-
Boa Vista
Johannes de Ram, born 1648 - died 1697 - Enlarge image
Boa Vista
- Object:
Print
- Place of origin:
Netherlands (printed and published)
- Date:
1680 ca (printed and published)
- Artist/Maker:
Johannes de Ram, born 1648 - died 1697 (engraver)
- Materials and Techniques:
Engraving
- Museum number:
25001:21
- Gallery location:
Prints & Drawings Study Room, level C, case MB2A, shelf DR108, box LOANS
This engraving is by the Amsterdam publisher, engraver, globe-maker and art dealer, Johannes de Ram. De Ram was best known for his maps and atlases, some of which were issued using the maps of other geographers, some of which were prepared by himself. Similarly his engravings were informed by the accounts of early European explorers to Africa and the New World.
The Dutch were slow to develop trading interests in Africa but, following a series of conflicts with Portugal, gained possession of a number of slave depots on the West African coast. Responding to a labour shortage in the newly conquered sugar plantations of northern Brazil in 1630 the Dutch slave trade took off and by 1650 thirty thousand slaves had been dispatched to Brazil from West Africa.
The engraving depicts a scene on Boa Vista, an island in the Cape Verde archipelago, a historic centre for the slave trade. A white trader has just paid his black assistant, presumably for his help in securing the pile of ivory horns which lie on the ground before them and the shackled Africans emerging from a cave-like prison to the right of the image. In the background there is a curiously northern-European-looking port scene and a slave ship.
