Dierick Ruiters’s Manuscript Maps and the Birth of the Dutch Atlantic

Abstract

AbstractIn 1621, as the Twelve Years’ Truce drew to a close, the Dutch West India Company was founded with the explicit brief to open a second front in the war with the Habsburg monarchy and to attack Spanish settlements in the Americas. The Zeeland skipper Dierick Ruiters was one of the key figures in the embryonic phase of the Dutch Atlantic empire. Throughout the 1620s he presented the directors of the West India Company with crucial geographical and military intelligence in the form of five manuscript maps of strategic positions in the Habsburg empire. This article analyses the military value of these five little-known maps which facilitated the Dutch attack on Spanish strongholds along the coast of South America. Ruiters’s maps were initially kept secret but gradually reached a wider audience in the form of published news maps. Because Ruiters was never mentioned as the draftsman responsible for these maps, however, and reputations in cartography and colonial history alike in later centuries have dep...