home support either, as he was born in Roosendaal, a town in States-Brabant in the politically negligible Generality Lands. Lichthart’s fame also rested on his achievements in Brazil alone, and – from a biographer’s point of view – it was difficult to persistently praise an admiral whose face readers had never seen, because no portrait had been made. The cult of naval heroes, in the end, was forceful enough to ensure that in patriotic circles their names survived, but their achievements no longer struck a chord in wider Dutch society. In stark contrast, some reputations managed to pick up momentum during the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth century. Piet Heyn’s fame was hors catégorie after capturing the treasure fleet, but it is interesting to see that his courageous behaviour in the Bay of All Saints – first in 1624, and then again three years later – ensured that Brazil remained essential to support his position in the upper tier of the pantheon. Illustrations of the attack on the Forte do Mar 44 45

Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, “Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Hanoverian England”, The Journal of British Studies 28.3 (1989), p. 202. Don Harreld reaches basically the same conclusion when analysing Dutch circumnavigations of the early seventeenth century: “How Great the Enterprise”, pp. 29–30. See also: Schmidt, Innocence Abroad, pp. 159–60.

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only strengthened the connection of his glamorous reputation to the colony, and the memory of Heyn was therefore instrumental in the construction of Dutch Brazil’s lasting legacy. The Zeeland admiral Joost Banckert, by all accounts a “lesser” hero than Heyn, survived as a result of provincial chauvinism. Regional histories like the collective biography of Pieter de la Rue ensured that his reputation increased in the eighteenth century in both relative and absolute terms. Local or provincial interests were indispensable for making a hero’s reputation in the decentralized political framework of the United Provinces. The bitter feud between Holland and Zeeland in the 1640s over the future of the Brazilian colony resulted in an entrenched memory, that was readily tied to the shaping of a regional identity – and at least partly for this reason the loss of Dutch Brazil does not appear to have harmed Banckert’s heroic potential. When the seven provinces eventually merged to become part of a nationstate around 1800, nationally recognizable aspects of provincial sentiments converged to construct a collective mythology, and since the post-Napoleonic Netherlands took the shape of a monarchy under the House of Orange-­Nassau, the historiographic appeal of Dutch Brazil lay even more strongly than before in the achievements of Johan Maurits.46 At the same time, however, longstanding regional traditions were unlikely to evaporate: In Zeeland, some of this particularism persists until today, and Joost Banckert remains very much part of it. In the official anthem of Zeeland – written in 1919 when Belgium considered invading part of the province – Banckert is cherished as one of the province’s favorite sons. The anthem is still sung at least once a year, at the provincial government’s New Year’s reception. Even though in the twenty-first century, many inhabitants of the Netherlands may not realize it, the patriotic legacy of Dutch Brazil lives on. 46

Ernst van den Boogaart, “As perspectivas da Holanda e do Brasil do ‘Tempo dos Flamengos’”, in: Hugo Coelho Vieira, Nara Neves Pires Galvão, and Leonardo Dantas Silva, eds., Brasil Holandês: História, Memória e Patrimônio Compartilhado (Sao Paulo: Alameda, 2012), pp. 50–52. This development, incidentally, is not dissimilar to what happened in nineteenth-century Brazil, where the rise of nationalism witnessed the transformation of “autonomist” Pernambucans into the makers of a united Brazil. See Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Mythologies of Dutch Brazil”, in: Michiel van Groesen, ed., The Legacy of Dutch Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 284–317.

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Index Aa, Pieter van der 204, 205 Abrolhos Islands 188 Acosta, José de 29–30, 35, 37 Aimoré 194–96 Albuquerque, Matias de 136 Algonquians 23 Amazon river 55, 66 Amazons 202 Angola 7, 191 Angra dos Reis 55 ‘Antarctic France’, see French Brazil Arciszewsky, Christoph 135, 138, 140 Arguin 10, 144–63 Arias Montano, Benito 12–13, 22 Aruba 216 Aventroot, Joan 165–66 Axim 144n1, 155n27 Aztecs 29 Baek, Joost 114, 116 Bahia, see Salvador de Bahia Banckert, Joost 141, 231–32, 235, 237–38, 240, 245–47, 250 Barbary Coast 216, 230 Barberini, Francesco 22 Barlaeus, Caspar 187, 189, 194 Baro, Roelof 194, 203 Barré, Nicolas 20–21 Barreto, Francisco 181 Bartolomew’s Day Massacre 20 Bay of All Saints 59, 62–65, 74, 82, 126–29, 141, 194, 235, 239, 242, 249 Bayly, Lewis 177n42 Beck, David 113 Beer, Johann Christoph 185n7 Belém 55 Beni Hassan 151, 155, 157–61 Benin, Bight of 55 Benzoni, Girolamo 14, 24, 26, 28, 175 Berbice 148–149, 156, 205 Berckenrode, Balthasar Florisz van 141n42 Berkel, Adriaen van 164, 222–23 Beverlandt, Johannes 154–57, 160 Beverwijck (Albany) 177 Beverwijck, Johan van 177

