West-Indianischer Historien Ander Theil 212

Title

West-Indianischer Historien Ander Theil 212

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 Historia Antipodum, a heavily abridged, single-volume version of Theodor De Bry’s 14-part America series. After De Bry’s death, his sons continued the project. Merian, a skilled engraver, later married De Bry’s daughter and collaborated with Gottfried. The Historia Antipodum reorganized numerous travel accounts into three chapters covering nature, exploration, and recent colonial developments. Merian and Gottfried significantly reworked the content, merging reports and integrating illustrations into the text. Their depiction of the natural world and Indigenous cultures—drawing in part on José de Acosta’s writings—was particularly influential. The book stands as one of the most ambitious works of early modern travel literature.

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.