Beschreibung:

[HOUTMAN, Cornelis de (1565-1599)] – [LANGHENEZ, Bernardt, Dutch publisher] – LOEW, Conrad, translator. Warhaffter, klarer, eigentlicher Bericht von der weiten, wunderbarer und nie bevor gethaner Reiss oder Schiffahrt biss in India gegen der Sonnen aufgang gelegen ... Aus Niderlandischer Spraach in hochteutsch bracht durch Conrad Lew. Cologne: Bertram Buchholz, 1598. Apparently unrecorded edition of this extremely rare account of the first Dutch expedition to the East Indies. After the independence of the Netherlands from Spain, all Iberian ports were closed to the Dutch, thus denying them access to the spice and bullion markets. Therefore, the Company of Distant Lands – the immediate forerunner of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) – organised an expedition to the East Indies under the command of Cornelis de Houtman. He set sail in April 1595 with three ships, touching the coast of Brazil, before rounding the Cape of Good Hope on 2 July 1595. They then sailed across the Indian Ocean from Madagascar to the Sunda Straits and en route touched on Sumatra and stopped to trade in Bantam in June 1596. However, confronted with inflated spice prices, the ill-disciplined crew proceeded to destroy much of the city, and repeated this at Sidayu and Madura. On its homeward journey, the fleet sailed along the south of Java, a first for western vessels. De Houtman’s brother, Frederick, a talented astronomer who also sailed on the voyage, greatly contributed, along with the Dutch navigator Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser, to mapping the southern skies, recording a great number of new constellations. The voyage was not a great success – one of the ships had to be scuttled due to unseaworthiness, and only 89 out of 249 men returned alive – but the small amount of pepper they had managed to purchase turned a profit, and demonstrated that the Dutch could reach the East Indies and breach the Portuguese monopoly on the spice trade. This anonymous, first-hand journal, first published by Bernardt Langhenez in Dutch as Verhael vande Reyse de Hollandtsche schepen ghedaen naer Oost Indien (Middleburg, 1597), was the first printed account describing the voyage. It was quickly translated into German by Conrad Loew, and two versions of this German edition were printed in Cologne in 1598. One was published by Peter Reschedt (VD16 W 714 records only 3 copies in Germany, at least one with a world map); the other was in a collection of voyages published by Bertram Buchholtz (VD16 L 2319 records 9 copies in German institutions; see Brunet III, 1144; Sabin 42392). Priority for these has not been established. The present lot appears to be a separately issued publication of the Houtman voyage from Buchholtz's collected edition. It is unpaginated, and the type is completely reset. We have been unable to trace any similar edition in any of the databases we have consulted. Folio (265 x 173mm). German text, unpaginated, 2 ff., 12 ff. (tiny marginal rust hole in C2 with faint rust markings in margins of adjacent leaves, occasional faint spotting, otherwise a clean copy). Modern binding, reusing 16th-century ?Spanish vellum music manuscript leaf.