400,00EUR

Colombo, anno 1672, map of the fort, Baldaeus
[1714]

Colombo, anno 1672, map of the fort, Baldaeus, copperengraving Historic Colombo Fort – Map of the fort and the city of Colombo.- 1672 Plate size: 29x35 cm., the printed area in very good conditon, only on margins some small tears and a little brownish. The business district of Colombo, with Government buildings, banks and other commercial ventures, 5 star hotels and department stores, is still called ‘Fort’, because that is what it once was. The Fort of Colombo, which like Jaffna and Galle was really a fortified town, was demolished around 1870 in the interest of urban development, soon followed by most of the buildings within it. Today nothing is left but its shape in aerial photographs, the regular grid pattern of the streets, some parts of the walls, the hospital, the lonely Delft Gate that is now a useless passageway hidden among modern high-rise, hardly recognizable parts of the Governor’s House, and some odds and ends, like an ugly and lost little warehouse in the harbour. Of course today the historical remains are more appreciated, as monuments to history and sites of tourist interest, so most of the buildings that do remain have recently been renovated. The most important ones are located outside the original Fort area, such as the Dutch Period Museum and the Wolfendhal Church. After taking the Portuguese fort of Colombo in 1656, the Dutch partially demolished it, and restructured and improved the western part, taking advantage of the natural strength of the location between a lake and the sea. On the landside there was a wide moat connected to the lake which was infested with crocodiles, and beyond that the Pettah arose, the ‘old city’. The old Portuguese walls and bastions were demolished there. The Fort was connected with the Pettah via Koningsstraat, now Main Street, which started at the Delft Gate, or East Gate, crossed the moat by a draw bridge, ran between the sea and the Pettah and ended at Kayman’s Gate, where a Portuguese gate used to be. From there the road led along the Kelani River to Hanwella. There were nine bastions: Leiden, Delft and Hoorn on the landside, Den Briel and Amsterdam on the Westside, and Rotterdam, Middleburg, Kloppenburg and Enkhuizen on the southern side. On the west side, on a promontory to the north, were two batteries: the Battenberg battery and the Waterpas battery. On the north side, protected by the batteries, was the harbour, which was not much more than an open road, as there was no bay here. Due to the monsoons the harbour was safe only from December to April. The other eight months of the year the ships had to go to Trincomalee and Galle. On the east side, the land between the moat and the Pettah could be flooded by opening the sluice of the lake, which is now called Beira Lake, possibly from ‘de Beer’, which was the name of the sluice. The Colombo Fort was a walled city, with administrative and military buildings, as well as cinnamon storehouses, mills, a parade ground, a church, residential buildings, and stalls for horses and elephants. The streets were planted with rows of trees for shade. The houses both inside the fort and in the Pettah were based on the standardised ground floor plans that had evolved from the houses in Holland but had been adapted to the tropical climate to provide shade and ventilation. They had an extended roof covering a veranda to keep the windows in shade, widely spaced masonry columns, a door with a tall decorated fanlight, a high-ceilinged hall with doors leading to the bedrooms, and a living area leading to a back veranda and a paved courtyard with trees, enclosed by wings projecting from the house. The houses were usually one storey high, and had white-washed walls and red-tiled roofs that usually suffered much from the attentions of crows and monkeys. In 1694 some 400 families were living in Colombo, with an average number of 8 persons per family, which included slaves, who accounted for slightly more than half of the population. Of the remaining half, 54 percent were Europeans. Many men were married to Singhalese or mixed Portuguese women. In the 18th century this population group had increased to several thousands. There were families that had lived on the island for five generations. After the British took over many of them stayed on to work as civil servants for the British colonial administration. They eventually forgot the Dutch language and adopted English, but were, and are, still known as the Dutch Burghers. They had Dutch names and often quite distinct European features. They often had money, and occupied high positions in society as lawyers, doctors and academics, and kept apart from the ‘common folk’. Their upper class lifestyle and ‘outsider ness’ caused a certain resentment among the Singhalese, and after the British left most of the Burghers emigrated to Australia, the US and Canada as a result of the ‘Sinhala only’ policy of the post-independence government during the 1950’s and 60’s. Michael Ondaatje describes the life of the Burghers in his autobiographical ‘Running in the Family’ (1983), and Sri Lankan journalist Carl Muller writes about the ‘poor cousins’ of the Burghers in his trilogy ‘The Jam Fruit Tree’ (1993), ‘Yakada Yaka’ (1994), and ‘once upon a Tender Time’. Photograph of a print showing a bird's eye view map of Colombo and environs, 17th century
Colombo, anno 1672, map of the fort, Baldaeus by Baldaeus Philippus, 1632-71
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