Map of a planned fortress on Crab Island

Title Leupe: Plan van de nieuw geprojecteerde redoute op het Crabbe Yland aan de mond van Rio de Berbice.

This map shows a plan for a fort on the 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, however, 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 overview map shows the banks of the Berbice River with indications of tides as well as the Crab Island and the projected fort with its functions (A-C and a-d) at its centre.

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 reduction in cost achieved in comparison to the previous plan, even this version was found to be too expensive and so, as before, Crab Island remained unfortified.

North is up.

Scale-bar of 140 Rhineland rods = [approximately 1 : 6050].