Pascaerte vande Zuyd-Zee tussche California, en Ilhas de Ladrones

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 Ocean. The chart is arranged with east at the top. California appears as an island at the upper left, while Japan and Land van Eso appear toward the lower left. Across the Pacific are island chains associated with Spanish and Dutch navigation, including the Ladrones and islands of the western Pacific.

At the lower right, the chart includes Abel Tasman’s 1642 discoveries in Staten Lant — present-day New Zealand — and Van Diemens Lant — present-day Tasmania. Their inclusion shows how Dutch discoveries in the southwest Pacific were being fitted into broader sea charts of the Pacific by the mid-seventeenth century. The chart also preserves the fragmented quality of European knowledge of the Pacific, where islands, partial coastlines, and uncertain discoveries sit within a wide navigational grid.

Within the collection, this chart is closely connected with Johannes van Loon’s companion chart of the Pacific coast of Spanish America, Pascaerte van Nova Hispania Peru en Chili, ’t Amsterdam (291), which covers the eastern Pacific and the west coast of the Americas.