Carta XXII - Isole nel mare di Sur scoperte nel 1617

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 chart depicts a group of islands in the South Sea, or Pacific Ocean, attributed to discoveries made in 1617. It was engraved by Antonio Francesco Lucini for the first edition. It lacks the “L.” notation found on many plates from the reorganised 1661 edition, supporting its identification as a first-edition plate.

The geographic identity of the islands shown remains uncertain, reflecting the incomplete and often speculative European knowledge of the Pacific during the early seventeenth century. The chart may correspond to regions east of New Guinea, such as parts of the Bismarck or Solomon archipelagos, though the locations are only loosely defined. The attribution to 1617 suggests links to Dutch or Spanish voyages in the western Pacific, potentially including exploratory activity by the VOC or the legacy of the expeditions of Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira and Pedro Fernández de Quirós.

Within the collection, this chart forms part of Dudley’s Pacific group with the Isola di Iezo chart (275) and the Pacific chart from the Solomon Islands to Peru (276). It also relates to Dudley’s Australia chart (172), his general chart of Asia (222), and the eastern East Indies chart (224), which together show how Dell’Arcano del Mare organised uncertain Pacific and East Indies geography within a coherent maritime atlas.