1650 / 1659 Jan Jansson Map of the Pacific Ocean w/ Insular California

This is a superb example of Jan Jansson's 1650 map of the Pacific Ocean. It appeared in the 5th volume of Jansson's Atlas Novus, which focused on the world's oceans and can be construed as the first sea atlas intended for a general audience. It is the first chart of the Pacific to appear in a Dutch atlas and the first printed chart of the Pacific to depict California as an island. Striking, speculative cartography appears throughout, including an insular California and an insular Korea. It also includes a mysterious but expansive South Sea archipelago associated with the elusive Spanish explorer Hernán Gallego.

Island of California

Jansson's map is the first Dutch-printed nautical chart to feature an insular California. The form it takes here follows his own 1636 America Septentrionalis, modeled on the 1625 Briggs map The North Part of America. The chart includes a text (identical to that on the North America map) recounting how Dutch privateers captured a Spanish ship carrying a map of the island of California. This legend, including even the dimensions of the legendary island, contributed significantly to cementing the enduring Insular California myth.

The mapping of Mexico and Central America closely adheres to the 1630 Gerritz / De Laet Nova Hispania.

The Southwest and the Rio del Norte

East of California (on the mainland) are the Hopi Pueblos (Pueblos de Moqui). A river positioned appropriately for the Colorado appears here as Rio del Norte. While it does not continue deep into the continent, it is an erroneous Rio Grande, correctly rooted in New Mexico but flowing not to the Gulf of Mexico but westwards to the Sea of California.

Japan and the Insular Korea

Japan and Korea are at the map's extreme northwest. In most respects, their portrayal follows with Jansson's 1644 Nova et Accurata Japoniae, Terrae Esonis. Puzzlingly, the present work eliminates the cartography of Maerten de Vries and Cornelis Jansz Coen, which were prominent on the earlier work. Instead - and far removed to the east - the present work fills the North Pacific with a massive 'Terra incognita' separate from both Asia and America.

The convention of mapping Korea as an island can be traced to Ortelius' 1595 Japoniae Insulae Descriptio, drawn by the Portuguese Jesuit Luis Teixeria and published by Ortelius. The model, which presented Korea as a long, narrow, triangular island, remained relatively consistent until about 1634, when the shape seen here began to appear on the maps of Jansson's competitor, Blaeu. It is understandable why Jansson and Blaeu's maps and charts - largely derived from the work of Hessel Gerritsz - should retain an insular Korea as Gerritsz printed matter explicitly named Korea an island. It is, nonetheless, curious why Gerritsz should have done so, as his 1622 Mar Del Sur correctly presented Korea as a peninsula. We are left only to speculate whether the official VOC chartmaker simply changed his mind or whether the peninsularity of Korea was of such cartographic import that its revelation on a printed map ran against VOC interests. The Korea-as-an-island error was corrected in Blaeu's maps of 1655.

East Indies and Australia

The chart includes the eastern extreme of the Indies, most notably New Guinea and part of northern Australia. It also shows the lands charted in 1605-06 on the western coast of Queensland by Willem Janszoon (no relation to the mapmaker). This is consistent with the detail found on Hessel Gerritsz's c. 1630 map of the East Indies and reflected the state of the art of Dutch knowledge prior to Tasman's voyage.

Gallego's South Pacific Islands

The array of Pacific Islands appearing between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn were familiar to the Dutch due to the explorations of Le Maire, Schouten, and Spilbergen; they appear on Gerritsz' manuscripts as early as 1622. The multitudinous islands dominating the Pacific south of the Tropic of Capricorn are more unusual, appearing first on the unacquirably rare 1602 Jodocus Hondius America Novissima. The islands are not named, but an accompanying notation describes them as having been reported by Hernán Gallego, an elusive Spanish navigator 'apparently' dispatched on a royally sanctioned exploratory mission in 1576. Gallego is a puzzle: he is recorded in 1553 as the first navigator to make the west-east passage through the Strait of Magellan. He was later the chief pilot for the explorer Alvaro de Mendaña's 1567-69 Pacific voyage - the first to encounter the Solomon Islands. The 1576 journey alluded to on the present map was not elsewhere recorded. Hondius is believed to have received this knowledge during his exile in England, perhaps from a now-lost captured Spanish manuscript. Gallego is indeed believed my some scholars to have produced such a manuscript, but if so, it is unknown. Nor is it known what islands he might actually have encountered or if they were ever more precisely delineated than here. It is perhaps telling that the line roughly described by this expansive archipelago hews closely to the imagined coastline of Terra Australis Incognita as it appeared on maps of the world, the Americas, and the Pacific in the 16th century.

Publication History and Census

This map was first published by Jan Jansson in 1650, appearing in the nautically-themed fifth volume of his atlas. This first-state example conforms typographically to the 1659 Latin edition. After 1680, the plate fell into the hands of other publishers, who updated it to include the discoveries of Abel Tasman. We see 13 separate examples in institutional collections.