Beza, Theodore 167 Binckes, Jacob 7 ‘Black Legend’ 28, 80, 82, 93, 197, 213 Blaeu, Johan 6, 73, 138, 140–43, 195n33, 203 Blon, Michel Le 113 Boissard, Jean-Jacques 15–16 Borstius, Jacobus 178 Bosch, Lambert van den 184, 210, 212, 216, 219, 222, 239–40, 242–44, 247n41, 248 Brandt, Geerardt 234n7 Brazil, See also Dutch Brazil, French Brazil 6–7, 14, 54–56, 60–66, 73, 81, 87–90, 93, 97, 101, 133, 154, 181–204 Braun, Georg 123 Bredan, Daniel 135 Broeck, Mattheus van den 198 Broekhuizen, Godfried van 213, 215, 222 Brouwer, Hendrick 68n Bry, Johan Israel de 12, 33–34, 52 Bry, Johan Theodore de 5, 9, 12–31, 32–52 Bry, Theodore de 4–5, 9, 12–31, 33, 130, 189, 191, 193n28, 202, 213 Bucanus, William 167 Buenos Aires, see Rio de la Plata Bullinger, Heinrich 167–69 Burgh, Albert Coenraadsz 96 Cabo Blanco 144, 148–49, 151, 160–61 Cabral, Pedro Alvares 188, 191–92 Caerden, Paulus van 212 Calvin, John 18–19, 21, 167, 169 Cameels, Laurens 145, 151, 154, 157–58, 160, 162 Canada 222 Canary Islands 54, 97, 234 Cape Horn 68 Cape Lopez 32, 34, 37–42, 44, 52 Cape Santo Agostinho 137 Cape Verde 51, 97, 101, 151 Cape Vincent 146n3 Cartagena de Indias 106, 110, 115 Casas, Bartolomé de las 92 Challeux, Nicolas le 20n18 Chauveton, Urbain 17 Christian ii, Elector of Saxony 35

268 Claesz, Cornelis 33, 54 Clusius, Carolus 16, 20 Cluyt, Willem 75n3 Cocquius, Adrianus 177–78 Coeck, Joos 152–54, 156–59, 162 Coelho, Agostinho 75 Coelho, Domingo 74–75, 78–79, 84–94, 96 Colijn, Michiel 33n3 Colom, Jacob Aertsz 57–58 Columbus, Christopher 2, 5, 240 Cordes, Simon de 32, 34 Corral Bay 59, 67–69 Couwenburgh, Pieter 156, 158 Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector 100, 183 Curaçao 10, 137, 174, 216 Dan, Pierre 216–17, 219 Danckerts, Jasper 178–79 Dapper, Olfert 155, 184–85, 205 Defoe, Daniel 227 Delaware river 177 Descartes, René 164, 179 Diemen, Antonio van 146n3 Dimmese, Jacob 175 Dircksz, Jan 159 Doedsz, Cornelis 54 Dooreslaer, David á 173 Duck, Jacob 133n30 Dutch Brazil 7, 9–10, 56, 58, 68–69, 73, 74–75, 77, 80, 84, 99, 115, 122–43, 161, 168–69, 175, 181–204, 231–50 Dutch East India Company, see voc Dutch New York, see New Netherland Eckhout, Albert 189, 191–92, 202 Elmina 10, 144–45, 161–62, 165, 174, 177 Esopus 178 Espirito Santo 74 Essequibo 159, 205 d’Estrées, Jean, Comte 7 Evertsz, Cornelis 179 Exquemelin, Alexander 209–14, 218–19, 225–27, 229–30 Fadrique de Toledo, Don 97, 102, 110–11, 115, 234 Farret, Johan 174 Faye, Charles, Comte d’Espesses 94, 126

