1599 War Council at Bantam
DESCRIPTION
An engraved council assembly 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 "Wie die zu Bantam jre Versamlung halten, welche sie den Kriegsraht nennen," or "How the people of Bantam hold their assembly, which they call the war council." The text below says that the council meets on set days in the open market square, or Pacebam, in full public view. Legal cases are heard in the afternoon, while weighty matters of war are decided in secret at night by moonlight. It then gives the order of seating, from the governor and his four chief captains, the "bishop" with the elders, and the admiral with the ship captains, to the nobles of the land, the Malays, the Turks and Arabs, the young nobles, and finally the servants waiting on their masters.
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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