Von Erfindung derselben durch underschiedliche Schiffart/ I Annabon 423

Title

Von Erfindung derselben durch underschiedliche Schiffart/ I Annabon 423

Description

Magnificent representation of the island of Annabón between Cap Verden and Ascension. It is located in the Gulf of Guinea and at the same time it is one of the seven provinces of Equatorial Guinea in Africa.

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 uninhabited islands were circled by António Fernandes in 1445 and discovered and entered for the first time in 1456 by the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto, who was in Portuguese service (Boa Vista). Antonio da Noli, a Genoese captain who also sailed on behalf of the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator, continued to explore the islands from 1458 in collaboration with Diogo Gomes, discovered most of the rest of the eastern Cape Verde Islands and baptized the archipelago with the name Ilhas de Cabo Verde and began settling the islands as governor of the Portuguese crown from 1461. In fact, Diogo Gomes later claimed to be the first of the two to have seen the island of Santiago from afar and also to have been the first to set foot on it. Antonio da Noli, however, managed to return to Portugal earlier, and he was then understandably rewarded by Heinrich the Navigator with the encouragement of the discovery, which, in the words of Diogo Gomes, "I, Gomes, discovered". Because of the rivalry between the two, Diogo Gomes is considered to be the true discoverer of the main island of Santiago in Portuguese historiography. The islands were named by the Portuguese after Cabo Verde (Green Cape) on the west coast of Africa.