1563 Gastaldi / Ramusio Map of South Asia: India, Arabia, Persian Gulf

This is a scarce copperplate edition, commonly dated 1563, of the first accurate map of South Asia, including India, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. It was drawn for Giovanni Battista Ramusio by his friend, the great cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi. The map was first published in Volume I of Ramusio's delle Navigationi et Viaggi in 1554, but this copperplate edition was engraved by Niccolo Nelli to replace the original woodblock after it was lost in a fire.

A Closer Look

This southern-oriented map spans Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and India; the west coast of Sumatra appears at the eastern extreme of the map. Ultimately derived from Portuguese sources, the map is centered roughly on Goa, the administrative center of the Portuguese empire in the east. It is among the earliest printed maps to mark Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as Hormuz, Diu, Goa, and Cochin. The islands of the Indian Ocean are better presented than before: the Maldives are illustrated reasonably accurately. Sri Lanka is accurately placed, with Adam's Peak identified; the city of Columbo is also shown (its old name of Kolomtota is here transliterated 'Colmucho'). In addition to Sumatra, the Nicobar Islands appear in the eastern part of the Indian Ocean. The plate is richly decorated, with an abundance of elephants and lions, six sea monsters, and three Portuguese-style ships. (Two of these are marked as 'bound for Calicut' and one 'bound for the Moluccas.') In the map's border, the cardinal directions are labeled according to the Italian convention of naming the winds.

Publication History and Census

This is the second of three maps of Africa and Asia prepared by Gastaldi for Ramusio's work. The three maps first appeared in Ramusio's 1554 Voyages as woodcuts engraved by Matteo Pagano. Robert Karrow, Richard Betz, Thomas Suarez, and with them, the overwhelming consensus of catalogers in both academia and the trade agree that these woodblocks were destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1557 and replaced in new copperplate versions first appearing in the 1563 second edition of Ramusio's work. The presence of the 1554 woodcut maps in no fewer than three examples of the 1563 edition made available digitally by their institutions complicates this timeline. Also, we have found no examples of the copperplate maps in any 1563 edition of the book made thus available.

It is possible that examples of the woodcut maps survived the fire. It is also possible that the 1557 date for the fire is incorrect. It is also possible that the volume containing these maps was bound and published prior to the fire. None of this aids in the positive dating of the copperplate maps, and we cannot discount the possibility that the 1563 date is spurious and that the copperplates may first appear in the 1588 editions or even 1606 or 1613. Pending further study, we must adhere to the conventional dating of 1563 for the present work. Six examples of the map are listed in OCLC, four with the date 1613 assigned.