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Description

The First Separately Printed Map of Florida!

Fine example of Ortelius' seminal map of Florida and the South, plus maps of Central and South America, from the 1609 Spanish edition of Oretlius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

A rare map of North America to be based upon Spanish sources, specifically Geronimo de Chaves, the Royal Cosmographer to Philip II of Spain. One of the earliest maps to show internal detail, based upon the findings of Hernando de Soto, as recorded by Gonzalo de Oviedo. This is the earliest regional mapping of the South and Southeast. The map provided the foundation cartography for the region, especially the river systems.

The map first appeared in the 1584 Latin edition of Ortelius' Theatrum. The Peru map depicts the regions conquered by the Spaniards in 1531-33 in today's Central America and most of northern South America. Guasteca shows a portion of east-central Mexico along the Gulf of the Mexico coastline. The material was drawn from the Casa de Contrataction, one of the earliest examples of the dissemination of Spanish cartographic information from the New World.

To view a 1.5 minute video description of this map by map collector Thomas Touchton, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D3fapkxRHo

Reference
Burden 57; Cumming 5, Van Den Broecke 15.
Abraham Ortelius Biography

Abraham Ortelius is perhaps the best known and most frequently collected of all sixteenth-century mapmakers. Ortelius started his career as a map colorist. In 1547 he entered the Antwerp guild of St Luke as afsetter van Karten. His early career was as a business man, and most of his journeys before 1560, were for commercial purposes. In 1560, while traveling with Gerard Mercator to Trier, Lorraine, and Poitiers, he seems to have been attracted, largely by Mercator’s influence, towards a career as a scientific geographer. From that point forward, he devoted himself to the compilation of his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), which would become the first modern atlas.

In 1564 he completed his “mappemonde", an eight-sheet map of the world. The only extant copy of this great map is in the library of the University of Basel. Ortelius also published a map of Egypt in 1565, a plan of Brittenburg Castle on the coast of the Netherlands, and a map of Asia, prior to 1570.

On May 20, 1570, Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum first appeared in an edition of 70 maps. By the time of his death in 1598, a total of 25 editions were published including editions in Latin, Italian, German, French, and Dutch. Later editions would also be issued in Spanish and English by Ortelius’ successors, Vrients and Plantin, the former adding a number of maps to the atlas, the final edition of which was issued in 1612. Most of the maps in Ortelius' Theatrum were drawn from the works of a number of other mapmakers from around the world; a list of 87 authors is given by Ortelius himself

In 1573, Ortelius published seventeen supplementary maps under the title of Additamentum Theatri Orbis Terrarum. In 1575 he was appointed geographer to the king of Spain, Philip II, on the recommendation of Arias Montanus, who vouched for his orthodoxy (his family, as early as 1535, had fallen under suspicion of Protestantism). In 1578 he laid the basis of a critical treatment of ancient geography with his Synonymia geographica (issued by the Plantin press at Antwerp and republished as Thesaurus geographicus in 1596). In 1584 he issued his Nomenclator Ptolemaicus, a Parergon (a series of maps illustrating ancient history, sacred and secular). Late in life, he also aided Welser in his edition of the Peutinger Table (1598).