The First Map of America on the Mercator Projection

Chart made for the Dutch West India Company and not originally intended for public sale

Insulae Americae in Oceano Septentrionali, cum terris adjacentibus.
Willem Janszoon Blaeu, Amsterdam, 1634. State 1a. $38,500.

This map was the subject of an article by Tony Campbell in issue 30 of The Map Collector (1985). The chart was created not for any commercial atlas, but in fact for the confidential use of the Dutch West India Company. Its survival in this form is the result of Blaeu's standard Caribbean map not having been ready in time for its intended christening in the 1634 German edition of the Blaeu atlas.

Several examples of this map have turned up since Campbell first described it, though when Burden compiled his Mapping of North America, there were still only seven known, of which only three were out of the atlas.

Described by Burden (233) as bring of “landmark importance”, this is the northwest portion of Blaeu’s legendary second West Indische Pascaert. This extract forms a map of the Atlantic coast of America from Newfoundland through the equator. This map is apparently the earliest chart of the region on the Mercator projection, predating the charts of Dudley by over a decade. It was long known only from plagerisms (e.g., copies by Colom, Doncker, etc) and later reissues (Robyn, Lootsman, Van Keulen) rather than from the original production. Both Stokes and Wieder, for example, state that no example of the full chart is extant, and Stokes was unaware that any part of the original chart (i.e., the present map) was extant.

Two copies are now known to survive of the complete chart (Burden state 1), one in Karlsruhe, and a more recently discovered example in Brussels.

The provenance of the present example lies in the threat Bleau was experiencing at this time from competing chart makers. In February of 1634 Blaeu announced that an enlarged atlas was forthcoming, to be first available in a German edition by Easter of that year. With his deadline too close to engrave what would become the standard Blaeu atlas map of the Caribbean, he took the Pascaert plate (still in its first state), masked it on three sides, and ran off strikes, putting the German text on the verso. Page numbers were added in MS, and the title was struck on a separate scrap of paper which was then pasted to the otherwise blank cartouche. A true platemark appears only on the left side of the map; the other three sides exhibit the "inverted" platemark effect resulting from the masking of the plate.

Consistent with the map's intent as an onboard chart, Blaeu here held a conservative view of guesswork; some inadequately known coasts have been left only sketchily delineated. These few areas are along the Gulf Coast, particularly just west of the Florida peninsula.

The chart delineates the East Coast in extremely accurate fashion, depicting in detail the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds, the Outer Banks, and Cape Cod. Manhattan is shown as an island. Being a nautical chart, the continent's interior is without geographic detail. Blaeu has instead used this space for place-names, and coats-of-arms to identify the country claiming the particular region.

The extracted map described here is first known to have been described by Wieder in 1927. Burden made a comprehensive survey of surviving examples, and traced a total of seven copies of the map, of which two were loose and five were in the atlas.

Destombes & Gernez described the map as “a scientific and artistic document of the first rank... ...one of the most important contributions to the history of nautical cartography made by the Dutch in the seventeenth century.” The lack of any engraved privilege demonstrates that it was created for the exclusive use of the Dutch West India Company, never having been intended for public sale.

In all probability the second West Indische Pascaert was created in 1630, though some references date it at c1621 and c1625.

[A note about the antecedent to this work, Blaeu's first West Indische Pascaert: Blaeu's first West India Pascaert had been produced about 1621, or slighly later. It is known only in one copy, discovered in 1909; it is on paper rather than vellum, and is now in the Phelps-Stokes Collection of the New York Public Library.]