1673 Engraving of the Dutch Siege of Porto Calvo in Brazil
DESCRIPTION
An engraved scene of the Dutch siege of Porto Calvo appears in this excerpted leaf from the Brazil chapter of the 1673 German edition of Arnoldus Montanus's account of the Americas.
Columns of troops wind up a hillside toward a church and walled buildings beneath a mountain, while clouds of gunsmoke rise from the slopes. In the foreground, a massed body of pikemen advances under banners, a drummer beats a great drum, and musketeers with shouldered matchlocks file past officers in plumed hats standing beneath the palms. The engraving appears to show Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen's 1637 siege of the castle at Porto Calvo, the subject of the text on both sides of the leaf, and the smoke may stand for the hill forts that the Count of Bagnuolo had mined and that the Dutch found blown up and still smoking. The text below follows the siege to its thirteenth day, when, after bombardment from four batteries, the castle surrendered, yielding twenty-two bronze and five iron cannon from what the text calls the Spanish crown's arsenal in Brazil. The reverse covers Maurits's arrival at Recife in January 1637, the day of fasting and prayer he called before marching south, and his defeat of Bagnuolo outside Porto Calvo.
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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