Mar del Nort

Title

Mar del Nort

Description

Nautical chart of the northern Atlantic Ocean with the east coast of America, the Caribbean, the north coast of South America and the west coast of Europe and Africa. On reverse latin text.

ca. 1640

Artist

Janssonius (1588-1664)

Johannes Janssonius (Jansson)( 1588- 1664) Amsterdam, was born in Arnhem, the son of Jan Janszoon the Elder, a publisher and bookseller. In 1612 he married Elisabeth de Hondt, the daughter of Jodocus Hondius. He produced his first maps in 1616 of France and Italy. In 1623 Janssonius owned a bookstore in Frankfurt am Main, later also in Danzig, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Königsberg, Geneva and Lyon. In the 1630s he formed a partnership with his brother in law Henricus Hondius, and together they published atlases as Mercator/Hondius/Janssonius. Under the leadership of Janssonius the Hondius Atlas was steadily enlarged. Renamed Atlas Novus, it had three volumes in 1638, one fully dedicated to Italy. 1646 a fourth volume came out with ""English County Maps"", a year after a similar issue by Willem Blaeu. Janssonius' maps are similar to those of Blaeu, and he is often accused of copying from his rival, but many of his maps predate those of Blaeu and/or covered different regions. By 1660, at which point the atlas bore the appropriate name ""Atlas Major"", there were 11 volumes, containing the work of about a hundred credited authors and engravers. It included a description of ""most of the cities of the world"" (Townatlas), of the waterworld (Atlas Maritimus in 33 maps), and of the Ancient World (60 maps). The eleventh volume was the Atlas of the Heavens by Andreas Cellarius. Editions were printed in Dutch, Latin, French, and a few times in German.

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.