1599 Village Chief of Sumatra
DESCRIPTION
An engraved procession of a village chief and his attendants on Sumatra appears in this excerpted leaf from the de Brys' German account of the first Dutch voyage to the East Indies.
The caption reads "Wie das Landvolck in der Insel Sumatra beschaffen," or "What the country people of the island of Sumatra are like." The text below places Sumatra at the entrance to the Sunda Strait and tells how, when the Dutch landed at a village called Dampin, its chief came out to meet them in friendship so that they found the people peaceable. He is said to have been followed by servants who served as his guard, by women carrying his betel box and other things, and by a man who held a parasol over his head against sun and rain. The finest dress is described as fine sky-blue cloth, and the women are said to wear a skirt from the hips down and a piece across the breast, with their hair bound up and hanging down behind.
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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