Americae et proximarum regionum orae descriptio

Frans Hogenberg was a Flemish engraver and mapmaker whose work circulated widely in late sixteenth-century Europe through maps, news prints, and city views. He is closely associated with the Civitates orbis terrarum (52, 153, 321, 360, 400, 423and 424) and also contributed to the engraving of maps for Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum, first published in Antwerp in 1570; the collection holds the 1584 edition (252).

This map was published in 1589 in Walter Bigges and Lieutenant Croftes’s account of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian voyage. It derives from the mapping associated with Baptista Boazio and presents the Americas within the wider maritime world of Atlantic and Pacific navigation. The map belongs to a closely related group of late sixteenth-century maps of the Americas and the Pacific, alonside Giovanni Battista Mazza’s Americae et proximarum regionum orae descriptio (219) and Ortelius’s Maris Pacifici (221). For many years, the chronology of these maps was debated, particularly whether Ortelius’s Maris Pacifici preceded the Hogenberg and Mazza maps. Richard Casten and Thomas Suárez later argued that Hogenberg’s map was probably the earliest of the three, followed by Mazza’s map and then Ortelius’s Maris Pacifici.

The map extends beyond the Americas to include parts of West Africa and Europe, the eastern Pacific, Japan, the Philippines, the Moluccas, New Guinea, and the northern edge of Terra Australis. North America includes Anian and Quivira, while the western coastline remains uncertain. South America is shown in considerable coastal detail, including Peru, Brazil, Patagonia, and the Strait of Magellan. Ships and sea creatures animate the surrounding waters, reinforcing the map’s connection with voyage literature and maritime conflict. At lower right, Psitacorum regio, or “Region of Parrots, ” appears on the northern edge of Terra Australis. The accompanying inscription describes the land as rich in birds and separated from America by the Strait of Magellan. This places the map within the wider sixteenth-century tradition in which the far south was imagined through a mixture of classical expectation, travel report, and natural-historical description.

Within the collection, this map is closely connected with Mazza’s (219) and Ortelius’s (221) maps. Together, the three maps show how the Americas were increasingly understood within a wider Pacific world linking Asia, New Guinea, Japan, the Philippines, the Spanish transpacific sphere, and the northern edge of Terra Australis.