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Acquired by the Australian Government in 1909, and for some time hidden in the vastness of the Petherick Collection, is a very rare sea atlas by the Dutch cartographer, Hendrick Doncker.
This atlas is a slim, folio-size volume, consisting of only 19 charts and a title page and bound simply in unadorned, aged vellum. This copy of Doncker’s 1659 edition of his sea atlas—De Zee Atlas ofte Water-Waereld—was discovered in 1980 to be the only known copy in a public collection. Covering all parts of the known world, the maps are richly coloured and embellished with gold leaf, while the title of each plate is encased in a decorative cartouche. The atlas is a gentleman’s library copy of the actual charts, in a reduced format, which would have been used by Dutch mariners of the day. While the number of copies of this edition is unknown, its rarity immediately identified the work as a unique item in the Library’s collection. Acquiring the Doncker atlasHendrick Doncker’s sea atlas came into the National Library’s possession with the Petherick Collection in the early twentieth century. On the lower right-hand corner of the inside cover of the atlas is a small sticker of the nineteenth-century antiquarian bookseller Fredrick Muller. During the 1880s and 1890s, Muller issued a catalogue, America III, containing a listing (item 1934) for the Doncker 1659 sea atlas. It seems that Edward Augustus Petherick, a collector of material relating to Australia, purchased the atlas because he later refers to it in his draft Bibliography of Australasia and Polynesia (MS 760). The atlas lay unrecognised in the Library’s collection until 1980 when it was prepared for an exhibition.
Hendrick Doncker, cartographer Doncker’s date of birth was not recorded. However, an Act of Bethrothal signed on 16 October 1648, when at age 22 years he married Elizabeth Abrahamsd in Amsterdam, puts his birth date at about 1626. Little, if anything, is known of his earlier life but three years after his marriage he has been recorded as living in the Nieuwe Brugsteeg area of Amsterdam in a house known as in ‘’t Stuurmans gereetschap’ or ‘in the mariners instruments’. Here Doncker set about creating and publishing his enormous output of navigational aids. By 1647 Doncker was already a member of the Book Publishing Guild and maintained his bookshop for 50 years. Doncker set up business as a compiler and retailer of navigation charts and aids, including pilot guides, sea atlases and textbooks on the art of navigation. His charts were the most up-to-date in the second half of the seventeenth century, continuing the expertise and reputation established by his predecessors in the 50 years following the establishment of the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Unlike his contemporaries Doncker regularly corrected and improved his charts, replacing obsolete with new. This conscientious quest for highly accurate charts is reflected in the development of his sea atlas, which ran to at least 30 known editions and ceased publication in 1712. Doncker also worked closely with other well-known cartographers—Pieter Goos, the Jacobsz family (Lootsman) and Johannes van Loon—to produce a pilot guide, the Zeespiegel. Like Doncker, Pieter Goos was a well-known bookseller of Amsterdam, specialising in maritime works. He was also a copper engraver and produced a number of high quality sheet maps in addition to sea atlases and rutters (sailing directions). Sea atlases and rutters were, however, his speciality and many editions were created in a working life of over 25 years. The Jacobsz family, comprising father Anthonie and sons Jacob and Casparus, managed a flourishing printing and publishing house in Amsterdam that ran for 67 years. As the firm specialised in rutters as well as sea atlases, there was some competition with Doncker and Goos and also with Jacob Colom. Colom was born in 1600 and by 1622 had settled in Amsterdam and established himself as a bookseller, printer and chart-maker. Rutters and sea atlases were his mainstay but he also produced globes and non-maritime atlases, such as a small atlas of the Low Countries, produced in 1635. Colom in turn was a contemporary of perhaps the greatest of all the Dutch atlas makers, Willem Janszoon Blaeu and his sons Joan and Cornelis. The golden age of Dutch map-makingIn 1501 Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to India and the Spice Islands (now Indonesia). As a restult, new trade opportunities were opened and Antwerp, in Belgium, was established as the western distribution centre for the newly discovered riches. In time, the city established itself as one of the most prominent art centres of the sixteenth century and was home to graphic printers and recently developed printing presses. Toward the end of the sixteenth century many Antwerp printing and publishing houses had become large enterprises—mainly family based—and had established the adjoining