1599 A Malaccan and Other Merchants at Bantam
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of two foreign merchants and a woman 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 "Folgen noch etliche andere frembde Kaufftleut zu Bantam," or "There follow some other foreign merchants at Bantam." The text below identifies D as a merchant from Malacca, of a people said to live by lending money for long voyages on condition that it be repaid double if the voyage succeeds. E is the "Quillin," who is said to deal in the same way, cleverly buying up Chinese goods and selling them again at a good profit once the Chinese have gone, and F shows their women in their habit and dress.
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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