[Plan of Fort George on the Island of New Britain] Plan von Fort Georg auf der insel New Britannien, er Funden von Whilhem Dampiere, anno 1700

COLTZ, C.

Edité par [German speaking Europe, 1760

A propos de cet article

Manuscript gouache and pen and ink on fine laid paper, signed at lower right "COLTZ / CAR." Birds eye pictorial plan of an insular fortified settlement, with German title cartouche and key identifying "A. das Fort, B. der Haven, C. Lazeret, and D. Wacht Tuhrn" [sic]. A rare fictional manuscript plan of Fort George on the Island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea. The composition shows a large bastioned enclosure with regular ranges of buildings and a central tower, linked by walls to a smaller outwork and set within a highly schematic island landscape of inlets, promontories, and stylized mountain forms. A later pencil note at upper right reads Fort George (New Britain). The title's orthography is highly irregular, and the cartouche appears to invoke William Dampier's discovery of New Britain in 1700 rather than to record an actual surveyed site. This is best understood not as a working military plan but as an imaginative or apocryphal manuscript fortification view. No historical record for an English Fort George on New Britain has surfaced in standard public references, and the architecture, especially the tall conical towers and idealized building blocks, is closer to decorative manuscript convention than to an eighteenth century engineers draft. The present plan appears to belong to a very small group of German language manuscript fortification fantasies signed C. Coltz. A closely comparable example at the Clements Library, Plan von Fort Cumberland auf der insel St. Laurenti, is likewise dated circa 1760, signed by Coltz, described as an island fort with medieval architecture, and regarded as the work of an unknown author, probably from Germany. William Dampier explored the coasts of New Guinea and New Britain around 1700, named Nova Brittannia, and identified the passage now known as Dampier Strait. His voyage narratives appeared as A Voyage to New Holland in 1703 and A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland in 1709, publications that helped fix New Britain in the European geographical imagination while still leaving large parts of its coastline uncertain. A modern scholarly study of Dampier's voyage notes that his Nova Britannia was still imperfectly understood, with the relation of New Britain to New Ireland and parts of the coast remaining unknown. That climate of partial knowledge helps explain a manuscript such as this, which reads less as reportage than as a speculative visualization built on travel literature, place names, and fortified fantasy.

N° de réf. du vendeur 16110

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: [Plan of Fort George on the Island of New Britain] Plan von Fort Georg auf der insel New Britannien, er Funden von Whilhem Dampiere, anno 1700
• Éditeur: [German speaking Europe
• Date de parution: 1760
• Signé: Signé par l'auteur
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