Page 266 - Nicolaes Witsen & Shipbuilding in the Dutch Golden Age

Appendix
concerns his correspondence with the aforementioned Cuper. In one letter Wit- sen writes, “I am bec oming of a mind to use the fi gure of Charon and add him to the appendix of my work referring to that which Your Lordship has said in his Consecratio Homeri on page 235.” The quotation can be found in the appendix. As this letter from Witsen to Cuper is dated August 3, 1693, the appendix could not have been printed before the fall of that year.48
The text of the appendix also reveals that it was originally meant to contain five illustrations. These are absent from the Scheepvaartmuseum copy but can be identified. Long after Witsen’s death, in the late eighteenth century, the pub- lisher M. Schalekamp came into pos session of the c opper plates of Witsen’s work. With these plates he compiled a book with the title XXX Platen van Vreemde Vaartuigen (XXX Plates of Foreign Ships). Among these engravings there are five with the text “in the appendix p. . . .” Comparison with the text has established that indeed they belong to the appendix of the 1690 edition. All the plates men- tioned in the text of the appendix are present in Schalekamp’s book.
Van Yk, in writing hi s De Nederlandsche Scheeps-bouw-konst Open Ges telt, clearly had the first edition of Witsen’s book at his disposition, for he borrowed entire tables from it. And he must have had access to the 1690 edition as well, or at least parts of it—which places Van Yk among the very few who had this op- portunity. A list of books in Van Yk’s introduction is largely identical to the one in Witsen’s introduction to the second variant of the 1690 edition.49
Two known variants of the second edition can be summarized as follows:
1. Withoutappendix(UniversityofAmsterdamlibrary;Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, inventory number S.0147; private collection, Amsterdam).
2. With changes in the introduction on pages 28–38; with appendix of
31 pages (Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, inventory number: A.2992).
The Facsimile Editions
By comparing the li st of variants with the two f acsimile editions of Witsen’s book, we can draw some conclusions.50
The 1671 facsimile was printed from an unkno wn copy of variant 2, with the names of Casparus Commelin and the brothers Broer and Jan Appel aer on the title page. It contains the unexpurgated version of the text dealing with the Battle of the Sound and the Raid on the Medway. The Witsen portrait bears the incorrect date of 1671 instead of 1677. It is a facsimile of a good and complete copy. It is therefore a useful substitute for the original in the study of seventeenth-century Dutch shipbuilding; for other types of research it would have been necessary to reproduce the variant pages as well.
The facsimile of the 16 90 edition of Witsen’s book is based on variant 1, a copy of which is in the libr ary of the Univers ity of Amsterdam.51 A f ar better choice would h ave been variant 2, a s found in the Scheepvaartmuseum. The changes concerning antiquity might have been of interest to some scholars, and the revisions in the introduction and especially the addition of the appendix are changes of such importance that they should not have been overlooked. With the illustrations in XXX Platen van Vreemde Vaartuigen a c omplete copy could have been produced. Neither of these facsimiles reproduces the variant pages from the other known copies.
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