1599 Chinese Merchants at Bantam
DESCRIPTION
An engraved trio of Chinese merchants trading at "Bantam" (modern-day Banten, Indonesia) appears in this excerpted leaf from the de Brys' German account of the first Dutch voyage to the East Indies.
The caption reads "Contrafaytung der Kauffleut auß China, so zu Bantam handeln," or "Portrait of the merchants from China who trade at Bantam." The text below describes the Chinese as doing a strong trade at Bantam in goods brought from China, with some living there permanently in quarters apart from the Javanese. They are said to go from village to village buying pepper from farmers and to carry a scale with a sack hung from it, weighing the pepper so as not to be cheated and making their offer when they judge the farmer short of money. The text also claims that they buy women at Bantam as servants and sell them again on leaving, taking any children with them to China, and that they commonly dress in dark blue with a fine knitted cap.
The First Dutch Voyage to the East Indies
The Frankfurt engraver Theodor de Bry and, after his death in 1598, his sons Johann Theodor and Johann Israel published two great illustrated series of voyages, the Grands Voyages to the Americas and the Petits Voyages to the East Indies. The third part of the Petits Voyages, issued in German as Dritter Theil Indiae Orientalis in 1599, recounts the first Dutch voyage to the East Indies, which Cornelis de Houtman led from 1595 to 1597. Its account of Java draws on the journal of Willem Lodewijcksz, published at Amsterdam in 1598, and the de Brys re-engraved its views on copper, each with its own caption and passage of text. Houtman's fleet anchored off Bantam, the great pepper port of western Java, in 1596, where traders from China, India, Persia, and Arabia already did business. The voyage lost most of its men and its dealings ashore were often violent, but it proved that Dutch ships could reach the spice islands and opened the way for the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602.
CONDITION
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