Hondius-Jansson America Septentrionalis 1636 UTA

This famous Dutch map exhibits the general state of European knowledge (and ignorance) about North America at the time of its first publication in 1636. Much of the hard earned knowledge came from danger filled explorations funded by various chartered companies. The map shows Hudson's Bay, reflecting knowledge of the results of Hudson's last fatal voyage of 1610 under the auspices of the English Virginia and East India Companies. Nearby Button's Bay was named for Welshman Thomas Button who had explored it in 1612 while seeking to determine what happened to Hudson and his followers who had been cast adrift by mutineers the year before. The Company of the Merchants Discoverers of the North-West Passage, or Northwest Company, funded Button's voyage. Dutch knowledge of his discovery and the depiction of California as an island probably came from Englishman Henry Brigg's map The North Part of America, published 1625 in Samuel Purchas' compendium of travel accounts titled Purchas, His Pilgrims. "Lac de Champlain" and the extension of the St. Lawrence to "Lac des Iroquois" (Lake Ontario) provide evidence of Champlain's extensive explorations associated with French companies granted monopolies on fur trading and colonization.


Henricus Hondius and his brother-in-law and partner Joannes Janssonius were heirs to an extensive family cartography, printing, and publishing business. In 1602 Henricus' father Jodocus had acquired the copperplates for the maps in Mercator's Atlas, which the Hondius family continued to publish for a number of years. In 1629 Hondius and Janssonius began work on a complete revision or Atlas Novus.