Insulae de Cabo Verde Olim Hesperides, Sive Gorgades.

Title

Insulae de Cabo Verde Olim Hesperides, Sive Gorgades.

Description

Map shows the Cape Verde Islands (Cape Verde) in the Atlantic Ocean with a magnificent title cartouche and a compass rose.

ca. 1690

Artist

Valk/ Schenck Peter (1652-1726)

Gerard Valk ( 1652 – 1726) was a Dutch engraver, publisher and cartographer. Valck engraved many portraits of English nobility and worked frequently with Abraham Blooteling his father in law. He published most of his works himself.In Amsterdam, he had a close partnership with his son Leonardus Valck and Peter Schenk the Elder, who married Gerard Valck´s sister in 1687.Valck also published atlases, maps, printed globes and prints of different motives.

Historical Description

The uninhabited islands were circled by António Fernandes in 1445 and discovered and entered for the first time in 1456 by the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto, who was in Portuguese service (Boa Vista). Antonio da Noli, a Genoese captain who also sailed on behalf of the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator, continued to explore the islands from 1458 in collaboration with Diogo Gomes, discovered most of the rest of the eastern Cape Verde Islands and baptized the archipelago with the name Ilhas de Cabo Verde and began settling the islands as governor of the Portuguese crown from 1461. In fact, Diogo Gomes later claimed to be the first of the two to have seen the island of Santiago from afar and also to have been the first to set foot on it. Antonio da Noli, however, managed to return to Portugal earlier, and he was then understandably rewarded by Heinrich the Navigator with the encouragement of the discovery, which, in the words of Diogo Gomes, "I, Gomes, discovered". Because of the rivalry between the two, Diogo Gomes is considered to be the true discoverer of the main island of Santiago in Portuguese historiography. The islands were named by the Portuguese after Cabo Verde (Green Cape) on the west coast of Africa.