Plan for a new fortification at Nieuw-Amsterdam

Title Leupe: Tweede project voor de Berbice.

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 shows a second adapted version of the layout plans, produced at the request of Governor Stephen Hendrik de la Sablonière (1768-1773), where the former governmental secretariat has been omitted and where, in the inner courtyard, the accommodation for the garrison (b) is situated alongside rather than opposite the main gate.

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-bar of Ten Rhineland Rods = [approximately 1 : 255].