Page 262 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

Appendix
of the 16 90 edition, it is highly unlikely this refers to the e arlier 1671 edition. Further study has revealed that the 1690 edition appears only in two eighteenth- century auction c atalogues. Witsen’s close friend C uper had three c opies, and Witsen’s heir, his nephew Nicolaas Lambersz. Witsen, owned four.28 Witsen died childless, and his eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century heirs were not care- ful with his collections and papers, including the undoubtedly extensive source material for his books. It is very likely the unbound copies were at some point thrown away or sold for scrap.29
Influence
Witsen’s work on shipbuilding h ad a s ignificant influence and was soon used by others. In 1678 J. Robijn compiled and published a small booklet on rigging called Hollandsche Scheepsbouw, which was largely based on Witsen. The Dic- tionnaire de Marine, written by Nicolas Aubin in 1701, also draws heavily on Wit- sen. Aubin, a Frenc h protestant minister who sought refuge in the Netherl and, notes that the defi nitions “sont tirées du livre inc omparable de M. Witsen ou l’on trouve tout ce qui regarde la Marine des Anciens et celle d’aujoud’hui” (the definitions are taken from the incomparable book of Mr. Witsen where one finds everything regarding the navigation of the ancients and of today).30
The second author of a maj or work in the Netherland s on shipbu ilding was Cornelis van Yk, a m aster shipwright, who pub lished his De Nederlandsche S c h e e p s - b o u w - ko n s t O p e n G e s t e l t i n 1 6 9 7 . H e a l s o m a d e e x t e n s i v e u s e o f t h e work of his predecessor. He even c opied a number of tables from the fi rst edi- tion verbatim. When the second edition of Witsen surfaced in the e arly twenti- eth century, it became clear that Van Yk was probably the only author to mak e use of the r are second edition. I sh all pursue thi s later. The illustrations from Witsen were very influential, too, and were frequently copied—for example, in Van Yk’s treatise (1697), Nieuwe Hollandsche Scheepsbouw (1695 and later edi- tions), L’art de batir les vaisseaux (1719), and the dictionary of Aubin. More than a century after its publication the German author J. H. Röding, in his well-known
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Figure A.3. Russians vessels as depicted in the 1690 edition of Wit- sen’s treatise.