1673 Engraving of a Ship Wrecked on the Rocks of the Abrolhos
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of a ship wrecked on the rocks of the Abrolhos appears in this excerpted leaf from the Brazil section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, a three-masted ship heels over against a towering crag, its masts and yards knocked askew as the surf bursts white against the rocks. Storm clouds roll over the cliffs, and at left, a second ship rides the swell in the distance. In the foreground, a swordfish leaps from the churning waves.
The scene appears to show the shipwreck whose story runs across both sides of the leaf. Its details match the 1629 wreck of the Dutch East India Company ship Batavia, though the ship is not named here. The text below tells how the under-merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz and others had planned to seize the ship and sail it to a Spanish port or to Dunkirk to prey on Dutch shipping, a plot cut short when the ship broke apart on the rocks of the Abrolhos. The commander Francisco Pelsaert had the women, children, and sick ferried to an island and two nearby rocks before the storm smashed the ship to pieces. The sailors left aboard are said to have clung to the wreckage and swum for shore through the breakers, and Cornelisz to have survived two days in the mast. With water running short, Pelsaert sailed for the Dutch base at Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) to fetch help, and in his absence Cornelisz carried out what the text calls his "cursed villainy." The reverse tells how his followers killed nearly everyone on the island while Wiebbe Hayes held out on a rocky outcrop with some forty people, beat back their attacks, and seized Cornelisz. When Pelsaert returned with the yacht Sardam, eleven of the mutineers sailed out dressed in scarlet trimmed with gold braid and were taken prisoner. The text places the story in its account of Brazil, apparently confusing the Abrolhos shoals off the Brazilian coast with the Houtman Abrolhos off Western Australia, where the Batavia was actually wrecked. The reverse then turns to Porto Seguro and the capybara, a tailless "water-pig" said to graze the riverbanks at night in great herds with a horrible cry.
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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