Project plan for the extension of fort Amsterdam

Title Leupe: Plan van het fort Amsterdam en de Willemstad op het Eiland Curaçao, met een nader concept om dezelvde uit te leggen.

In 1745 a new plan for the fortification and expansion of Willemstad was drawn up by Director Faesch and a prominent resident, Willem Meijer, a major in the civil militia. This plan required that the wall be taken much farther to the east. The larger concept was one of Meijer’s ideas, who suggested that he would also undertake the building work, on the condition that the land in the new extension be granted to him as his private property and he would be allowed to build on it and sell it. The first general project map was sent to the Republic in June 1746 by ‘the Engineers’. This map belongs to a batch of maps send two years after to provide more details. Here the different sections within the fortress are elaborated as can be derived from the index. This map was drawn by Carel Gustaaf Schrijver in 1748, which as well as bearing his own signature was countersigned in approval by Director Isaac Faesch and the militia major Willem Meijer, is almost identical to the first version of this plan for the expansion and fortification of Willemstad from 1746 (VEL1445). The only real difference is the absence of the contours on Hertell’s earlier 1742 plan, and a slightly more massive projected construction of the eastern town wall.

North is up.

Scale-bar of 50 Rhineland Rods = [approximately 1 : 980].