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Description

Fine dark impression of this highly important map of the Yucatan Peninsula and Central America, from the Rio Escondido, from Cornelis Wytfliet's Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum, the first atlas to focus on the mapping of the New World.

Wyfliet's map is one of the earliest to focus on the Yucatan and Central America.

Several over-sized rivers and lakes are prominently shown. An apocryphal R. Grande flows from a large lake in present-day Guatemala. Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River are the dominant features in Central America. Another wide river nearly bisects the isthmus near Panama City.

As noted by Burden:

In 1597 Cornelis van Wytfliet published his Augmentum to Ptolemy's Geography. This is true in as much as it covers all the Americas, a part of the world unknown to the latter; however, no other connection between them exists. Dedicated to Philip III of Spain it is a history of the New World to date, recording its discovery, natural history etc. For the book Wytfliet had engraved nineteen maps, by whom we do not know, one of the world and eighteen regional maps of the Americas. Of these the following eight maps all relate to the north of the continent. As such this book can be truly called the first atlas of America. It was an immediate success and ran to several editions.

Reference
Burden 104.
Cornelis van Wytfliet Biography

Cornelius de Wytfliet (ca.1550-ca. 1597) was a Flemish cartographer most famous for his Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum. The work was published in Louvain, Belgium, and had nineteen maps of the Americas.