1599 A Chief of Bantam in Procession
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a chief of "Bantam" (modern-day Banten, Indonesia) walking with his attendants appears in this excerpted leaf from the de Brys' German account of the first Dutch voyage to the East Indies.
The caption reads "Wie die Hauptleut und Obersten auff der Strassen eynher tretten," or "How the captains and chiefs walk along the street." The text below says that a sword in a red or black velvet sheath and one or two spears are carried before such a man, with servants behind bearing his betel box and water jug and a parasol held over his head. Townspeople who meet him may not walk past but must squat until he has gone by, as the two men in front do here. The chiefs are described as bare above the waist, girded with a cloth woven with gold thread, and turbaned in fine Bengal cloth, wearing the dagger they call the cris behind, in front, or at the side, and going barefoot because they think it shameful to cover the feet.
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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