A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Just like the Mercator-Hondius Atlas, Blaeu’s Atlas Appendix was an uneven affair in its geographical coverage and printed quality. Nevertheless, it was an immediate success, as wealthy members of the public were eager to buy and inspect a new atlas different from those produced by Hondius. Henricus Hondius and Johannes Janssonius were understandably appalled that their control of the market was now being challenged by an atlas primarily composed of maps made by their dead relative. They quickly responded, later in 1630, by publishing an appendix to their atlas, followed in 1633 by a newly enlarged French edition of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas, in which they directly attacked Blaeu’s Atlas Appendix as ‘a hotch-potch of old maps’, which also copied maps from Jodocus the Younger’s atlas.27

  Hondius and Janssonius’s criticism of Blaeu’s hastily printed atlas was totally justified – although it was a charge that could equally be levelled at their own atlas too. The competition made both sides realize that atlases composed of a bricolage of old maps and hastily commissioned or pirated new ones were unsustainable. A completely new atlas was required that included up-to-date maps incorporating recent discoveries, including some on the VOC’s manuscript charts of South-east Asia. But such a venture required massive capital investment (in skilled workmanship, labour hours and the sheer volume of printed text involved), as well as access to the latest navigational information. In the latter half of the 1620s, the changing political and commercial climate meant that Blaeu held the advantage over his rivals: the power of the Contra-Remonstrant political faction gradually diminished, and Blaeu’s Remonstrant allies found new favour within both the city’s civic authorities and the VOC. They included his close friend Laurens Reael, one of the city’s most powerful and influential figures, related by marriage to Arminius, a former Governor-General of the East Indies, and a director of the VOC.28

  For Blaeu, this shift in power reached a climax in 1632 when the post of official cartographer to the VOC fell vacant on the death of Hessel Gerritsz. Whereas Blaeu’s appointment had been almost unthinkable in 1619, by 1632 the position was his for the taking, and when the VOC’s directors (including Reael) visited him in December 1632 to offer him the post, he accepted immediately. He was formally appointed on 3 January 1633. His contract stipulated that he was responsible for keeping a record of the logbooks of VOC pilots travelling to South-east Asia, correcting and updating the company’s sea charts and maps, appointing ‘trustworthy’ individuals to make the maps, maintaining absolute secrecy, and providing a biannual report to the directors on this and the rest of his cartographic endeavours. In return he received a yearly salary of 300 guilders, a modest salary in line with those of comparable state officials, but one which could be supplemented by individual payments from the VOC for each chart and map he made.29 It put Blaeu right at the heart of the Republic’s political and commercial policies, and gave him a position of unprecedented power and influence within the Dutch mapmaking profession.

  Even as he was being appointed, Blaeu was working on yet another attempt to corner the market, his Novus Atlas, which (it was promised in a pre-publication notice) would be ‘entirely renewed with new engravings and new detailed descriptions’. Published in 1634, it was the first Blaeu atlas to name the involvement of Willem’s son Joan, even though he had been helping his father since at least 1631. Unfortunately the Novus Atlas did not live up to its publicity. Although it included 161 maps, over half had been published before, 9 were published in an incomplete state, and 5 had not even been intended for inclusion!30 Blaeu’s duties as VOC cartographer and his desire to rush out an atlas before the competition probably led to the mistakes.

  His appointment as the VOC’s cartographer nevertheless gave Blaeu the confidence to expand the scope of his atlases, for which the tools were to hand. At his death in 1632, Gerritsz’s estate had included six copperplate engravings of India, China, Japan, Persia and Turkey, all commercially sensitive regions in which the VOC were busy trading and mapping. The VOC’s privileges meant that they were in effect the Company’s possessions, but Blaeu, probably with the help of Reael, who was one of Gerritsz’s executors, managed to acquire the plates for his own use. In 1635 Blaeu published an even bigger atlas, this time in two volumes, which included 207 maps, 50 of them new, and which made even grander claims to comprehensiveness. ‘It is our intention’, wrote Blaeu in the preface, ‘to describe the whole world, that is the heavens and the earth, in other volumes such as these two, of which two about the earth will shortly follow.’31 The atlas reproduced a Gerritsz map of India and South-east Asia which simply added decorative cartouches at the top and left-hand corner, and in the right-hand corner a scene of putti playing with navigational instruments and plotting their way across a terrestrial globe with a pair of compasses. The cartouche on the left reveals that the map was dedicated to none other than Laurens Reael.

