By Hanna de Lange
The Fagel Collection, preserved at the Library of Trinity College Dublin, is renowned for its great number of rare and beautiful books. Yet it also contains a significant cartographic component: an assemblage of 2,880 maps catalogued by librarian T.K. Abbott in 1900. He appended ‘a list of the Fagel Collection of maps’ to his Catalogue of Manuscripts in TCD Library. Despite what the catalogue title might suggest, the maps are predominantly printed, not hand-drawn. The maps originally arrived at Trinity in twenty-five portfolios, the numbering of which is still used today. One portfolio—number XXI—contains forty-nine maps relating to South America, including twelve focused specifically on the region of Suriname, located in the north-east of the continent. These visual documents offer a lens on the spatial, economic, and political structures underpinning eighteenth-century colonialism.
When Hendrik Fagel the Younger sold his family’s vast library in 1802, Suriname had been a Dutch colony for over a century. Since 1682, the colony had been governed by the Sociëteit van Suriname, a private company composed of three parties: the city of Amsterdam, the Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family and the West India Company. Managing the colony from afar, the Society relied heavily on detailed documentation to maintain administrative oversight, especially for taxation purposes.
Surveyor Alexandre de Lavaux helped meet this demand. De Lavaux, of Prussian origin, was a soldier in the Dutch army who lived in Suriname and partook in military expeditions. Although he was not officially appointed to do so, he presented the Society with a new, up-to-date map. In 1735, he travelled to Amsterdam, where he instructed the engraver Hendrik de Leth to produce the Algemeene Kaart van de Colonie of Provintie van Suriname (General Map of the Colony or Province of Suriname). The map appeared in several states and sizes between 1737 and 1767, with and without a highly decorative border, and survives today in both hand-coloured and uncoloured versions. The Fagel Collection contains several of these. Often printed on separate sheets of paper intended to be assembled and displayed on a wall, such as the 1767 version which is in the collection, De Lavaux’s map is a striking example of cartography as an instrument of governance.
One of the most immediately noticeable features of the map is its orientation: south is placed at the top, contrary to modern conventions. Yet this was not unusual in the early modern period, when no fixed standard for map orientation existed. The map offers a detailed depiction of plantations, rivers, and settlements. Notably, it also portrays villages in the interior forests. These include settlements of Indigenous peoples, some identified by names then known to the Dutch, such as Pirios and Arawaka, and others are generically labelled as ‘Indians’ or ‘Free Indians.’ Alongside these are marron villages: communities established by enslaved individuals who had fled bondage (called wegloopers, literally: runaways) and taken refuge in the jungle. From these hidden bases, they launched raids on plantations to secure provisions and help others to escape.
Strikingly, the map depicts various marron settlements with smoke rising above them—an evocative visual cue indicating villages set ablaze. These images record the colonial military campaigns aimed at suppressing resistance and reasserting control, campaigns in which De Lavaux himself had participated. Despite the impression of total control that the map sought to project, these military expeditions were often unsuccessful. Contemporary sources stated that ‘some villages were burned’, but the colonial forces were not successful in demolishing them all. The directors of the Society of Suriname perceived this as a failure. To make matters worse, the directors received numerous complaints from plantation owners about the exorbitant costs of the campaigns. Faced with these challenges, the Sociëteit van Suriname eventually turned to negotiation in its attempt to reestablish control in the colony. Talks with representatives of the marron community took place ‘behind the fourth hill above Auka’ and culminated in a peace treaty in October 1759. The treaty was sealed not only by oath, but through a ritual involving blood: each participant made a small incision in their arm, allowing some drops of blood to be collected in a gourd, that was then mixed with earth and water and drunk by all parties involved. The details of this event are described in a Dutch translation of Thomas Salmon’s Modern History or the Present State of America.
Another curious detail on De Lavaux’s map merits special mention: next to the depicted villages of the indigenous people is a village with the name Akokwa. This name refers to a town in present-day Nigeria. Given that West Africa was part of the British colonial network which also encompassed the Caribbean, the presence of this place name on a map of Suriname resonates as a historical echo. Suriname, briefly under British rule before becoming a Dutch colony, bears in this name an enduring imprint of African enslaved populations.
Originally intended as administrative tools and instruments of surveillance, De Lavaux’s maps of Suriname are now much more than that. They mark not only the historic destruction of marron settlements but also the enduring legacies of resistance that colonial powers sought to extinguish. Their survival in the Fagel Collection serves as a reminder that materials in heritage libraries can shed new light on established histories when revisited or reinterpreted.
Hanna de Lange was awarded her PhD in the history of the book from the University of St Andrews in 2023. In her thesis, she investigated the circulation of books printed in England and Ireland on the Northern European book market. She was a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Unlocking the Fagel Collection’ project at Trinity College, Dublin (2024–2025). From July 2026, Hanna will take up a research position with the WidowsPrint project at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany.
