India quae Orientalis dicitur et Insulae Adiacentes

Circa 1606–1609

Copper engraving with contemporary hand-colouring on paper

15.5 x 19.25 in (39.5 x 48.8 cm)

India quae Orientalis dicitur et Insulae Adiacentes — Hondius’s Monumental Map of Maritime Asia

This grand folio map, India quae Orientalis dicitur et Insulae Adiacentes, represents one of the most influential Dutch visualisations of maritime Asia at the opening of the seventeenth century. Issued by Jodocus Hondius from the Mercator plate tradition, it presents “India Orientalis” in its early modern sense, extending from the Indian subcontinent across Southeast Asia to China, Japan, and the island worlds of the East Indies.

The map is structured as a navigational chart as much as a geographic statement, overlaid with an extensive rhumb-line network radiating from multiple compass roses. Coastlines of India, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Philippines, and New Guinea are rendered with a clarity reflecting accumulated Iberian and Dutch maritime intelligence. Political boundaries are subordinate to coastal articulation and sea routes, underscoring the map’s orientation toward oceanic movement, trade, and imperial reach.

The sheet is further distinguished by two finely engraved ornamental cartouches executed in the Northern Mannerist idiom. The elaborate title cartouche, composed of scrolling strapwork and floral motifs, frames the Latin title and asserts the map’s scope and authority. A second dedication cartouche, addressed to Christophorus Thysius, situates the work within the learnt and mercantile patronage networks of the Dutch Republic.

Issued in the Mercator–Hondius atlases that defined early seventeenth-century cartographic authority, the map stands as a foundational image of Asia conceived as a connected maritime world shaped by navigation, commerce, and European expansion.

NON-EXPORTABLE

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