Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

title page of the revised edition and, within the text, De Laet incorporated important new
information he had gathered from company travel journals, correspondence, and conversations
with merchants and sailors. 73 For the French edition, published in 1640 and dedicated to Cardinal
Richelieu (1585-1642), De Laet added still more information, this time of a historical nature. 74
The greatly expanded section on northeastern Brazil retained the older description by John
Lancaster, an Englishman who visited the region in 1595, but now included new information
from Dutch sources, along with an account of the seizure of Olinda by the Dutch in February of
1630. 75 On the following page, De Laet recounted the entire story of the WIC from its founding
in 1621 to the ongoing Dutch offensives under Johan Maurits. 76
This was the germ of the Iaerlijck Verhael: although De Laet began by incorporating new
information within the existing structure of the Nieuwe Wereldt, the spatial organization of the
text ultimately became too constricting. The company’s conquests and discoveries were too
disparate to be sandwiched into a small section on
Brazil, and the information taken from foreign texts were increasingly made obsolete by the
reports of Dutch explorers, navigators, and soldiers. Having spent much of the past two decades
writing and editing histories of European and distant states for Elsevier, De Laet evidently
considered the company to be a legitimate subject for historical analysis. 77 It is likely that he first
considered, or even began composing, the Iaerlijck Verhael as early as 1640 or 1641, and that it
73
Johannes de Laet, Nieuwe Wereldt Ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien (Leyden: Bonaventura ende Abraham
Elsevier, 1630).
74
Johannes de Laet, L’histoire du Nouveau Monde (Leyde: Bonaventura et Abraham Elzevier, 1640).
75
Ibid., 532. “Mais depuis que nos Belges ont pris Olinde, il y a plusiers des plus riches qui se sont retires a cette
ville”; “cette ville fut prise a l'improviste par les nostres au commence de May de l’an [1632]. Il y eut plus de cent
Portugais de tues, beaucoup pris, un bon butin en fut tire, une bonne partie de la ville ruinee par leu feu; & il y fut
gaste une grande quantite de vivres, principalement di vin, que l'on y gardoit pour les troupes […]”
76
Ibid., 533.
77
Gruys, “De Reeks ‘Republieken’ van de Elzeviers en Joannes de Laet.”
246