First separate map of a Southeast Asian Island to be based on empirical data

Gastaldi / Ramusio, 1556 (1565)
Excellent condition and impression. 10ฝ x 14ฝ inches. $1100.

State 2 of this earliest printed map specifically devoted to any island of Southeast Asia based on actual first-hand observation. From Volume 3 of Ramusio's I Navigatione.

[Following extract from Suarez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia]

Although it was the Portuguese and Spanish who brought Europe most of the revelations about Southeast Asia during this period, mariners under French auspices also tried their luck at overseas exploration during the 1520s. Giovanni da Verrazano tried and failed to find a passage through North America to Cathay in 1524. Vessels from Dieppe reached the island of Diu in the northern Indian Ocean by 1527. Two years later, a pair of ships commanded by two brothers, Jean and Raoul Parmentier, reached the Maldive Islands by running Portuguese blockade, then continued east to the west Sumatran port of Ticon. France, for a brief moment, was a new contestant in Southeast Asia.

But their luck ran out in Sumatra. Both Parmentier brothers died from fever, and trade in Sumatra was difficult. One ship returned to Dieppe, with far too little in bounty to encourage any further sacrifice in lives or resources for French voyages to Southeast Asia.

Two years after Ramusio’s map of Southeast Asia, in 1556, the third volume of the Navigationi was published. While primarily concerned with the Americas, the work also related news of the Parmentier voyage and included a woodcut map of Sumatra (fig. 35), the first published, separate map of any Southeast Asian island to be based on actual observation (in contrast to the Bordone maps of three decades earlier, which were conjectural mappings based primarily on Marco Polo). The general contour of the island is remarkably good for the day, and the various islands lying off its western coast are shown in detail, as is Banca on the eastern coast. The port where the Parmenier brothers anchored, Ticon, is recorded, and the manner in which the island’s coast forms a promontory just to the northwest of Ticon is accurately mapped. Ramusio has also corrected the erroneous placement of Aceh from his general map of Southeast Asia of two years earlier.

The truly peculiar aspect of the map is its complete omission of Malaya, and its omission of the west coast of Java. Even the exaggerated width of the Malacca Strait shown by Ramusio on his general map of two years earlier does not account for the absence of Malaya. Were it not that the equator is clearly marked on the map, it would appear that Ramusio was influenced by the notion, at this time gaining favor, that Java Minor (which he might have ‘correctly’ transposed to Sumatra) was not an island due south of Malaya as previously believed, but rather an island lying in the western Pacific much further south.