![]() North AmericaThe east coast of North America is increasingly recognizable: Cape Cod can be recognized, for example. In 1818 its existence was disproved by John Ross, who during his first Arctic expedition, would plumb the waters of its alleged location to a depth of 180 fathoms (330 m) and finding no bottom. In 1745 it would be proposed that the island had been real but had sunk. Despite this, Thomas Shepard would claim in 1671 that the mirage was not only real, but that they had also explored and mapped it. ![]() It is thought that Frobisher's Frisland was actually southern Greenland, and that what he thought was Greenland was actually Baffin Island, and that the location of the newly discovered Buss Island was in the wrong place (57° N rather than a probably 62° N) and was furthermore an optical effect, rather than actual land. Sailors on the third expedition of Martin Frobisher in 1578 aboard the ship Emanuel (a class of ship known as a busse) had recorded the sighting of an island in the ocean between Ireland and Zeno's fraudulent Frisland. Buss IslandAlthough Zeno's Frisland, Icaria, and Estotiland have been removed, in the north polar projection another phantom island - Buss Island - has been added. The northeastern extremes of Asia are still ill-formed, awaiting the efforts of Witsen and other mapmakers of the late 17th century. Nova Zembla is shown as an island, although its eastern shore is not yet charted. The efforts of Dutch whalers are recorded in the presence here of Spitzbergen. Greenland is mapped with the Davis Strait and James' Bay is recognizably charted. Mercator's four Arctic landmasses are gone, as is the fraudulent Zeno cartography which dominated the mapping of the North Atlantic in the first part of the 17th century. The NorthSimilarly, the guesswork and legend that informed the 16th century mapping of the north has been replaced with concrete results of exploration. The oft-imagined southern continent is replaced by Abel Tasman's discoveries of Australia and New Zealand's western coastlines in 16, and a current depiction of the East Indies consistent with Joan Blaeu's access to the secret maps of the East India Company. Visscher's south polar projection is starkly empty, apart from a portion of Patagonia and a full-coastlined Tierra del Fuego. The SouthThis is among the earliest world maps to dispense with the Terra Australis Incognita that dominated the south pole of earlier world maps, and which mariners consistently failed to discover. Visscher's map does include two subordinate polar projections based on those that appear on the wall map, however, which Blaeu did not reproduce on his atlas map. Franco Draco, which do not appear on the 1648 wall map. Thus, it is likely that Visscher's immediate source was Joan Blaeu's double hemisphere atlas map, and not the earlier wall map: this is supported by the presence on the Visscher map of the Californian place names of Nova Albion and Pt. Visscher's title appears to allude to that of Joan Blaeu's atlas map Nova et Accuratissima Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula, which almost certainly predated Visscher's, although Shirley dates the Blaeu at 1662, Van der Krogt places it in the first volume of Blaeu's Toonneel des Aerdrycks, which was printed ahead of the others in the atlas, as early as 1649. Sources and DatingVisscher's cartography represented the state of the art of Dutch mapmaking, as expressed in Joan Blaeu's 1648 double hemisphere wall map, Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula. ![]() As such, according to Rodney Shirley, it is the 'master fore-runner' of the highly decorative style of Dutch world map that characterized the latter part of the Dutch Golden Age of Mapmaking. It epitomizes, both aesthetically and geographically, the Dutch World map of the second part of the 17th century. This is Nicolas Visscher's classic 1658 double hemisphere map of the world, in beautiful original color.
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