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Description

Fine old color example of De Wit's map of Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay, Button Bay, Davis Straits and continguous parts of the coastline of Canada and Groenland.

Kershaw notes that De Wit's map is one of a series of maps beginning with Van Loon in 1668, which dominated arctic navigation for the remainder of the 17th Century.

The map is based upon polar maps issued by Jansson and Blaeu, augmented by information derived from Sanson's map of 1656 and others. This is the first state of the map, as noted by Kershaw (Entry 209).

Condition Description
Old Color.
Frederick De Wit Biography

De Wit (1629 ca.-1706) was a mapmaker and mapseller who was born in Gouda but who worked and died in Amsterdam. He moved to the city in 1648, where he opened a printing operation under the name of The Three Crabs; later, he changed the name of his shop to The White Chart. From the 1660s onward, he published atlases with a variety of maps; he is best known for these atlases and his Dutch town maps. After Frederik’s death in 1706, his wife Maria ran the shop for four years before selling it. Their son, Franciscus, was a stockfish merchant and had no interest in the map shop. At the auction to liquidate the de Wit stock, most of the plates went to Pieter Mortier, whose firm eventually became Covens & Mortier, one of the biggest cartography houses of the eighteenth century.