India Orientalis

Levinus Hulsius was a Flemish-born publisher, engraver, linguist, and compiler of voyage literature active in Nuremberg at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. His travel publications helped bring recent information about overseas voyages, trade routes, and newly encountered regions to a German-speaking readership.

This map, India Orientalis, was published by Hulsius in 1602. It presents the Indian Ocean and East Indies from the Arabian Sea, Persia, India, and Sri Lanka across mainland Southeast Asia, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Philippines, the Moluccas, China, Japan, and the western Pacific. The map is signed and dated at lower right: Per Levin. Hulsium A° 1602. The map reflects the rapid circulation of Dutch and Portuguese-derived information about Asian waters at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It appeared only a few years after Cornelis de Houtman’s first Dutch voyage to the East Indies returned in 1597, and belongs to the same printed world of voyage accounts, route maps, and commercial intelligence. Coastal names, island groups, shoals, and sailing routes present the East Indies as a connected maritime region rather than a remote extension of Asia.

At lower right, New Guinea is only partly shown, with a note indicating uncertainty about whether it is an island or part of a larger southern land. This uncertainty is important in the history of early European mapping of the western Pacific, before Dutch voyages clarified the relationship between New Guinea, northern Australia, and the seas south of Java.

Within the collection, this map is closely connected with Hulsius’s broader India Orientalis (453) and Cornelis de Houtman’s voyage account (455).