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A rare and compact early 17th-century map of Southeast Asia, published in Frankfurt in 1625 as part of the extended Hulsius series, showing the island of Java and its surrounding archipelagic context at the dawn of European colonial entrenchment in the region.
The engraving captures Java rendered with distinctively serrated coastlines, oriented west to east and bracketed by Sumatra and Bali (Balla). Place names like Palinban (Palembang), Bantam, Tuban, and Balambuan point to active trading centers familiar to Iberian and Dutch merchants. Draco 1577 is a reference to Francis Drake's voyage of 1577, which reached Southeast Asia in 1579.
Published in the decades after Levinus Hulsius’s death, this plate exemplifies the continued German appetite for exotic geography, even as Frankfurt’s role as a cartographic innovator waned. It reflects a moment when maps were as much narrative and symbolic devices as they were empirical instruments—positioning Java not just as a place on the globe, but as a node in the imagination of global commerce, curiosity, and control.
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