Index Ferreira, Gaspar 75 Fierens, Jacques 179 Figueiredo, Manuel de 56 Fitzer, William 17n Florida 12, 14, 23, 213 Fludd, Robert 15 Focquenbroch, Willem Godschalck van 174 Franck, Sebastian 178 Frederick V, Elector-Palatine (‘the Winter King’) 22 Frederik Hendrik of Orange-Nassau, Stadtholder of the United Provinces 94, 177, 183 French Brazil 17–19, 21, 137, 188 Galen, Johan van 183 Garcia, Emanuel 65n38 Garcia ii, King of Kongo 169 Gerritsz, Hessel 69, 73, 126, 128–30, 133, 138 Gesner, Conrad 239 Gietermaker, Claes Hendricksz 58n18 Gijsbertsz, Evert 54 Gioia, Flavio 2 Goeree 146n5, 149 Gold Coast 144, 155, 161–63, 174, 191 Gracián, Baltasar 164, 179 Grotius, Hugo 114, 121 Guanabara Bay 59, 65, 154, 188 Guinea, see Gold Coast Guyanas 54, 66, 148–149, 207–9, 219, 222 Haecx, Hendrick 188 Hakluyt, Richard 13, 23 Harriot, Thomas 14, 23 Haselbekius, Johannes 84 Havana 97, 106, 110, 115, 118–19 Hazart, Cornelius 184, 186 Helmont, Jan Baptista van 179 Hendricksz, Boudewijn 63, 66–67 Herckmans, Elias 68n Heyn, Piet 74, 88, 93, 99, 101, 126–29, 232–34, 237–45, 247, 249–50 Heyns, Zacharias 32–52 Hilten, Jan van 83, 97–98, 102–10, 113–20, 126, 138–39, 141, 143 Hispaniola 66n40 Hogenberg, Frans 123–24, 127

Index Hollar, Wenceslaus 131 Hommius, Festus 167 Hondius, Hendrick 137 Hondius, Willem 137 Honduras 118–19 Honthorst, Gerard van 95–96 Hoofe, Cornelis Pietersz 153, 156, 158–59, 161–62 Hooft, Cornelis Pietersz 114 Hooft, Pieter Cornelisz 114–17, 120, 177 Hooghe, Romeyn de 7–8, 124, 203–4 Hoorn, Jan ten 164, 205–30 Hoorn, Nicolaas ten 164, 222–27 Hoorn, Timotheus ten 207, 227 Hudson Valley, see New Netherland Huijge, Cornelis 155 Huydecoper, Jan Pieter Theodoor 162 Ilhéus 194–95 Imborch, Gijsbert van 178 Isabella of Spain, Archduchess of the Southern Netherlands 94, 102 Isla Margarita 67 Ita, Pieter 118–19 Itamaraca 59n22 Itaparica 141, 235 Jacomo, Jan Andries de 35 James, Duke of York 208 Jansz, Barent, see Potgieter, Barent Jansz Jansz, Broer 83, 97–98, 102, 107n25, 109–10, 113–15 Jansz, Harmen 54 Jansz, Marten 54 Jesuits, see Society of Jesus Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, GovernorGeneral of Dutch Brazil 96, 138, 140, 181, 183, 186–89, 194, 203, 231–32, 234, 238, 250 Kaempfer, Engelbert 184, 186 Kessel, Jan van 202 Keye, Otto 207 Labadie, Jean de 179 Lacher, Johan Simonsz 157–58, 161 Laet, Johannes de 59n21, 73, 156n29, 194, 207 Lamsvelt, Jan 225, 228

