Design for a fortification on Crab Island

Title Leupe: Plan en profil van de nieuwe geprojecteerde redoute, op het Grabbe Yland aan de mond van Rio de Berbice.

This map is part of a plan for a fort on Crab Island.

A plan similar to this one was already designed to no avail by P.M. Osterlin before 1735 (see VEL1611).

That did not mean to say that the notion of placing a fort on Crab Island had been entirely abandoned.

Following sustained pressure from private planters in Berbice, the directors finally turned, in 1738, to the Society of Surinam with the request that the French engineer, Pierre-Dominique Desmaretz, then responsible for the construction of Fort Nieuw Amsterdam, be seconded to Berbice for some time so that he could come up with a new plan for the fortification of the island. Desmaretz travelled there the following year and developed the plan shown here.

This is a ground plan for the main fortification, accompanied by a profile on top.

The idea behind his project was broadly the same as Osterlin’s proposal of four years earlier, with the difference that Desmarestz had made the new fortification smaller and had left out the auxiliary battery on the eastern river bank.

Despite the cost-saving that this would have provided in relation to the previous plan, even this version was found to be too expensive and so, as in the past, Crab Island remained unfortified.

This map was send in November 1739 and received in the Netherlands in April 1740.

Scale-bars of 50 Rhineland rods = [approximately 1 : 1,500] / [profile] 4 Rhijnlandse Roeden = [approximately 1 : 115].