Plan for closing the mouth of the Suriname River in times of war

Title Leupe: Plans van gemonteerde ponten, pontons en Boomen om de rivier te sluyten enz.

The plans made in the 1780s and 1790s to close off the mouth of the Surinam River in case of an imminent attack from the sea were not the first of their kind. Some forty years earlier, shortly before the completion of Fort Nieuw Amsterdam and his own voluntary resignation in 1747, the then military commander in the colony, Jean-Pierre Chambrier, had presented a similar project, of which this map was a part. The redoubts Purmerend and Leiden had not yet been built at the time, so that the ‘lines of obstruction’ then linked up directly to the main fort. Two of the three elements of which Chambrier thought the barriers should consist also reappeared in the later plans: flat-bottomed ‘punts’ (a), which were envisaged to serve as floating batteries or gunboats and are shown in detail below the map, and bigger armed ships (b). Before them would be an anchored floating barricade consisting of heavy tree trunks bound together with chains and set with iron spikes (c), kept afloat by empty barrels (d). To prevent an enemy approach along the banks and over the shallows in small craft, bundles of branches should be placed there (e). The plan was rather unpracticable and was never realized.

North is lower left.

Scale-bar of [profiles] 60 feet = [approximately 1 : 110].