Kaart der Reyse van Abel Tasman volgens syn eygen opstel

François Valentijn was a Dutch minister, author, and compiler who spent much of his career in the service of the Dutch East India Company. In 1685 he was sent to Ambon as a minister in the East Indies, where he remained for about a decade. After returning to the Netherlands, he went back to the Indies in 1705 and the following year served as army chaplain on an expedition to eastern Java. Ill health soon forced him to request permission to return to the Netherlands.

Back in Dordrecht, Valentijn completed his large compilation Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien. Published between 1724 and 1726 in five parts and eight volumes, the work drew on Valentijn’s own journals, correspondence, and research, as well as material obtained from VOC officials and earlier written and printed sources. It was one of the most extensive printed accounts of the Dutch East Indies, combining geography, history, natural history, ethnography, maps, views, and commercial information.

Among the maps included in Valentijn’s work is this map, which traces Abel Tasman’s first voyage of 1642–43 when Tasman sailed from Batavia to Mauritius, then eastward across the southern Indian Ocean before encountering Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand. The map also incorporates knowledge from Tasman’s second voyage of 1644 along the northern coast of Australia. Although presented as following Tasman’s own account, the map includes place names and cartographic information that reflect later Dutch knowledge as well as the Tasman material available to Valentijn.

The map shows Nova Hollandia, Van Diemens Land, N. Zeelandt of het Staaten Land, Nova Guinea, parts of Southeast Asia, and the western Pacific. Tasman’s track is traced across the southern Indian Ocean and toward the islands of the southwest Pacific, linking the geography of Australia and New Zealand to the Dutch maritime routes of the VOC. The partly known outlines of New Holland and New Zealand convey the continuing uncertainty surrounding the lands south and east of the East Indies in the early eighteenth century. The cartouche credits the publishers Joannes van Braam and Gerard Onder de Linden, who issued Valentijn’s work with privilege in 1726. As a map printed within Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien, it is not an independent sea chart but a historical and geographical reconstruction of Tasman’s voyages within a larger Dutch account of the East Indies and adjacent regions.

Within the collection, this map relates to English and Dutch-derived charting of New Holland and Southeast Asia, including John Seller’s earlier chart of the eastern East Indies and New Holland (53), John Thornton’s A draught of the coast of New Holland and parts adjacent (102), and the later Thornton charts of Java, Borneo, Celebes, Bali, and Madura (397, 398, and 399).