François Valentijn

François Valentijn, born at Dordrecht on 17 April 1666, studied theology at Leiden and served from 1685 as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in the East Indies, chiefly at Amboina, across two tours; he came back to Holland in 1714, settled at Dordrecht to work up his papers, and died in August 1727. His great compilation ‘Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien’, the Old and New East Indies, ran to five volumes in eight folio books published between 1724 and 1726.

The account of Ceylon fills 462 pages of the fifth volume, the most extensive treatment he gave any country, illustrated with thirty-one plates: a large map of the island, charts of its forts, churches and cities, and scenes of its social life and history. For the maps and plans he was granted access to the Company’s Secret Atlas. He compiled rather than drew, yet his folios carried the fullest picture of Ceylon then in print.

The heart of the Ceylon volume, for the eye, is the map. Valentijn’s large ‘Nieuwe Kaart van het Eyland Ceylon’ ranked among the most accurate charts of the island made in its day, and it could do so because he had been granted what few outsiders ever saw, the guarded plans of the Company’s own atlas. The views around it, the towns and forts, the scenes of history and daily life, he assembled as he assembled his text, out of journals, letters and the plates of earlier men, borrowing freely and not always with a scholar’s scruple. The achievement is one of arrangement on a vast scale, an encyclopaedia of the island in which the map is the true original and much of the rest is inheritance finely ordered.

Sources

1. de Silva, R.K., and W.G.M. Beumer. Illustrations and Views of Dutch Ceylon 1602–1796. E.J. Brill / Serendib Publications, 1988.
2. Valentijn, François. Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën. Amsterdam: Joannes van Braam & Gerard onder de Linden, 1724–1726.