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The St. Laurence River Extending To the Rocky Mountains!
Rare world map by Pierre Mariette, with several remarkable cartographic features.
The map shows a massive landmass extending from California almost to Japan. Korea is shown as an oddly shaped Island, with the Great Wall plainly shown. Japan is also in a very curious shape, as are the Philippines.
The map includes details from Marco Polo, most notably the place name Beach in Terra Australis Incognita.
The shape of Florida is also quite unusual.
Perhaps most interesting is the extraordinary course of the St. Laurence River, which ends in the American Southwest, just to the North of a second named river/lake system, which originates in modern day Arizona and skirts under the mountain range depicted and into Calfiornia, without any definite outlet to the sea, except perhaps to the Colorado River and the Sea of Cortez.
Several similar maps were produced in Paris by Berey and Boisseau, but each of the three is very rare.
Includes engraved images of compasses, celestial spheres, sailing ships, sea monsters, and Neptune embellish this rare early world map.
Jodocus Hondius the Elder (1563-1612), or Joost de Hondt, was one of the most prominent geographers and engravers of his time. His work did much to establish Amsterdam as the center of cartographic publishing in the seventeenth century. Born in Wakken but raised in Ghent, the young Jodocus worked as an engraver, instrument maker, and globe maker.
Hondius moved to London in 1584, fleeing religious persecution in Flanders. There, he worked for Richard Hakluyt and Edward Wright, among others. Hondius also engraved the globe gores for Emery Molyneux’s pair of globes in 1592; Wright plotted the coastlines. His engraving and nautical painting skills introduced him to an elite group of geographic knowledge seekers and producers, including the navigators Drake, Thomas Cavendish, and Walter Raleigh, as well as engravers like Theodor De Bry and Augustine Ryther. This network gave Hondius access to manuscript charts and descriptions which he then translated into engraved maps.
In 1593 Hondius returned to Amsterdam, where he lived for the rest of his life. Hondius worked in partnership with Cornelis Claesz, a publisher, and maintained his ties to contacts in Europe and England. For example, from 1605 to 1610, Hondius engraved the plates for John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine.
One of Hondius’ most successful commercial ventures was the reprinting of Mercator’s atlas. When he acquired the Mercator plates, he added 36 maps, many engraved by him, and released the atlas under Mercator’s name, helping to solidify Mercator’s reputation posthumously. Hondius died in 1612, at only 48 years of age, after which time his son of the same name and another son, Henricus, took over the business, including the reissuing of the Mercator atlas. After 1633, Hondius the Elder’s son-in-law, Johannes Janssonius, was also listed as a co-publisher for the atlas.
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