Plan of Fort Zeelandia

Title Leupe: Plan van de teegenswoordigen staat der fortress Zeelandia met de daerby ontworpene noodige verandering enz.

From the 1710s onwards, numerous suggestions were made to revise the design of fort Zeelandia. Despite the many 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 constructed on the southeastern flank of the outer fort. Later that same year, because of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War which had broken out in the meantime, Lieutenant-Captain Johann Friedrich Wollant of the Engineering Corps produced a general plan of defence (see VEL2007A), plus a series of subsidiary plans for makeshift improvements of the existing fortifications. Most or in some cases even all of the annotations on these plans is in cipher.

In July 1782, Wollant produced this new design for Fort Zeelandia, this time not in cipher, but once again with the present and projected situation on one single page. In principle, the elements are the same as in the preceding plan, but instead of moving the government stores he wanted to bring them inside the walls by extending the outer fort northwards. A small ravelin should also be built on this side to protect the proposed new road to the redoubt Purmerend. The old inner fort, of which two bastions on the land side had already been demolished in 1781-1782, would be included in a whole new ‘envelope’ and should therefore be relieved of its three remaining bastions. Neither of Wollant’s plans was carried out and, although a few changes were made to the buildings inside the fort after 1782, at the time of the unopposed surrender to the British in 1799, from the point of view of defence, Zeelandia was still as it was shown on Van der Meij’s map on VEL2076.

North is lower right.

Scale-bar of 70 Rods of 12 Rhineland feet = [approximately 1 : 2,050] / [inset map] 60 Rods of 12 Rhineland feet = [approximately 1 : 2,050] / [profile] 5 Rods of 12 Rhineland feet = [approximately 1 : 310].