Willem Bosman (12 January 1672 – after 1703) was a merchant in the service of the

Dutch West India Company The Dutch West India Company () was a Dutch chartered company that was founded in 1621 and went defunct in 1792. Among its founders were Reynier Pauw, Willem Usselincx (1567–1647), and Jessé de Forest (1576–1624). On 3 June 1621, it was gra ...

, spending most of his time in the

Dutch Gold Coast The Dutch Gold Coast or Dutch Guinea, officially Dutch possessions on the Coast of Guinea (Dutch language, Dutch: ''Nederlandse Bezittingen ter Kuste van Guinea'') was a portion of contemporary Ghana that was gradually colonized by the Dutch (et ...

. Bosman was born in

Utrecht Utrecht ( ; ; ) is the List of cities in the Netherlands by province, fourth-largest city of the Netherlands, as well as the capital and the most populous city of the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of Utrecht (province), Utrecht. The ...

. Although he sailed to the Gold Coast as an

apprentice Apprenticeship is a system for training a potential new practitioners of a Tradesman, trade or profession with on-the-job training and often some accompanying study. Apprenticeships may also enable practitioners to gain a license to practice in ...

when he was only 16 years of age, he managed to climb the ranks and eventually became head merchant ( Dutch: ''opperkoopman''). In 1702 he sailed back to the

Dutch Republic The United Provinces of the Netherlands, commonly referred to in historiography as the Dutch Republic, was a confederation that existed from 1579 until the Batavian Revolution in 1795. It was a predecessor state of the present-day Netherlands ...

, and little is known of his later life. Bosman is best known for his description of the Gold Coast titled ''Nauwkeurige beschrijving van de Guinese Goud- Tand- en Slavekust'' (An accurate description of the Guinean Gold, Ivory and Slave Coast) published in 1704. This document remained the most authoritative description of the area for more than a century and provided significant detail of the Komenda Wars in which Bosman took part. He described in detail the functioning of the slave trade and commented of Fida that "markets of men are here kept in the same manner as those of beasts are with us." The book was a major source for Ghanaian historians in the twentieth century and a facsimile of the 1705 English translation was republished in 1907. at the instigation of the colonialist, Alfred Lewis Jones. The

Ghana Ghana, officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It is situated along the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and shares borders with Côte d’Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, and Togo to t ...

ian surname Bossman is thought to originate from the children Bosman had with his black mistresses.

References

External links

*
Nauwkeurige beschryving van de Guinese Goud- Tand- en Slave-kust, enz.
', op archive.org. *
A new and accurate description of the coast of Guinea, divided into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory coasts
' at

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bosman, Willem 1672 births Year of death missing Sailors on ships of the Dutch West India Company Dutch Gold Coast people Businesspeople from Utrecht (city) 18th-century Dutch businesspeople 18th-century merchants Dutch merchants