Plan for a new fortification at Nieuw-Amsterdam

Title Leupe: Stand van het oude fort en daarby staande gebouwen, alsmede de pleck alwaar de nieuwe diend geplaatst te worden..

In line with the final decision made by the directors to stick to the old location, in 1771 the military enginer Jean-Guillaume d’Arnaud, who was sent out in 1770 to oversee the scheduled reconstruction of Fort Nassau and Nieuw-Amsterdam, drew up several versions of a design for a new fortification on the site of the small fort that had been destroyed in 1763.

Two of the four project drawings that have been preserved are signed (see VEL 1632A-B) but the others, including this one, can definitely be attributed to d’Arnaud as well.

This map gives the position of the projected fort (G) in relation to the old one (D), the smithy and carpenters’ workshops (A-C) and what was called the ‘freeman’s warehouse’ (E); what d’Arnaud meant by the ‘overseer-general’s dwelling’ (F) was his own accommodation.

The design with the square ground plan and the two corner bastions placed diagonally opposite each other harked back to a model which, in European and colonial fortification architecture, had been common for at least a century and a half when it came to small secondary forts and field sconces but which was less suitable for a fortification on the scale anticipated by d’Arnaud; with its more than 80 metre long sides the new Fort Nassau would have a surface area four times as big as the previous structure.

The plan never gained the approval of the Society’s directors.

North is lower left.

Scale-bars of 10 rods = [approximately 1 : 1,030].