1599 Wedding Feast at Bantam
DESCRIPTION
An engraved wedding feast 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 "Heyrath und Hochzeitliche solennitet, deren in der Statt Bantam," or "Marriage and wedding ceremonies of the people of the city of Bantam." The text below says that parents there give their children no great dowry beyond slaves or bondservants, and that a betrothed bride and groom stay at home until the wedding. On the day itself, friends and servants come in their finest clothes, long spears hung with white and red cotton streamers are planted on both sides of the way from the groom's house to the bride's, and the groom rides through the city on a saddled horse much like the procession glimpsed through the doorway here. In the evening a meal is held for the nearest friends and relatives and afterward the groom withdraws with his bride behind a curtain, after which, the text claims, she is seen by no other man.
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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