Page 265 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

3. Pages 345–46 and 463–78 reprinted with changes in the text.
4. Pages 475–76 removed; pages 477–78 reprinted.
Most copies also have a portrait of Witsen, made in 1677, when he was thirty-
six years old. Some of these portraits are incorrectly dated 1671.43
Variants in the 1690 Edition
Only five copies of the sec ond edition, the Architectura navalis, are known to have survived beyond Witsen’s time. F our are now k ept in Amsterdam: one copy is in the library of the University of Amsterdam, two are in the library of the Scheepvaartmuseum(MaritimeMuseum)in Amsterdam,andoneisinprivate hands. The private owner obtained this copy in the mid-1990s from a Norwegian dealer who had acquired it from a Norwegian collector. The fifth copy, now lost, used to be in the libr ary of the Seefahrtschule (School of Navigation) in Bre- men, Germany; a nineteenth-century handwritten inventory of the library clearly lists the book by author and title, along w ith the year of publication and folio size.44 However, when the old and r are books of the school were incorporated into the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen (State and University Library of Bremen) in the 1 980s, the 1690 edition of Witsen was not among the books transferred, and it is not known when the volume was lost. S. P. l’Honoré Naber mentions it in his 1914 article, as does W. Voorbeijtel Cannenburg in a 1956 ar- ticle. Cannenburg, however, probably copied the information from the earlier ar- ticle, not having seen the book himself.45 During the Second World War, under the threat of Allied bombing, the school, with its library, was moved and incor- porated in the navigation school in Wustrow on the Baltic Sea.46 After the war the school reopened in Bremen, but the town of Wustrow became part of the newly formed German Democratic Republic and the books remained there. Only in the 1990s, after the German reunification, was the remaining collection in Wustrow returned to Bremen to bec ome part of the holdings at the Staats- und Univer- sitätsbibliothek. But, as noted earlier, the Architectura navalis was not among the books transferred.47
The copies intheUnivers ity of Amsterdam library, Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam (inventor y number S.0147), and the priv ate collection are the same—with one exception: the one in the university library has an engraved por- trait, by the engraver Petrus Schenk, of a sixty-year-old Witsen wearing a sump- tuous wig. The second copy in the Scheepvaartmuseum’s collection (inventory number A.2992) contains significant differences compared with the other three. This copy has a new introduction, completely reset and with many differences in text. For instance, more sources are mentioned, and pages have been removed and replaced by others, as in the first edition. Pages 29–38 were reprinted with new text, but this text is two pages longer, so between pages 36 and 37 are two pages numbered [35] and [36]. After the fi rst variant of the 16 90 edition was printed, Witsen apparently received some additional information, a g ood deal of which he took—as mentioned in the book itself—from a letter he received in 1693 from his good friend Gijsbert Cuper. All these variants occur in the section on antiquity.
But the most important change in thi s copy (A.2992) is of a different sort altogether: it contains an appendix of no less than thirty-one pages, providing additions of every kind to all parts of the book. This appendix can be dated. An important collection of Witsen’s letters has survived, an interesting part of which
Variations on Witsen
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