Fragment of this rare finely engraved sea chart of the the Indian Ocean, published by Johannes Loots.
This fragment includes the Saudi Peninsula, Red Sea, Persian Gulf and Most of Africa. The chart is based upon the Goos / Van Keulen Sea Chart of the Indian Ocean, entitled OOST INDIEN Wassende-Graade Paskaart, vertoonende nevens het Oosterlykste van Afrika, meede de Zeekusten van Asia, van C. de Bona Esperance tot Eso, boven Japan. Goos first issued the chart circa 1660, before passing on the plate to Van Keulen, who used the plate well into the 18th Century. A link to the example in the National Library of Australia can be found here: catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2661562
As can be seen, this Loots edition of the map is significantly revised the Goos / Van Keulen map and clearly from a different set of plates. A link to the only example we could locate can be found here: http://www.maritiemdigitaal.nl/index.cfm?event=search.getdetail&id=100110029
The overall size of the chart was approximately 37 x 25 inches. The work is apparently from a very rare sea atlas, published by Johannes Loots (1665 - 1726), based in part upon information derived from Christoffel Middagten (1659 - 1723). We have identifed an example of a 14 sheet sea atlas in the Library of Congress with no title, which may include this map. It appears that Loots created a working sea atlas for Mariners by pasting the charts back to back, so that a single map became 3 pages in the book, which would account for the extreme rarity.
Johannes Loots was a publisher who flourished in the competitive sea chart trade of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Despite the presence in Amsterdam of such better known chart publishers as van Keulen, Doncker, and Lootsman, Loots published several sea atlases and separately issued charts. The inventory of his shop included 464 copperplates, a figure much larger than the actual number known.