West-Indianischer Historien Ander Theil 212

Title

West-Indianischer Historien Ander Theil 212

Description

Illustration shows the admiral and his brother Bartolomeo receiving the new bailiff on his arrival on the island of Hispaniola.

ca. 1628

Artist

Bry, de - Merian (1528-1598)

In 1631, Matthäus Merian and Johann Ludwig Gottfried published a one-volume abridged version of the monumental America series by Theodor De Bry and his two sons. The Historia Antipodum can be seen as the apotheosis of the collection of voyages to the New World. After Theodor's death in 1598, Johan Theodor and his brother Johan Israel continued to run the business together in Frankfurt until the latter died in 1609. As he had no natural male successor, in 1616 he sought the help of a highly talented Basel engraver in his early twenties, Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593-1650), who soon married Johan Theodor's eldest daughter Maria Magdalena. When Johan Theodor died, Merian immediately complied with a request from his mother-in-law. After Merian moved to Frankfurt permanently in June 1626, he turned to Johann Ludwig Gottfried (ca. 1584-1633) to help him pursue a successful independent career as a publisher. In the early 1630s, Gottfried contributed to a new Latin edition of Part 3, which contained the reports of Hans Staden and Jean de Léry on Brazil, as well as to German and Latin reprints of Part 9, which was dedicated to the natural history of the West Indies by the Jesuit José de Acosta. He was probably also involved in the production of the last German volume of the America series, part 14, which was published in 1630. The most significant addition to the collection, however, was a German work entitled Historia Antipodum or Newe Welt, published in 1631, a voluminous folio volume of more than six hundred pages which, despite its size, brought together what was probably the most monumental publication of early modern Europe, the fourteen-part America series that formed part of the De Bry travel collection. In many ways, the changes Merian and Gottfried made to the travelogues for Historia Antipodum surpassed even the editorial changes made for the original volumes. The travel accounts were no longer published one after the other, each followed by its own set of relevant illustrations, but all available information was summarized in three long chapters on the history of the New World, with the engravings within the text rather than as separate sections at the end of each narrative. The first chapter of the abridged version deals with the natural world, a decision that must be seen in the light of Gottfried and Merian's personal convictions, which they expressed in their introduction to Archontologia Cos- mica. The second chapter brings together fifty-three travelogues to the New World, all of which were previously included in the collection of voyages. Finally, the third and shortest chapter presents new, recently published accounts of European expansion in the Atlantic. In the introduction to the volume, the editors introduce the reader to their objective. The dedication to Landgrave Philipp von Hessen, signed only by Merian but dated 1630, emphasizes the differences between Europeans and the indigenous population of the New World, as does the "Preface to the Reader", which bears both signatures. Merian and Gottfried adhere to the generally accepted order of information in early modern European humanities and open their Historia Antipodum with a description of the natural world. The first seventy pages are based on the German translation of Acosta's treatise, which was first used in 1601. As the original translation prepared by Johan Homberger for the De Brys comprised 327 folios, the version printed in the abridged edition was heavily edited. Books 1-3 of Acosta's work, which deal with such traditional and far-reaching topics as the Aristotelian world view, the biblical theories on the origin of the Indians, the habitability of the Torrid zone and the currents and winds in the southern hemisphere, are each reduced to a few pages in the Historia Antipodum.

Historical Description

Until 1492, the Indian peoples of the Arawak, Ciboney and the Caribs lived on Hispaniola. In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered Hispaniola. Searching for gold deposits, Columbus discovered the ports of Valparaiso (today Port-de-Paix), Punta Santa and, before returning to Europe, built a small fort near the latter with the help of the Arawak from the rubble of the stranded ship Santa Maria. La Navidad, in which he left a crew of 40 men. La Navidad was the first Spanish colony in America. When Columbus started his journey home in 1496, his brother Bartolomeo founded a new city in the south, at the mouth of the Ozama River, Santo Domingo, which became the capital of the island and later gave its name to it (or the eastern part). Since La Isabela was abandoned, Santo Domingo is the oldest surviving European-founded settlement in America. In 1498 Columbus reached the city of Santo Domingo again. He tried to settle disputes between the settlers and his brother and intensified Christianization and the search for gold. In 1517 Pedro d’Atenza brought sugar cane from the Canary Islands to Haiti, and Gonzalez gave the impetus to plantations and sugar mills. [2] To operate it, Ovando brought 40,000 Tainos from the Bahamas, as many of the native Indians had already perished. But even these soon died as a result of the epidemics, whereupon (from 1503 or 1505) people were brought from Africa and imported as slaves. In 1509 Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus, became governor and later viceroy of Hispaniola. In 1512 the inauguration of the University of Santo Domingo, the first university in the New World, took place. From 1625 onwards, French and English pirates (called buccaneers or flibustiers) settled on the nearby island of Île de la Tortue in the north. They were later expelled, but a remnant of them, consisting mainly of French, settled as planters on the deserted north coast of Hispaniola and asked France to support them against the Spaniards. Louis XIV then sent Bertrand d'Ogeron as governor to Hispaniola in 1661 and founded a French colony in the western part of the island in 1665, which was destroyed by the Spanish in 1686. As early as 1691, however, a new French colony was founded by Jean Baptiste du Casse. In the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697, Spain renounced the western part ("Saint Domingue") of the island in favor of France. The French and the remaining Spanish part of Hispaniola developed very differently. In 1776 the border between the two parts of the country was regulated, which roughly corresponds to today's.