Pascaerte van Nova Hispania Peru en Chili

Johannes van Loon was an Amsterdam engraver, mathematician, and chartmaker who began his cartographic career in the 1640s working with Theunis Jacobsz. By 1650 he was collaborating with Johannes Janssonius, engraving plates for major atlas projects, including the final volume of Atlas Novus and Andreas Cellarius’s celestial atlas, Harmonia Macrocosmica (see 158and 259).

In 1661, Johannes van Loon and his brother Gillis van Loon published the Klaer-Lichtende Noort-Ster ofte Zee Atlas, a sea atlas containing thirty-five charts, including this chart of the Pacific coast of Spanish America from California and New Spain southwards through Central America, Peru, and Chile to the Strait of Magellan. It was drawn for oceanic navigation, with rhumb lines, latitude scales, compass roses, and coastal place names structuring the long western coastline of the Americas. Its focus is the coast: ports, capes, islands, and approaches used by ships, rather than the inland geography of the continent.

The title cartouche is flanked by two standing figures, one holding a spade and the other a pick or staff, probably alluding to mining and labour in the Spanish American world. This visual emphasis suits a chart of New Spain, Peru, and Chile, regions closely associated in European imagination with silver, mineral wealth, and imperial commerce.

Within the collection, this chart is closely connected with Van Loon’s companion Pacific chart, Pascaerte vande Zuyd-Zee, tusschen California en Ilhas de Ladrones, ’t Amsterdam (290), which continues the geography westward across the Pacific. It also relates to Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s map of South and Central America (279), which presents an earlier Dutch printed view of many of the same American coasts, and to Lodewijcksz.’s route chart to Java (69), another chart concerned with long-distance Dutch navigation across oceanic routes.