Plan of Fort Zeelandia

Title Leupe: Plan van de fortress Zelandia.

The uncompleted English Fort Willoughby fell into Dutch hands in 1667 and was definitively handed over to Abraham Crijnssen in May 1668. Its construction was completed under his interim-administration up to 1669 and under Governor Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck after 1683 an earthen outer fort was added to a fort now known as Zeelandia. At the beginning of 1710, the Governor and Councillors commissioned a resident Huguenot, Isaac Tourton, to investigate the condition of the fort and make recommendations for improvements. In his report of 18 July, he concluded that Fort Zeelandia was not fit to defend the colony and that adaptations would be ineffectual. Two years after Isaac Tourton’s first plans for a new fort, his crushing condemnation of Zeelandia as it stood was completely confirmed by the successful attack on Paramaribo by the French privateer Captain Jacques Cassard. Several draughtsman attempted to revise the design in the subsequent decades.

Despite all the recommendations for a much larger fort, indeed even a citadel at Paramaribo, until around 1780 the design of Fort Zeelandia remained more or less unchanged. Only in 1781 was a new battery with eleven pieces of ordnance constructred on the southeastern flank of the outer fort. On account of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War which had broken out in the meantime, later in 1781 on the orders of Governor Texier, Lieutenant-Captain Johann Friedrich Wollant of the Engineering Corps produced a general plan of defence (see VEL2007A), plus a series of subsidiary plans for the short-term improvement and extension of all existing fortifications for the defence of the colony against foreign foes. Most or in some cases even all of the annotation on these plans is in cipher. Besides the extension and strengthening of the batteries of the outer forts, this design for Zeelandia in this series consists of a depiction on two maps of the existing (right) and of the planned (inset, left) situation, included the removal of the government stores and a number of other buildings located outside the walls to the north of the fort to new sites inside the outer fort. Simultaneously, the areas around the Plein would be redesigned. In the process the dilapidated outbuildings behind Government House would havo to make way for a garden, which was indeed what happened later. The new site of these and a few other buildings would be the former location of the Commandery, located alongside them, which had burned down in 1777.

North is lower right.

Scale-bar of 60 Rods of 12 Rhineland feet = [approximately 1 : 1,900 / [inset map] 40 Rods = [approximately 1 : 1,900].