269 Landsbergen, Franciscus 167 Lange, Petrus de 243–45, 248 Langren, Jacob Florisz van 54 Larraspurú, Don Tomás de 112 Laudonniere, René de 14 Leendertsz, Gabriel 177 Leeuwen, Simon van 162 Lemos, Gaspar de 191 Léry, Jean de 14, 17–22, 192–94, 199–200, 203 Lichthart, Jan 135, 140, 232, 234, 237–38, 240, 249 Lieshout, François 107n25 Linschoten, Jan Huygen van 29, 56, 200 Lipsius, Justus 16 Lonck, Hendrick 101, 106, 109, 121, 129, 232, 234, 237–38, 240, 244, 249 Long Island 175 Louis xiii, King of France 96, 137 Louis xi, King of France 206 Louisiana 222 Loyola, Ignatius of 77 Lucas, Samuel 55 Lucifer, Hendrick Jacobsz 66 Ludwig iv, Landgrave of Hesse-Marburg 35 Luiz, Agostinho 75 Luyken, Jan 212, 216, 220–21 Magalhães Gândavo, Pero de 195 Magellan, Ferdinand 5, 43 Magellan, Strait of 32, 34, 43–44, 47, 68 Mahu, Jacques 32, 34, 51 Maire, Strait le 68 Mandelslo, Johan Albrecht van 183 Maracaibo 212–13 Maranhão 188, 234 Marcgraf, Georg 189 Marcken, Jan Gerritsz van 177 Marees, Pieter de 55 Martins, Manuel 75 Matanzas, Bay of 93, 99, 103, 111, 128–29, 232–33, 238n23, 242 Matos, António de 75 Maurits of Orange, Stadtholder of the United Provinces 56, 93–94, 171 Medici, Maria de’ 11, 95–96 Melton, Edward, see Godfried van Broekhuizen Mendonça de Furtado, Antonio de 74

270 Mendonça de Furtado, Diogo de 74, 78–79, 88, 94 Mercator, Gerhard 5 Merian, Matthaeus 17n, 131 Meteren, Emanuel van 178 Meurs, Jacob van 183–87, 189–90, 194–96, 198n40, 202–3, 205, 212–13, 229 Mexico, see New Spain Moerbeeck, Jan Andries 81n Montaigne, Michel de 192–93, 199 Montanus, Arnoldus 10, 59n21, 181–204, 205, 213 Montmorency, Florent de 94 Moree 146 Moretus, Jan I 12, 17, 22 Morgan, Henry 209, 211–14, 225 Moyne de Morgues, Jacques Le 14, 23 Mulheiser, Johann Philipp 174 Münster, Sebastian 43, 49 ‘Nassau Fleet’ 68, 166 Nassy, David 165n3 New Netherland 7–8, 10, 136, 148, 165, 171n22, 176–80, 207 New Spain 6, 29, 99, 110, 128 Nieuhof, Johan 184–85, 194, 198, 199n40, 202, 205 Nova Zembla 33, 52 Ogilby, John 185, 203 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van, pensionary of Holland 78 Olinda, See also Pernambuco 59, 70–72, 99, 106, 121, 129–32, 188, 231, 234 Oliva, Joao de 75 Olivares, Gaspár de Guzman, Count-Duke of 102 L’Ollonais, François 209, 211, 225 Oquendo, Don Antonio de 110 Ormuz 90 Ortelius, Abraham 5, 43, 49 Osório, Jerónimo 191n25 Oxenstierna, Axel, High Chancellor of Sweden 113 Padtbrugge, Herman 212, 241 Paludanus, Bernardus 29 Panama 213, 227, 230

Index Paraíba 59n22, 133–37, 140, 234 Paramaribo 165, 175 Patagonia 32, 34–35, 42–50, 52, 195 Pater, Adriaen 102, 106, 109–10, 115, 188 Paul, Balthasar 77 Pere, Abraham van 148–50, 152–53, 156–57, 159 Pere, Daniel van 150–57, 159–60, 162 Perkins, William 167, 169, 171 Pernambuco, see also Olinda 54, 56, 59, 61, 69–72, 102n12, 104–5, 107, 110, 115, 117, 121, 133, 137, 141, 156, 174, 181, 186, 234 Peru 14, 30, 166 Petri, Rudolphus 77 Petten, Pieter Cornelisz van 54 Philip ii, King of Spain 13, 81, 231 Philip iii, King of Spain 165 Philip iv, King of Spain 94, 102 Pigafetta, Antonio 43 Pietersz, Michiel 206 Plancius, Petrus 6 Plante, Franciscus 238n21 Platina, Bartolomeo 175 Pliny the Elder 43, 213 Poele, Johan van de 159 Porto Calvo 138–40, 234 Porto Seguro 188 Portobelo 227 Post, Frans 144n1, 189, 231–32 Potgieter, Barent Jansz 32–52 Potiguars 190 Punta de Araya 59, 66–67 Ravesteyn, Paulus van 165n4, 179 Recife 56, 59, 70–72, 99, 121, 129–30, 132, 137, 141, 152, 159, 165, 168–75, 177–78, 181, 188, 234, 236 Rensselaer, Jeremias van 177 Rensselaer, Kiliaen van 148, 177 Rensselaerswijck 148, 176–77 Reyning, Jan Erasmus 216, 218–19, 222, 227 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal 137 Rio de Janeiro 18, 55, 59, 61, 65, 69–70, 74, 154 Rio de la Plata 165–66 Rio Grande (Brazil) 130 Roanoke 23

