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Rare First State of Plancius' 1590 World Map

Fine example of the rare first state of Petrus Plancius' double-hemisphere map of the world, engraved by Baptista Van Deutecum in Amsterdam in 1590.

The eastern hemisphere includes an odd depiction of Japan, showing it as a round cluster of islands. In China, the guard towers of the Great Wall are visible.

The Atlantic is filled with storied islands, including Frisland (see below) St. Brendan, and Brasil. Hy Brasil is an enduring Atlantic chimera emerging from Celtic folklore. It ranges on maps from just off the west coast of Ireland to the area around the Azores. The island was initially described as a rich paradise not unlike Atlantis; it emerged from the depths for a short period and then would disappear. It started to appear on portolan charts in the fourteenth century and continued to be a stalwart of maps and charts into the nineteenth century. The island was the subject of a fanciful pamphlet by Richard Head in 1675. Despite no accurate reports of its whereabouts, the island appeared on Admiralty charts and other reputable maps for centuries, usually in the latitude of 51°N and at a longitude of 17°W.

Another island of note, at the edge of the western hemisphere on this map, is St. Brendan (here S. Brandain). Like Hy Brasil, this island is also connected to Irish lore. St. Brendan, hearing of a promised land from St. Barrind, decided to take a group of monks to find the paradise in the sixth century. After 43 days the monks landed on a deserted island. This is only the first of a series of islands which they encountered, before facing a frozen sea. They supposedly had more adventures and eventually return home. The island itself varied in its placement, ranging from near the Canary Islands to close to Newfoundland.

Farther south in the western hemisphere, South America has been improved in shape as compared to the central source for this map, the 1587 world map of Rumold Mercator. The continent no longer has a bulge in the southwest. It tapers delicately to a point, where it is separated from a southern continent by the Strait of Magellan.

In the Pacific, north of the Equator, islands encountered by the Spanish in their creation of the Manila-Acapulco galleon route are scattered about. South of the equator, a large, round New Guinea dominates the space, accompanied to the east by the Solomon Islands. The latter had been visited by Alvaro de Mendaña’s expedition in his 1567-9 voyage.

Separating Asia and North America is the Estreco de Anian and inland, in the northwest, is Anian regnum. The Strait of Anian derives from Ania, a Chinese province on a large gulf mentioned in Marco Polo’s travels (ch. 5, book 3). The gulf Polo described was actually the Gulf of Tonkin, but the province’s description was transposed from Vietnam to the northwest coast of North America. The first map to do so was Giacomo Gastaldi’s world map of 1562, followed by Zaltieri and Mercator in 1567. The Strait then became shorthand for a passage to China, i.e. a Northwest Passage. It appeared on maps until the mid-eighteenth century.

In southwest North America is Quivira reg. Quivira refers to the Seven Cities of Gold sought by the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. In 1539, Coronado wandered over what today is Arizona and New Mexico, eventually heading to what is now Kansas to find the supposedly rich city of Quivira. Although he never found the cities or the gold, the name stuck on maps, wandering from east to west.

Another distinctive feature here is the adoption of the four-island conception of the North Pole. This depiction is similar to how the Arctic is shown on the Behaim globe (1492). This four-island representation would later be taken up by Gerard Mercator and others for the following two hundred years. The idea for it comes from De Inventio Fortuna, a now-lost fourteenth-century book describing a magnetic island, Rupes Nigra, that is surrounded by a whirlpool and four large islands.

While the map is geographically intriguing, it is also aesthetically engaging. The scrollwork lettering is delicate, while the large ship and the sea monster are finely-wrought. The intricate cut-out pattern framing the hemispheres has an embedded compass rose and armillary sphere.  

Terra Australis

One of the defining characteristics of this map is the massive southern continent that fills the southerly latitudes, Magallanica Terra Australis. A peninsula juts up near southeast Asia. Place names there include Beach, Lucach, and Maletur. As with Anian, they would be familiar to anyone who has read Marco Polo’s Travels. These three places were originally regions in Java. As can be seen, a Java menor is near to Maletur. This conflation of Java with the southern continent stemmed from an error. Initially, Polo used Arabic usage of Java Major for Java and Java Minor for Sumatra. After a printing mistake made Java Minor seem the largest island in the world in the 1532 edition of Polo’s Travels (Paris and Basel), mapmakers started to make a landmass to accommodate Java Minor, Beach, Lucach, and Maletur.

Farther west is Psitacorum regio, which refers to an area densely populated with parrots. This place name appeared on Mercator’s 1541 globe and his 1569 world map. It was supposed to have been sighted by Portuguese sailors but was never verified in terms of size or location.

States of the map

Plancius's map first appeared in 1590, with Plancius' name in the title, although Shirley explains that there is a proof state at the British Library which lacks the toponym Magallanica. A later state appeared in 1612 and 1621, with the name or phrase D.R.M. Mathes in the title and Plancius’ name removed. All three (1590, 1612, and 1621) appeared in bibles.

The present example is a first state with Plancius’ name.

Sources and rarity

One of Plancius’ earliest world maps, this map is based on Rumold Mercator's famous world map, which was first published in 1587. However, the present map has corrections to the shape of South America and includes the Solomon Islands, as derived from Ortelius. In addition to these changes, Plancius uses information derived from the latest Portuguese sources to derive the west coast of America and the east coast of Asia.

This map is considerably rarer than Mercator's map. As Shirley notes, "most of the maps prepared by Plancius are uncommon, if not rare, as they were not reprinted in standard atlas form."