1673 Engraving of Ships off Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of ships off Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands appears in this excerpted leaf from the America's Discoverers section of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
In the center of the scene, two large ships heel through heavy waves toward a walled harbor town, their pennants streaming as small boats scud alongside. Behind them, more ships ride at anchor before the town, where puffs of smoke rise from low batteries at the water's edge. The town stretches along the shore beneath a long curving wall, with a bastioned fort at right and church spires and crosses among its roofs, while mountains rise beyond. At far left, a small domed building stands beside a palm on a spit of land, and the engraved title St. Iago runs across the sky.
The engraved title names the town of Santiago on the island the text calls the Jakobs-Insel (modern-day Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands). The text below opens the account of the voyage of Jacques Mahu and Simon de Cordes, who are described as having sailed from Rotterdam with five ships in June 1598. The Portuguese agreed to let them take on fresh water, but as their crews filled the casks, two hundred horsemen charged them and the Dutch fought back so bravely that the riders at last fled. The town is described as lying lengthwise along a safe harbor shaped like a half moon with a ditch running through it, high mountains on either side, and a wall with six bastions. The text claims the Portuguese had planted their guns at the waterline to sink ships lured there under a show of friendship. Above this, the page closes an earlier story in which a man named Schmid leapt into a boat in a storm off La Rochelle and reached the island of Oléron half dead. The reverse tells how the storm kept the fleet from anchoring, how Mahu died and was buried at sea in a chest weighted with stones, and how Cordes sailed on to Guinea for fresh food against scurvy. There the officer Beuningen was brought before a king who sat on a low bench like a cobbler's, had ash smeared across his face, and who drank so much Spanish wine that he fell asleep. Later, in the Strait of Magellan, the fleet is said to have killed more than fourteen hundred penguins, birds the text says stand upright, resemble geese, and dig burrows like rabbits.
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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