Cornelis Jansz Vennip

Cornelis Jansz Vennip, a steersman of Enkhuizen, kept the log of the fleet of three ships that Joris van Spilbergen led out of Veere on 5 May 1601 to open a Dutch trade with Ceylon. He travelled inland with Spilbergen to the court of Kandy and set down all that he saw, and he is thought to have drawn the towns the expedition visited as well as the admiral’s audience with King Vimala Dharma Suriya. He is believed the earliest European to have drawn Ceylon from direct observation, and the sketch behind the earliest Dutch map of the island may be his. He died at sea on 15 June 1603, before the voyage was done.

His original drawings do not survive. They are thought, all the same, to lie behind the fourteen plates that Floris Balthasar engraved for Spilbergen’s ‘Historiael Journael’, printed at Delft in 1605, so that what Vennip saw of Ceylon passed into print through another hand.