The Vingboons Chart of the James River, Virginia, circa 1617

Abstract

I N the late i630s, a young Dutch cartographer named Johannes Vingboons gave the finishing touches to a nautical chart of the James River in Virginia. As he inked in the contours of the river and recorded the soundings made by his informant at the English colony, he worked carefully; the success of trade ventures and even the lives of sailors using his chart in the future depended on its accuracy. He hoped such a map would attract the interest of Willem Janszoon Blaeu, master chartmaker for the Dutch East India Company and famous for his Atlas Major of the world. The map might also gain the attention of the Dutch West India Company, whose interests lay closer to Virginia. The James River chart joined his growing collection of maps, charts, coastal drawings, and architectural sketches of places spanning the globe-places he had never seen. The farthest he or his family had traveled was from Mechlin, Belgium, to Amsterdam forty years before.1 Vingboons began his career during the golden age of Dutch mapmaking, following in the footsteps of such master cartographers as Gerhard Mercator, Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, Petrus Plancius, and Jodocus Hondius. The impetus for this efflorescence of mapand chartmaking came after the Low Countries rebelled against their Spanish master. When the Dutch began their overseas expansion, they needed the best nautical charts available for the use of their pilots-charts then in the hands of the Spaniards and Portuguese. Dutch pilots and cartographers thus frequented foreign ports in order to obtain copies of existing maps. Jan Huighen van Lindschoten spent five years in the Portuguese Indian colony of Goa between I583 and I588,