  Such manoeuvres clearly show Blaeu’s pragmatic pursuit of domination of the market in atlases, but his motivations were not always straightforward. In 1636, following Galileo Galilei’s condemnation by the Catholic Inquisition for his heretical heliocentric beliefs, a group of Dutch scholars hatched a plan to offer the Italian astronomer asylum in the Dutch Republic. The plan was floated by the great jurist, diplomat (and Remonstrant sympathizer) Hugo Grotius – whose books were published by Blaeu – and was enthusiastically supported by Laurens Reael and Willem Blaeu. Beyond their intellectual belief in a heliocentric universe, all three men also had vested commercial interests in offering such an invitation. Grotius, having already written on the subject of navigation, was hoping to lure Galileo to Amsterdam so that he would offer the VOC a new method of determining longitude which, if successful, would give the Dutch complete domination of international navigation.32 Blaeu’s somewhat nonconformist intellectual beliefs coincided with his eye for a novel commercial opportunity: Galileo represented a new way of looking at the world, but it was also one that Blaeu might have calculated would give him a decisive edge in cartographic publishing in the 1630s. Ultimately, the plans to invite Galileo came to nothing, as the astronomer pleaded that ill health (and undoubtedly the terms of his house arrest by the Inquisition) prevented him from making what would have been a sensational defection to Europe’s leading Calvinist republic.

  The scheme’s failure made little difference to Blaeu, who went from strength to strength. In 1637 he expanded the family business by moving the printing works to a new building on the Bloemgracht in the Jordaan district in the west of the city, home to the dyeing and painting industries. With its print foundry and nine letterpresses, six of which were dedicated to mapmaking, the new building was the largest printing house in Europe. Willem, alas, had only had a year in which to enjoy his pre-eminence as Europe’s greatest printer. In 1638 he died, bequeathing the family business to his sons Joan and Cornelis (c. 1610–42).

  Willem’s death marked the end of the first phase of the Blaeu dynasty’s rise to almost complete domination of printing and mapmaking in the Dutch Republic. He had carved out a career placing him at the forefront of printing and mapmaking in Amsterdam. Willem’s world maps and navigational guides superseded those of previous geographers, and his published atlases challenged those of Ortelius and Mercator. He led the way in putting cartography at the heart of the state’s political and commercial policies, culminating in his VOC work, and publishing maps and books describing a heliocentric world in which the earth was no longer positioned at the centre of the universe. But for Joan and Cornelis, the exigencies of the business of publishing, the competition with Hondius and Janssonius and the ongoing demands of the VOC’s commissions meant that they needed to consolidate their father’s achievements before their competitors moved in.

  Following their father’s death, Joan and Cornelis’s business was given a boost by the news that Henricus Hondius had inexplicably withdrawn from making atlases with his brother-in-law, leaving Janssonius to continue on his own. The Blaeus’ position was further reinforced in
November 1638, when Joan was confirmed in his father’s job as official cartographer to the VOC. Under Willem’s tenure, the post had expanded in line with the increasing volume of trade between Amsterdam and the VOC’s Indonesian headquarters in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta); by the time Joan was appointed, the Dutch Republic’s merchant fleet had grown to around 2,000 vessels, eclipsing every other European maritime sea-power. With a capacity of approximately 450,000 tons, and employing about 30,000 merchant sailors, the VOC received investors’ subscriptions of an estimated 40 to 60 million guilders each year; at the same time, its profits continued to grow and its markets expanded into spices, pepper, textiles, precious metals and luxury items like ivory, porcelain, tea and coffee. Throughout the 1640s it was dispatching more than 100,000 tons of shipping eastwards each year, and by the end of the century it had sent an estimated 1,755 vessels and over 973,000 people to Asia (of whom 170,000 lost their lives en route).33

