Countless studies by historians, art historians and anthropologists have dealt with the early modern image of the South African Khoikhoi. Lacking everything that Europeans valued, they fell prey to the most contemptuous imagery available. The term ‘Hottentots’, by which they were known, was considered more or less synonymous with monstrous appearance, beastly habits and cultural ignorance. As such they were portrayed in official reports and travel journals, in prints and drawings. Few European artists and travel writers published their observations with any recourse to reality, however. They usually created their images in Europe in accordance with prevailing artistic and literary conventions, time and again reverting to stereotypes that were embedded in prejudice and based on incomplete and distorted knowledge. Thus far scholars have not discovered a single drawing by an eyewitness from the first two centuries of Khoikhoi-European encounters. As a consequence our insight into the mechanisms of stereotyping is far from complete. We neither know how the images were perceived by European viewers nor do we know if and how the stereotypes blurred the perception and judgement of eyewitnesses themselves.

The conquest of Olinda in 1630 by forces of the Dutch West Indian Company (WIC) was the beginning of a period that has become known as Dutch Brazil. The enterprise flourished after the board of directors of the WIC, the gentlemen XIX, appointed Count Johann Moritz von Nassau in 1636 as Governor General. Recife, the present capital of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, became the administrative centre of an area reaching from the state of Alagoas to the state of Maranhāo. The uprising of a large part of the Portuguese population in 1645, a year after the departure of Nassau, turned Recife into a beleaguered fortress that surrendered itself and all other WIC possessions in Brazil on 26 January 1654.

On 3 May 1638, Anthonie van Diemen, Governor-General of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company, met Hamzah, Sultan of Ternate, in the roadstead of Kambelo. Kambelo was one of the principal settlements on the west coast of Hoamoal, the western peninsula of the island of Seram. As such it was part of the Ternatan dependencies in the Amboina Islands, present-day Maluku Tengah. Van Diemen had arrived in Amboina at the end of February with a capital fleet of seventeen ships, carrying about 1,700 men on board. After he had been apprised that Hamzah had not yet arrived, in March Van Diemen continued his journey to the Banda Islands to inspect and arrange the VOC affairs in that area. In April he returned to Amboina, where, after a short stop at Hila, he sailed to Kambelo because word had reached him that some fifteen ‘junks’ from Java and Sulawesi had arrived there. As these ships were considered to be interlopers, suspected of carrying away cloves, thus violating the VOC monopoly, Van Diemen planned to attack them. However, as soon as Hamzah arrived, accompanied by a fleet, a hongi, of ten kora-kora, indigenous galley-like war vessels, the proposed action was postponed. For the time being diplomacy won the upper hand over violence. There was hope that the meeting of ‘these two great personalities’ could resolve long-standing conflicts in the area.