1673 Engraving of the Dutch Siege of Mina Castle in Guinea
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of the Dutch siege of Mina Castle in Guinea 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, Dutch musketeers in broad-brimmed hats lunge forward through billowing gunsmoke into a crowd of African warriors who swing axes overhead or fall back onto the ground. At left, a column of pikemen presses in behind them. In the foreground, a fallen soldier lies face down beside his hat with a dead warrior sprawled across the ground next to him. Behind the warriors, a line of men hold up long poles topped with severed heads before a row of domed huts. Beyond them, a towered castle behind a palisade stands on a rise at left above ranks of soldiers, and a ship lies at anchor in the bay.
The scene appears to show the battle outside the Portuguese castle of Mina (São Jorge da Mina, at modern-day Elmina in Ghana) described in the text below. The book tells the story in its account of Dutch Brazil because Count Maurits sent the expedition from there. In 1637 Johan Koin is said to have sailed for Guinea with nine warships, joined the commander Ipern at Kommendo, and camped behind a hill close below the castle. The local Africans, alarmed by these movements, made what the text calls a strange peace with the Dutch, promising to remain their friends if Koin took the castle and to void the agreement if he failed. As the army of eight hundred soldiers and five hundred sailors halted within a cannon shot of Mina, a thousand warriors burst from a thick wood with such fury that only the expertise of its veterans saved them. The warriors cut off the heads of the Dutch they killed and carried them on long raised poles as a spectacle like the ones seen here. Godlat brought up the musketeers in support, but Colonel Latan still fell along with forty of his men. The reverse tells how the attackers at last fell back beneath the castle, how Koin bombarded it from a nearby hill, and how on the sixth day of the siege the castellan surrendered what the text calls an excellent and otherwise invincible fortress on shameful terms. The garrison was to march out unarmed, without flags or burning matches, and be shipped to São Tomé, leaving all its gold and silver to the victors. The reverse then returns to Brazil, where Colonel Schuppen laid waste to Sergipe del Rey and drove off three thousand cattle to starve the enemy.
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
1200 W. 35th Street #425 Chicago, IL 60609 | P: (312) 496 - 3622