1599 Peasants and Slaves at Bantam
DESCRIPTION
An engraved portrayal of peasants and slaves 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.
Translated, the caption reads "Portrayal of the peasants who have lately settled behind the city, together with other slaves." The text below calls them plain and simple folk who had recently settled and built a town named Sura. They are said to keep the law of Pythagoras and so eat nothing that had its life in the blood, living chiefly on rice, fruit, and herbs. They never marry but keep quiet and temperate, leading what the text calls a truly philosophical life. The slaves added to the scene are said to go entirely naked and bareheaded apart from a cotton cloth bound about the waist and to be very submissive to their masters, and the figures hewing logs and working on a boat behind the two porters appear to be these slaves.
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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