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This small-format map of Greenland and Iceland appeared in Petrus Bertius’s Tabularum Geographicarum Contractarum, a pocket atlas published in Amsterdam. It offers an imaginative and speculative rendering of the North Atlantic based on late sixteenth-century geographic models, notably those of Gerard Mercator.
Greenland is shown as a large, mountainous island stretching from the northeast to the southwest, its interior filled with jagged ranges and dotted with invented or corrupted place names. The mythical island of "Groclant" appears off the northwestern coast. To the southeast, Iceland is prominently featured and densely labeled, including settlements, as well as its famous volcano.
The map is elegantly composed, bordered by a latitude and longitude grid, rhumb lines, and a bold frame. The red ecliptic line curves across the lower portion of the map, a visual device borrowed from Ortelius and Mercator. The surrounding seas are labeled Mare Glaciale and Oceanus Septentrionalis, emphasizing the map’s Arctic context.
Petrus Bertius was a Flemish historian, theologian, geographer, and cartographer. Known in Dutch as Peter de Bert, Bertius was born in Beveren. His father was a Protestant preacher and his family fled to London around 1568. The young Bertius only returned to the Low Countries in 1577, to attend the University of Leiden. A bright pupil, Bertius worked as a tutor and was named subregent of the Leiden Statencollege in 1593. He ascended to the position of regent in 1606, upon the death of the former regent, who was also Bertius’ father-in-law. However, due to his radical religious views, he eventually lost his teaching position and was forbidden from offering private lessons.
His brothers-in-law were Jodocus Hondius and Pieter van den Keere, who were both prominent cartographers. Bertius began his own cartographic publishing in 1600 when he released a Latin edition of Barent Langenes’ miniature atlas Caert Thresoor (1598). He published another miniature atlas that first appeared in 1616.
By 1618, Bertius was named cosmographer to Louis XIII. He converted to Catholicism and took up a position as professor of rhetoric at the Collège de Boncourt (University of Paris). In 1622, Louis XIII created a chart of mathematics specifically for Bertius and named him his royal historian. He died in Paris in 1629.
![Northern Hemisphere [and] Southern Hemisphere](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/108994.jpg)
