Fort Rotterdam (1752)

Description

This is an engraved image of Fort Rotterdam in Makassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi published in 1752.

The image is a birds eye view of the fort and at the bottom is a description in English and Dutch reading: Fort Rotterdam/Kasteel Rotterdam. It is labeled but no descriptions of the labeling exist.

Jacques-Nicolas Bellin who lived from 1703 to 1772 was an important cartographer of the 18th century. He is understood as geographe de cabinet and a transitional mapmaker spanning the gap between 18th and early 19th century cartographic styles. His long career as Hydrographer and Ingénieur Hydrographe at the French Dépôt des cartes et plans de la Marine resulted in hundreds of high quality nautical charts of practically everywhere in the world. His work focuses on function and accuracy tending in the process to be less decorative than the earlier 17th and 18th century cartographic work. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bellin was always careful to cite his references and his scholarly corpus consists of over 1400 articles on geography prepared for Diderot's Encyclopedie. In addition to numerous maps and charts published during his lifetime, many of Bellin's maps were updated (or not) and published posthumously. He was succeeded as Ingénieur Hydrographe by his student, also a prolific and influential cartographer, Rigobert Bonne.

Jakob van der Schley who lived from 1715 to 1779 was a Dutch engraver and painter. He has engraved the maps and views of the maps of the Dutch edition of Prevost's Histoire General des Voyage.