Wouter Schouten

Wouter Schouten, born at Haarlem in 1638 and trained in surgery, signed to the Dutch East India Company as an assistant surgeon in 1658, rose to chief surgeon, and first saw Ceylon about 1661; he returned to Holland in 1665, kept a barber’s shop at Haarlem and inspected the Surgeons’ Guild, and died in 1704. His ‘Oost-Indische Voyagie’, printed at Amsterdam in 1676, carries, besides its engraved title and portrait, forty-three copperplate engravings that the title-page declares were made from the author’s own drawings done in the East.

His two double-page views, of the towns of Colombo and of Point de Galle, rank among the more topographically reliable of the period. Later editions ran on to 1775, with German and French translations to carry the work abroad.

The forty-three plates were not cut by Schouten’s own hand. His drawings, made on the spot with a surgeon’s habit of exact notation, were carried onto copper in Amsterdam by Coenraet Decker and Jan Kip for the press of Jacob van Meurs, the house that dressed most of the great Dutch travel books of the age in one richly worked manner. Something of the engravers therefore lies over the surgeon’s eye, a film of studio finish laid upon the observed fact, and it is why the double views of Galle and Colombo read at once as among the earliest accurate records of those towns and a little statelier than the low, hot forts can have looked. The form is the Dutch panoramic profile: the town taken broadside from the roadstead, so that ramparts, church towers, shipping and shore run together in one long band, the working sight of a sea power that knew its possessions first from the water.

Sources

1. Schouten, Wouter. Oost-Indische Voyagie. Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs and Johannes van Someren, 1676.
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.