  All these ships needed maps and charts to navigate from Texel to Batavia. The skipper and the chief and junior pilots were each given a complete set of at least nine charts, and the third watch a more limited set. All of them were made by Blaeu and his assistants. The first chart showed the route from Texel to the Cape of Good Hope; the second depicted the Indian Ocean from the east coast of Africa to the Sunda Straits separating Java and Sumatra; the following three showed the Indonesian archipelago on a larger scale, followed by charts of Sumatra, the Straits, Java and finally Batavia (including Bantam on the Indonesian island of Java). Each set was accompanied by globes, manuals, logbooks, blank sheets and even a tin cylinder for storing the charts. In an attempt to restrict their circulation, the VOC ordered that any charts not returned at the end of a voyage would have to be paid for.

  Blaeu’s role as official cartographer to the VOC connected him with everyone from the third watch on board a VOC East Indiaman all the way up to the directors of the company and its policy-making decisions. The master and mates of each VOC vessel were required to show the company’s cartographer their logs, journals and any topographical sketches they made en route to the East, and Blaeu had to check and approve every log before depositing it in the VOC’s East India House on Oude Hoogstraat. Blaeu then drew sea charts, known as ‘leggers’, a template for the subsequent finished maps, based on what he read. These charts were simple in outline, and on the same scale as was used in the final maps. They incorporated new material whenever appropriate, and formed the basis of the standard set of charts used by all VOC pilots. Up to four assistants were then employed to execute handdrawn charts on parchment – drawn by hand rather than printed to try to prevent their details being easily circulated on the open market, and on parchment because of its durability on the long sea voyage. Making charts in this way also allowed for a quick and ingenious method of updating the original charts. These would be revised by pricking out new coastlines or islands with a needle and then placed on top of a blank sheet of parchment and dusted with soot. Once removed, the specks of soot left on the new sheet of parchment through the needle pricks could then be carefully joined up by Blaeu’s assistants to form a new and more accurate representation of coastlines.34

  The costs involved were considerable: each new map that Blaeu made cost the company between 5 and 9 guilders (the price of a small painting), so outfitting a ship with a complete set of new charts would cost at least 228 guilders. Blaeu’s costs were probably no more than 2 guilders for each chart, giving him an enormous profit margin of at least 160 per cent. These figures are of course tentative, as it is impossible from the small number of charts that survive to estimate how many were returned and reused, nor how often Blaeu was required to update each chart. But there seems no doubt that his post was extremely lucrative. In 1668 Blaeu invoiced the company for a staggering 21,135 guilders – an astonishing figure considering that his own annual salary was 500 guilders, similar to that of a master carpenter (and the average cost of a house in Amsterdam). It probably included bills for charts, but also larger, luxury items such as globes and handpainted maps for presentation to foreign dignitaries. In 1644 Blaeu was paid 5,000 guilders for a gigantic handpainted globe presented to the king of Makassar (in modern-day Indonesia), and other records show payments of anything from a few hundred guilders to tens of thousands for globes, atlases and decorative maps.35 In contrast, Blaeu’s assistants appear to have been poorly paid by their employer. One of them, Dionysus Paulusz, drew a map of the Indian Ocean for which Blaeu charged the VOC’s directors 100 guilders, even though Paulusz complained that he received little more for it than ‘a sip of water’.36

