Carta IIII - Carta particolare del stretto di Sunda fra l'Isole di Sumatra è Iava maggre

Robert Dudley was an English nobleman, navigator, and cartographer who spent much of his later life in exile in Florence under Medici patronage. His Dell’Arcano del Mare, first published in 1646–47, was reissued in 1661 under the shortened title Arcano del Mare. The atlas was the first printed sea atlas by an Englishman and one of the first to use Mercator’s projection consistently throughout.

This detailed chart of the Sunda Strait was engraved by Antonio Francesco Lucini and bears the notation “L.o6.o” in the title cartouche, placing it in Book VI of the 1661 edition. It depicts the narrow maritime passage between Sumatra and Java, one of the principal routes linking the Indian Ocean with the Java Sea.

The Sunda Strait was one of the most heavily trafficked passages in the East Indies during the seventeenth century, especially for Dutch East India Company ships moving toward Batavia and the wider Java Sea. Dudley labels Java as Iava Maggiore, an Italianised form of Java Major rooted in Marco Polo’s terminology. The chart includes coastal outlines, anchorages, and navigational hazards, reflecting Dudley’s use of Dutch and Iberian hydrographic sources within a practical sea-chart format.

Within the collection, this chart is closely connected with Dudley’s related Australia, East Indies and Pacific charts (172, 222, and 224). Johannes van Keulen II’s later Sunda Strait chart (44), the Sunda and Bangka Straits chart (45), and the Sumatra and associated straits chart (225) show how Dutch chartmakers continued to refine the mapping of these waters. It also connects Arnold Colom’s paired East Indies charts (84) and Johannes van Keulen I’s East Indies charts (83and 95), which place the Sunda Strait within the wider hydrographic mapping of the East Indies.