1599 Foreign Merchants at Bantam
DESCRIPTION
An engraved trio of foreign merchants at "Bantam" (modern-day Banten, Indonesia) appears in this excerpted leaf from the de Brys' German account of the first Dutch voyage to the East Indies.
The caption reads "Eygentlicher Abriß der frembden Kauffleut zu Bantam," or "True likeness of the foreign merchants at Bantam." The text below identifies A as a Persian merchant from "Coracone" (likely Khorasan), of a people of jewelers skilled in handling gems, and B as a merchant from Arabia, of those who trade mostly by sea from island to island. C is a merchant from "Pegu" (modern-day Bago, Myanmar), also said to be well versed in trade. All three nations are said to live at Bantam for the sake of commerce and to differ somewhat in dress, as the figure shows.
The First Dutch Voyage to the East Indies
The Frankfurt engraver Theodor de Bry and, after his death in 1598, his sons Johann Theodor and Johann Israel published two great illustrated series of voyages, the Grands Voyages to the Americas and the Petits Voyages to the East Indies. The third part of the Petits Voyages, issued in German as Dritter Theil Indiae Orientalis in 1599, recounts the first Dutch voyage to the East Indies, which Cornelis de Houtman led from 1595 to 1597. Its account of Java draws on the journal of Willem Lodewijcksz, published at Amsterdam in 1598, and the de Brys re-engraved its views on copper, each with its own caption and passage of text. Houtman's fleet anchored off Bantam, the great pepper port of western Java, in 1596, where traders from China, India, Persia, and Arabia already did business. The voyage lost most of its men and its dealings ashore were often violent, but it proved that Dutch ships could reach the spice islands and opened the way for the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602.
CONDITION
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