Netherlands as a global monopoly in the area of book and print production. At the same time the lucrative German market, the centre of European trade in the sale of artworks, was well patronised by Antwerp traders anxious to get a foothold. Not only were typographers represented, but also their colleagues, who specialised in prints and maps. The emergence of the Republic of the Netherlands early in the seventeenth century heralded a new golden era for Dutch trade and cartography. The Republic’s great strength lay in the formation of the Dutch East India Company in 1600, and the opportunities presented with the decline of Spain as a great sea-faring nation, sapped by years of war at the end of the sixteenth century. The centre of commerce moved from Antwerp in the south of Belgium to Amsterdam in the north of the Netherlands. The advent of the Dutch East India Company gave added impetus and purpose to the role of cartographers based in Amsterdam. In addition to charts and atlases, rutters containing directions for a particular navigation or route became an important output for many of the cartographic firms that established themselves in the town. A period of relative political stability appeared with the succession of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange in 1625. During his reign, which lasted for more than quarter of a century, political and religious affairs were more harmonious and learning, literature and painting were fostered and encouraged. Commerce also flourished, and through the Dutch East India Company, and later the Dutch West India Company, an eastern empire was acquired while conquests were made in South America. Financial and other assistance came from England and France. The power of the Spaniards was weakened while France rose as a military power, the latter defeating the Spanish at Rocroi, France, in 1643. By the end of the seventeenth century, the quality of Dutch mapping was in decline, except in the area of nautical charts. Many of the later Dutch publishers were copying and imitating. In the meantime, the initiative had passed to France in line with its emergence as a political and economic power. The latter was reflected in the development of the sciences, including the area of navigation, surveying instruments and charting techniques. Atlases and the Dutch atlas makersDutch atlas production reached its peak with the most famous family of cartographers, the Blaeu family, which established itself in Amsterdam towards the end of the sixteenth century and founded a dynasty of mapmakers that flourished for 100 years. However, it was Abraham Ortelius who conceived the idea of an atlas as a special collection of maps in the one format and by the one author. Born in Antwerp in 1527, Ortelius travelled widely throughout Europe in his youth but it was not until 1563 that he started practising as a cartographer. In 1560 he had travelled with Gerard Mercator, an established and prominent cartographer, and under his influence developed the first recognised, published atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum or Atlas of the Whole World, which first appeared in 1570. Following the pioneering work of Ortelius and Mercator, the seventeenth century saw the emergence of the atlas as the dominant cartographic form by the Dutch and has been described by some authors as ‘the age of atlases’. Plates were sold, inherited or otherwise passed from one publisher to another and used for decades, often with little change or alteration, particularly by some of the minor cartographers. While Blaeu and another Dutch cartographer, Janssonius, brought the atlas to its highest art form, a large number of publishers’ atlases began to appear, particularly during the second half of the seventeenth century. Many were also engravers and in the course of their businesses acquired cartographic materials and produced maps, either publishing them in atlases or submitting them to other publishers. Claes Jansz Visscher was one such example, an engraver who printed the maps of others. His son inherited the business and continued to add new titles, meeting a wide range of clientele by also producing cheap editions. However, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the practice of creating compilation atlases, made to order for clients and consisting of maps by various publishers, lead to a gradual decline in the quality of the cartography. In contrast, maritime atlases, such as those compiled by Doncker, Blaeu and Johannes van Keulen (who appeared towards the end of the century), endured for much longer, with some of their firms continuing into the nineteenth century. Accessing the atlasWhen not on exhibition, the atlas may be viewed, by prior appointment, through the Map Reading Room, located on the Lower Ground 1 level of the Library. The reading room is open 9 am–5 pm on weekdays. Maura O’Connor, Map Curator Hendrick
Doncker (1626–1699)
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