A Chart of the Easternmost part of the East Indies with all the Adjacent Islands from Cape Comorin to Japan

John Seller was an English hydrographer, chartmaker, instrument maker, and publisher whose work helped establish a domestic English trade in printed sea charts during the later seventeenth century. This chart is among the earliest English-published nautical charts to depict the East Indies and New Holland using information derived largely from Dutch discoveries. First engraved by Francis Lamb, it was later issued with the names of Seller’s London publishing partners: John Colson, William Fisher, John Atkinson, and John Thornton.

According to Tooley, the chart is known in four states. The first state, c. 1670, has no imprint or dedication; the second adds Francis Lamb’s signature and a dedication to Berkeley; the third state, represented here, adds Seller’s publishing partners and Fort St. George; and a later fourth state removes Lamb’s signature and the Berkeley dedication. The chart extends from India and Ceylon eastwards through Southeast Asia, China, Japan, the Philippines, the Moluccas, New Guinea, and New Holland. It is a nautical chart organised through rhumb lines, compass roses, coastal outlines, island groups, shoals, and place names. North is placed at left, following Dutch nautical convention. A decorative title cartouche with fruit garland, allegorical figures, and a small yacht, together with an elaborate scale cartouche, reinforces the sheet’s combination of practical and ornamental functions.

New Holland occupies the right side of the chart and is shown through a sequence of early Dutch coastal discoveries. These include landfalls associated with Dirk Hartog on the west coast in 1616, Frederik de Houtman in 1619, the Leeuwin in 1622, Jan Carstensz. in 1623, François Thijssen and Pieter Nuyts on the south coast in 1627, Gerrit de Witt in 1628, and Abel Tasman’s charting of the northern coast in 1644. Significantly, Tasman’s 1642–43 discoveries of Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand are omitted, consistent with Dutch charting conventions of the period. The result is a partial but historically revealing image of Australia before its outline was more fully revised in the eighteenth century.

Within the collection, this chart is closely connected with other works concerned with Southeast Asian and Australian waters, including Petrus Plancius’s Insulae Moluccae celeberrimae (376and 72), Van Keulen’s charts of the Sunda Strait and Bangka Strait (44and 45), Sayer and Bennett’s Plan of the Road and City of Batavia (298), and Robert Sayer’s later A new chart of the eastern coast of New Holland (36). Together these works show how Dutch, English, and later European mapmakers progressively assembled, adapted, and republished knowledge of the East Indies and Australia.