Von Erfindung derselben durch unterscheidliche Schiffahrt. 303

Title

Von Erfindung derselben durch unterscheidliche Schiffahrt. 303

Description

Illustration shows how the sailing ships from Seville landed in Las Palmas on Tenerife in 1549 to load wine for the voyage to Capo Viride, the island of St Thomas and the New World.

dated 1630

Artist

Merian (1593-1650)

Matthäus Merian (1593 – 1650) , born in Basel, learned the art of copperplate engraving in Zurich and subsequently worked and studied in Strasbourg, Nancy, and Paris, before returning to Basel in 1615. The following year he moved to Frankfurt, Germany where he worked for the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry. He married his daughter, Maria Magdalena 1617. In 1620 they moved back to Basel, only to return three years later to Frankfurt, where Merian took over the publishing house of his father-in-law after de Bry's death in 1623. In 1626 he became a citizen of Frankfurt and could henceforth work as an independent publisher. He is the father of Maria Sibylla Merian, who later published her the famous and wellknown studies of flowers, insects and butterflies.

Historical Description

The Canary Islands consist of Tenerife, Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro. You are in the Atlantic in a geographic region known as Macaronesia. This also includes Cape Verde, the Azores, the Madeira Archipelago and the Ilhas Selvagens. In the period from the 4th century until the Europeans rediscovered the Canary Islands in the 14th century, different cultures developed independently of one another on the individual islands. Although these were based on the same principles, they had so many peculiarities that one cannot speak of a “Guanche culture of the Canary Islands”. There was the culture of the Majos on Lanzarote, that of the Majoreros on Fuerteventura, that of the Bimbaches on El Hierro, that of the Gomeros on La Gomera, that of the Canarios on Gran Canaria, that of the Benahoaritas on La Palma and that of the Guanches on Tenerife. The naming of the indigenous people of all islands with the name of the indigenous people of the island of Tenerife as Guanches, which was common for a long time, ignores the differentiated cultural developments on the different islands.