America: Noviter Delineata

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This map is a depiction by a mapmaker by the name of Hondius, Hendrikus Hondius, dating to roughly 1630 (or) 1631. It is full of activity. There are galleons. There are large sailing ships. There is a conflict going on between two of them in the Pacific, the so-called Mar-del-Zur. And there is activity all over. At the very foot of South America there is a sea creature, a fairly large sea creature belching water – probably not a creature that the average mariner would want to run into. And a similar creature appears on the left-hand side.

There are various insets. One depicting the top of the world, the Arctic region. And one depicting the bottom of the world, the Antarctic region.

If one looks through the map at various points where there may be a blank spot, the mapmaker has chosen to fill them in with some interesting animal life or other activity that characterized that part of the world. Obviously, by this date, not too much was known by the interior either of South America or North America, and when one looks up to the North American portion of the map, there is a great deal of blank space, a great deal of geography yet to be discovered.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1933458

A comparative view of the principal waterfalls, islands, lakes, rivers and mountains in the Western and Eastern Hemispheres

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I’m going to discuss two maps together. These maps are a curious graphic, which doesn’t represent any clear geography, but does represent an amalgam of some of the principal features to be found around the world, whether those features were lakes, rivers, mountains, or the like. And what is kind of nice about them is that they bring all the largest mountains together, for example, and you can see visually which are the tallest and which are the almost-tallest, and so on. So it’s a nice comparative graphic, one that gives you some appreciation of how the various features of the world relate to one another.

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1691588