  Blaeu’s appointment reflected the peculiar balancing act between official exclusivity and private entrepreneurship that characterized the edicts of the VOC. Although insisting that his sea charts were the exclusive property of the company, and that the methods of their creation must remain a secret, the directors gave Blaeu remarkable autonomy in how he exploited his new-found cartographic knowledge in his other printing projects. This knowledge even allowed him to block the company’s proposed reforms of their navigational practice. Throughout the 1650s and 1660s, the directors suggested the printing of a standardized navigational manual, and although Blaeu was involved in the discussion, he persistently prevaricated. It was simply not in his interest to support such an initiative, especially as he began work on the Atlas maior.37

  The VOC post therefore brought Blaeu more than just very considerable financial profit. It gave him unparalleled access to the latest cartographic information for his charts, and the ability to influence (and if necessary block) new initiatives. It also brought him enormous cultural and civic influence. Over the next three decades he took on a series of public positions: he served on the city council, including a stint as alderman, captain of the civic guard and commissioner of fortifications.38

  Blaeu also expanded the activities of his printing house on the Bloemgracht, publishing religious works by Catholics as well as Remonstrants and Socinians (a liberal sect that rejected the idea of the Trinity, and who were despised by Calvinists as much as if not more than the Catholics), despite the objections of Amsterdam’s civic authorities. Blaeu was so confident of his political position that in 1642 he even survived a raid on his press by the schout, the city’s legal prosecutor, for his publication of a Socinian tract. The schout ordered that the books be burnt and the Blaeu brothers fined 200 guilders, but Blaeu’s influence quickly led the city’s burgomasters to quash the verdict (although too late to save the books from the fire). As ever, Blaeu turned the controversy to his advantage, publishing a subsequent edition in Dutch advertising its scandalous nature as a book that was ‘publicly executed and burnt by fire’.39 The apparently liberal disposition of the printing practices Blaeu inherited from his father continued to define his publishing decisions, but they were inevitably influenced by commercial considerations. He also used his wealth to invest in the cultivation of the Virgin Islands, undertaking to supply African slaves to work on its plantations.40 Taken together with Paulusz’s claims regarding Blaeu’s meanness as an employer, his activities as a slave-trader show that he inherited both his father’s libertarian beliefs and his ruthless entrepreneurial streak.

  Blaeu’s enduring ambition as a printer was to dominate the trade in atlases once and for all, but despite his appointment as the VOC’s cartographer and the privileged information it gave him Blaeu still faced relentless competition from Johannes Janssonius. Free of their father and business partner respectively, the two men were now locked in a fierce competition to produce the finest atlas on the market. Each redoubled his efforts, printing ever larger and more ambitious atlases throughout the 1640s and 1650s, jettisoning references to earlier mapmakers like Mercator, and even using the same title, Novus Atlas, to emphasize the modernity of their products. Blaeu concentrated on simply adding further volumes to the initial structure of the atlas inherited from his father. In 1640 he issued a new atlas in three volumes, introducing new maps of Ita
ly and Greece. In 1645 he published a fourth volume of England and Wales, dedicated to King Charles I, just as England’s civil war began to turn in favour of the king’s republican adversaries. There was a brief hiatus in Blaeu’s atlas production in the late 1640s – partly due to a series of publications produced in response to the signing of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, including his twenty-one-sheet map of the world in two hemispheres that would be used as the basis for the floor of the Burgerzaal. In 1654 he added a further volume on Scotland and Ireland, and in 1655 a sixth volume of seventeen new maps of China, which drew on his extensive contacts within the VOC’s operations in the Far East. One volume of the atlas sold for between 25 and 36 guilders, and the complete edition of all six volumes cost 216 guilders.

  But Janssonius continued to match Blaeu volume for volume, even claiming that subsequent editions of his atlas would provide a comprehensive description of the whole world, including the heavens and the earth, surpassing not only Blaeu’s efforts, but also the great cosmographical treatises of the sixteenth century. By 1646 he had also published four new volumes, adding a fifth sea atlas in 1650, and in 1658 completing a sixth volume consisting of 450 maps – even bigger than Blaeu’s six-part atlas containing 403 maps.