In West-Indien. 329

Title

In West-Indien. 329

View showing the capital Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (town of Allagona) when the Dutch Armada took control of it. It was looted and churches and monasteries were burnt, small fortresses such as the large Gratiosa fortress were blown to pieces.

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

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.