Cimbebas et Caffariae Littora a Catembela ad Promontorium Boan Spei..

Title

Cimbebas et Caffariae Littora a Catembela ad Promontorium Boan Spei..

Description

Map shows the Atlatic with the western coast of Africa

ca. 1675

Artist

Wit, de (1610-1698)

Frederik de Wit (1610 – 1698). His Atlas began to appear around 1662 and by 1671 included anywhere from 17 to 151 maps each. In the 1690s he began to use a new title page "Atlas Maior" but continued to use his old title page. His atlas of the Low Countries first published in 1667,was named Nieuw Kaertboeck van de XVII Nederlandse Provinciën and contained 14 to 25 maps. Frederik de Wit quickly expanded upon his first small folio atlas which contained mostly maps printed from plates that he had acquired, to an atlas with 27 maps engraved by or for him. By 1671 he was publishing a large folio atlas with as many as 100 maps. Smaller atlases of 17 or 27 or 51 maps could still be purchased and by the mid-1670s an atlas of as many as 151 maps and charts could be purchased from his shop. In ca.1675 Frederik de Wit released a new nautical atlas. The charts in this atlas replaced the earlier charts from 1664 that are known today in only four bound examples and a few loose copies. Frederik de Wit new charts were sold in a chart book and as part of his atlases. Frederik de Wit published no fewer than 158 land maps and 43 charts on separate folio sheets. In 1695 Frederik de Wit began to publish a town atlas of the Netherlands after he acquired a large number of city plans at the auction of the famous Blaeu publishing firm’s printing plates. Dating Frederik de Wit atlases is considered difficult because usually no dates were recorded on the maps and their dates of publication extended over many years.

Historical Description

For a long time in human history, the Atlantic was the great water that separated the "Old World" from the "New World". With an area of ​​about 106 million square kilometers, the Atlantic covers about a fifth of the earth's surface. The extent of the Atlantic Ocean is enormous, which is why a distinction is made between the North and South Atlantic. In the west it touches the two American continents and in the east Europe and Africa hold it back. After the first crossing of Christopher Columbus (1492), there were regular ocean crossings only in the 19th century. The people in Europe wanted to leave the poor conditions of that time behind and start over in the burgeoning America. There were real waves of emigration. Is Columbus the Discoverer of America? This view is controversial. The Vikings, who are said to have stranded on the coasts of Canada around the year 1000 after an odyssey across the Atlantic, keep coming up. Columbus may have known about it and could see their maps. The Chinese navigator Zheng He is often named as the discoverer of America. At the beginning of 2006, a Chinese collector found a map from 1413, on which America, Asia and Europe are already drawn. But whether this card is real and thus the Chinese are the true discoverers of the "New World", nobody really knows. The first transatlantic steamer set sail from Bremerhaven on July 2, 1847. His destination was the port of New York. The people took extreme hardship on such crossings, because the overcrowded decks were anything but comfortable.