"Veram et historicam descriptionem auriferi regni Guineae."

"Veram et historicam descriptionem auriferi regni Guineae."

- Indiae Orientalis part 6

-Johann Theodor de Bry; Johann Israel de Bry;

Pieter de Marees

-Published by  in Frankfurt by Wolfgang Richteri

-1604

-Quarto, 29 x 20 cm - late 18th century quarter vellum with marbled boards. Good condition but some trimming to plates.

-Complete (Plates bound before text in this copy) : TP to plates. 26 half-page engraved illustrations TP, [8], 1-127

First edition of part 6 of de Bry's Petits Voyages in Latin. 

Pieter de Marees’s Beschrijvinghe ende Historische verhael van het Gout Koninckrijck van Guinea (1602) is the most important European work on West Africa of the seventeenth century. A Dutch merchant sailing from Enkhuizen, little else is known about De Marees apart from this account of his voyage to the Gold Coast around 1597. Written for merchants and policy makers in the newly independent Dutch Republic, it was soon translated into Latin, French, and German, influencing and shaping European views of Africa. Images copied from his illustrations would be used by the cartographer Blaeu, and other illustrators, long into the 17th Century. The work describes the Akan people of modern-day Ghana and the Gold Coast, offering a remarkably detailed view of society. It includes descriptions of political and social structures, trade, religion, and even local hairstyles, memorably illustrated in a famous plate. De Marees’s description of the Akan remains a key primary source for historians and anthropologists today. Being a merchant, he focused on the region’s valuable commodities—gold, ivory, and pepper—and included a phrasebook to aid future traders. His observations on war captives being held as slaves within African societies predate, and in some ways anticipate, the transatlantic slave trade that would expand later in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.