Descriptio Novae Guinea et Inss. Salom

Barent Langenes was a Middelburg publisher associated with the compact Dutch atlas Caert-Thresoor, first issued in 1598 and distributed through the Amsterdam publisher Cornelis Claesz. Conceived as a small-format alternative to larger atlases, the work combined terrestrial, maritime, and cosmographical material and was later expanded into Latin, French, and German editions. This map of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands first appeared in the Magellanica section of the atlas. This example is from the enlarged 1606 Latin edition, Petrus Bertius, Tabularum geographicarum contractarum libri quinque, Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz, 1606. The presence of latitude markings confirms that it belongs to the post-1599 issue sequence.

Engraved by Pieter van den Keere, the map draws heavily on Petrus Plancius’s map of the Spice Islands (72). Both the coastal outlines and the Latin inscription derive from Plancius’s work. The inscription explains that New Guinea was so named by seafarers because its coasts and appearance resembled African Guinea. It also refers to Andrea Corsali’s reported name Terra de Piccinacoli and suggests that New Guinea’s size made it probable that it formed part of the southern continent.

That suggestion places the map within late sixteenth-century uncertainty about the relationship between New Guinea and Terra Australis. Rather than showing New Guinea as a clearly bounded island, the map leaves open the possibility that it belonged to a larger southern landmass. In this respect it is a compact but important witness to the persistence of southern-continent geography in small-format atlas publishing.

This map is closely connected with Petrus Plancius’s Spice Islands map (72), from which it derives, and with the related Langenes East Indies map (388). It also connects with the cosmographical maps in Caert-Thresoor (294, 295, and 296).