1673 Engraving of a Dutch Audience with Two Pacific Island Kings
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a Dutch audience with two Pacific Island kings appears in this excerpted leaf from the America's Discoverers section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
Beneath a thatched canopy on four posts, two Dutchmen in broad collars sit on woven mats between kneeling Islanders with long braids, one of whom raises a bundle of feathers. Dutch trumpeters play behind them, Islanders with spears and birds crowd in at right and bowls sit on the ground before them. Beyond the canopy, a throng gathers on the shore.
The scene appears to show the visit of Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire's expedition to an island of two kings in 1616, an event recounted in the text below. Aris Claesz, going ashore by moonlight, is described as having found the king seated under a canopy supported by four pillars while young women danced to the beat of a hollow log. The next day the two kings sat side by side beneath it, and four Dutch trumpeters and a drummer amazed some nine thousand onlookers. Commoners then chewed the green herb kava which they wore bound around their waists, spat it into a great wooden bowl, kneaded it with water into a drink, and served it kneeling to the kings and to the Dutch. Each king presented a pig and bowed his head to the ground before Le Maire. The text notes that the men wore a long braid on the left side of the head, while nobles wore two. The reverse ends the voyage at Jakarta, where the Dutch East India Company seized the ship, and the crew reached Vlissingen having sailed around the world in two years and eighteen days. It then opens Jacques l'Hermite's Nassau Fleet of 1623.
Arnoldus Montanus (ca. 1625–1683), a Dutch minister and schoolmaster, compiled De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld from earlier chronicles and travel accounts without ever crossing the Atlantic. The Amsterdam publisher Jacob van Meurs issued it in 1671 with a wealth of engravings. John Ogilby's English adaptation followed the same year, and Die Unbekante Neue Welt, the German edition attributed to Olfert Dapper, followed in 1673. Its illustrations were drawn by artists who had mostly never seen the Americas either. They mix reported detail with European invention, and they shaped how a generation of European readers pictured the New World.
CONDITION
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