Johann Jacob Saar

Johann Jacob Saar, born about 1626 and raised at Nuremberg, enlisted as a common soldier in the Company in 1644 and served fifteen years in the East, most of them in Ceylon, where he saw the wars against the Portuguese, the siege of Colombo of 1655 to 1656, in which he was wounded, and the taking of Jaffnapatnam. He returned home in 1660 and died young of his wounds, a soldier’s life cut short by the campaigns he had recorded.

His account, ‘Ost-Indianische Funfzehen-Jährige Kriegs-Dienst’ (Nuremberg, 1662), carries his portrait, a frontispiece and fifteen plates; a Dutch abridgement followed in 1671 and a revised German edition in 1672, the book finding readers across two languages. His diary having been lost at sea, he wrote from memory, so his dates are unreliable, yet his soldier’s account stands among the fuller German records of the Dutch conquest, valued for the eye of a man who was there.

The fifteen plates are a soldier’s record before they are an artist’s. Cut in Nuremberg for the German market, they show the war Saar had fought, the siege lines before Colombo, the forts taken and the country marched through, drawn plainly and at a distance as a campaigning man would recall them. They stand among the earliest German images of the Dutch conquest of Ceylon, and their worth is the eyewitness’s, the account of one who had stood in the trenches rather than the studio.

Sources

1. Saar, Johann Jacob. Ost-Indianische Fünfzehen-Jährige Kriegs-Dienst. Nuremberg, 1662.
2. de Silva, R.K., and W.G.M. Beumer. Illustrations and Views of Dutch Ceylon 1602–1796. London and Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988.