Frederick de Houtman
Frederick de Houtman (other common spelling: Frederik) (* 1571 ; † 1627 ) was a Dutch navigator, researcher and administrator. He created the oldest surviving star catalog of the southern sky (1603) and sailed along the Australian west coast (1619).
Frederick de Houtman was born in Gouda ; In 1590 he lived in Alkmaar , where he married. In 1594 Frederik and his brother Cornelis de Houtman were captured in Lisbon. Nevertheless, they brought back 25 nautical charts drawn by Bartolomeo de Lasso.
From April 1595 to August 1597 he took part in the first Dutch East India expedition under the command of his older brother Cornelis. They had the Itinerary of January Huygen van Linschoten and ended in September on the southwest coast of Madagascar, where 70 men due to illness and vitamin C deficiency must be buried. In February they drove on. In June the four ships were in Bantam . Up to this point, Houtman supported the navigator Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser in creating a star catalog.
At the time, it was believed that compass needles showed deviations the further south you went. Plancius instructed Frederick de Houtman in astronomical positioning to check the phenomenon. He asked the navigator Pieter Keyser to undertake sky observations and to map the southern starry sky and equipped him with a device (probably an astrolabe ).
In November they drove on to Java's coast. When one of the captains was poisoned, the crew refused to continue. They landed in Bali and drove back in February. When three ships instead of four arrived on Texel in August , only a third was still alive. There are several descriptions of this trip.
The first Dutch East India expedition, from April 1595 to August 1597, was a disaster and a commercial failure. Of the 249 participants, only 87 returned alive; the majority had died as a result of illness and violence. In addition, only a few barrels of pepper could be purchased. However, the venture can be seen as the beginning of Dutch colonial rule in East Asia. In addition, Portugal's monopoly on the spice trade was broken.
Keyser and Houtman had successfully measured the southern sky and made maps (Keyser had died on the journey), introducing twelve new constellations. Plancius first placed them on a celestial globe in 1597/1598, published in 1600 by Jodocus Hondius , and in 1602 and 1603 on globes by Willem Blaeu . Johann Bayer took it over in his 1603 sky atlas Uranometria .
In a second expedition under Laurens Bicker , which started in 1598, Cornelis de Houtman was killed and Frederick was a prisoner of the Sultan of Aceh in the north of the island of Sumatra for 26 months . He used this time to study the Malaysian language and to observe the sky. He expanded Keyser's catalog to 304 stars. However, 107 of which are already in the Almagest of Ptolemy mentioned. De Houtman refused to become a Muslim . When he showed that he could build a mill, he was released.
In 1603 Houtman returned to the Netherlands. Curiously, he published his astronomical observations as an appendix to a dictionary for the Malaysian and Malagasy languages. Based on Noël de Barlaimont, he wrote 12 dialogues and added 1,000 words from the Turkish and Arabic languages. The cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu used Houtman's catalog to create his celestial globes. Only a few copies of the catalog exist today, one is in the library of Oxford University . Keyser's catalog, however, has been lost.
Between 1605 and 1611 Frederick de Houtman was Governor of the Netherlands on the island of Ambon . De Houtman translated the Our Father , the Ten Commandments and the Heidelberg Catechism into Malay. During another expedition, De Houtman discovered a hitherto unknown land mass in 1619. It was the Australian coast near present-day Perth . As he followed the coast northward, he came across a group of small coral reefs and shallows , what is now the Houtman Abrolhos Archipelago . In 1621 he became governor of the Moluccas .
Individual evidence
- ^ Els M. Jacobs (1997) De Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie , p. 16, 24. Teleac NOT.
- ↑ http://belgica.kbr.be/fr/coll/cp/cpII2706_fr.html
- ↑ During this trip Keyser introduced twelve new constellations of the southern sky, which today belong to the 88 recognized constellations.
- ^ Gary D. Thompson: Modern Western Constellations. 28: The constellating of the southern sky. Web Document 2007
- ↑ http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/algr001disp04_01/algr001disp04_01_0004.php
Web links
Creation of the star catalog prepared by Houtman
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Houtman, Frederick de |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch researcher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1571 |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1627 |