Page 264 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

Appendix
a phrase excusing the episode: “The crew of some fire ships fell into the hands of the English, and, in the h abit of war, were robbed of their lives in the fur y.” In short, the pages with anti-English passages were cut out of the book and re- placed with an expu rgated version. Yet even this was not enough. In the next variant entire pages were removed. In the majority of the surviving copies, pages 475–76, again dealing with the successful Dutch raid on England’s southeastern coast in 1667, were left out. During this raid the Dutch had sailed up the Medway from the Thames estuary, attacked English ships at Chatham’s naval docks, and towed one of the flagships of the English fleet away to the Netherlands. This first successful attack on British soil, immensely humiliating to the English, was now omitted, with of course adjustments to the text to ensure continuity.37
In two letters to the Dutch scholar Vossius, Witsen explains some of the rea- sons for these changes: “On my return from England I agreed to omit the spiteful history of the raid on the Medway entirely, which could easily be done because only a few c opies had been sold.” Witsen had already presented Vossius with a copy of the first version, and this letter is in fact a note he sent with the re- printed pages. Less then a month later he writes that the changes are the result of his visits to England: “I hate all this sharpness, all the more because this na- tion had treated me so kindly.”38 Perhaps Witsen received advice to mitigate the tone, but the letters clearly demonstrate that he changed his mind about the text.39 External pressure certainly played a role, too. The earlier variant contains a description of the Battle of the Sound (the Øresund, the sea strait between Sweden and Denmark), whic h was fought between the Dutc h and Swedes in 1658. On pages 463–65 Witsen writes in rather unfavorable terms on the role of the Swedish admiral, Count Wrangel, after he received a broadside and was about to be boarded: “Whereupon Wrangel turned his arse and anchored under Elsinore Castle because he received various shots aft and was himself wounded by a splint er in the f ace. . . . although h is ship was called Victoria he aban- doned the fi ght.” Unknown to Witsen, Count Wrangel had received the book soon after its publication through his Dutch business agent, De Geer. The old admiral must have been absolutely furious. In a letter to De Geer he demanded a full apology from Witsen for his impertinence and insisted that the pages be removed from al l remaining copies; Witsen complied. With these c hanges in the text, both the Anglo- Dutch war and the Battle of the Sound are described in neutral terms.40
Some authors have claimed that Witsen’s work was banned because of these vexing passages—mainly because of a remark in a work by the French author Jerôme Lalande in 1793: “Le Traité de N. Witsen eut beaucoup de réputation en Hollande, mais les États-Généraux en ordonèrent la suppression” (The treatise by N. Witsen had a considerable reputation in Holland, but the States General suppressed it).41 However, there is no evidence that the work was ever officially banned, although it clearly stirred some emotions. Voorbeijtel Cannenburg notes that no record of such a ban has been found in the archives of the States General or the City of Amsterdam. Moreover, as noted earlier, the book remained on the market for decades after its initial publication.42
In summary, we can distinguish four variants in the 1671 edition:
1. TitlepagewiththenameofChristoffelConradus;unexpurgatedtext(one extant copy, University Library, Amsterdam).
2. Title page with the names of Casparus Commelijn and Broer and Jan Appe- laer; unexpurgated text.
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