271

Index Rock the Brazilian 209 Rodrigues, António 75 Roelemans, Cornelis 146n3, 153, 158 Roggeveen, Arend 73 Rue, Pieter de la 246–47, 250 Ruiters, Dierick 9, 11, 53–73, 152–54, 156–57, 160, 162 Ruyter, Michiel de 234n7, 237, 241–42 Saeghman, Gillis 33n3 Salvador de Bahia 56, 59, 61–65, 69–70, 74, 77–78, 81, 84, 87, 90–91, 94, 96, 101, 103, 106, 123, 126, 128, 132, 136, 166, 186, 188, 233, 238, 241, 248 Santa Marta 106, 109, 115n47 Santos 55, 82 São Paulo de Luanda, see also Angola 141, 161 São Tomé 161 São Vicente 55, 82 Sarmiento de Acuña, Don Diego, Count of Gondomar 23 Sarpi, Paolo 178 Savery, Salomon 95, 138, 141 Schaep, Jacob 94 Schoonenburg, Wouter van 188–189 Schoppe, Sigismund von 135, 141, 181, 188–89 Schultetus, Abraham 168–69 Sebastian I, King of Portugal 89–90 Senegal 146n5, 147, 149, 152–56, 159, 161n45 Smeeks, Hendrik 229 Soest, Rutger van 177 Soler, Vicente Joachim 172 Souterius, Daniel 171 Spilbergen, Joris van 55, 81–82 Spínola, Ambrogio 93 Spranckhuysen, Dionysius 233 Staden, Hans 14, 191–92, 193n28, 194, 202–4 Sterre, David van der 216–19 Stetten, Jodocus van 172 Stijfs, Martin 157–58, 160 Strabo 213 Stradanus, Johannes 1–5, 7–8 Struys, Jan 184 Stuyvesant, Pieter 176, 178 Suriname 7, 10, 175, 205, 207 Swift, Jonathan 227

Taffin, Jean 168–69 Tamandaré 234 Tapuyas 190–91, 193–94, 197, 203 Teellinck, Willem 175 Teixeira, Marcos 74 Tenreiro, Manuel 75 Thevet, André 43, 49 Thysius, Antonius, the Younger 238–40, 244, 247–48 Tierra del Fuego, see Patagonia Tierra Firme 6, 110 Tobago 7–8, 60 Tobajaras 190 Trinidad 54, 115 Tromp, Maerten Harpertsz 237 Tulp, Nicolaes 178 Tupinamba 190–93, 197 Udemans, Godfried 168 Urban viii, pope 22 Valdivia 59, 67–69 Valera, Cipriano de 171 Varick, Margrieta van 176 Veer, Gerrit de 33, 52 Verhoeven, Abraham 98, 103, 105–7, 109–13, 115–20 Vermeulen, Gerrit 206 Vesalius, Andreas 178 Vespucci, Amerigo 1–3, 240 Villegagnon, Nicolas Durand de 18–19 Vingboons, Johannes 144–45 Virgin Islands 97 Virginia 12, 14, 23, 213 Visscher, Claes Jansz 64–66, 69, 73, 75, 77–82, 84, 122–43, 189 Visscher, Nicolaes ii 227 Vitelleschi, Muzio 86, 94 voc 6, 55, 72, 133, 146, 188, 212 Vondel, Joost van den 177 Vries, David Pietersz de 207 Vries, Simon de 203, 220–22 Waerdenburgh, Diederick van 101, 106, 121 Waghenaer, Lucas Jansz 6, 54 Wagner, Zacharias 189 Waldseemüller, Martin 2 Wallhausen, Johan Jacob 16n

272 Wassenaer, Nicolaes van 75, 84–93 Weert, Sebald de 32–33, 37–42, 52 ‘Western Design’ (1655) 100 White, John 14, 23 Wild Coast, see Guyanas Willekens, Jacob 74, 233, 244–45 Willems, Catharina 56n15 William iii of Orange, Stadtholder of the United Provinces 187 William iv, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel 20n17

Index Witt, Johan de, pensionary of Holland 187, 236, 238 Wouters, Lieven 76–77 Xavier, Francis 77–78, 96 Zesen, Philipp von 184, 205 Zwier van Haren, Onno 231–32, 241, 248