Leen Helmink Antique Maps

Johannes de Laet (Latinised as Johannes Latius) was one of the most important Dutch geographers, historians, and colonial administrators of the seventeenth century. Born in Antwerp in 1581 and raised in Leiden after the fall of Antwerp, he was educated within the humanist culture of the young Leiden University. Trained in classical languages and natural philosophy, he entered commerce rather than academia, spending years in London and Rouen and developing the international networks that later supported his scholarly and cartographic work.

De Laet’s decisive public role began in 1621, when he became a founding director (bewindhebber) of the Dutch West India Company (WIC). His fellow directors soon recognised him as the Company’s most informed authority on geography, ethnography, and overseas intelligence. A careful and empirical thinker, De Laet consistently argued for stable commercial expansion rather than purely military conquest. His access to reports, journals, pilot charts, and correspondence from Dutch Brazil, New Netherland, Guiana, the Caribbean, and the South Atlantic gave him an unparalleled documentary base with which to study the New World.

It is this wealth of primary material that enabled De Laet to produce his major scholarly achievement: the Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien, first published at Leiden in 1625. The work, expanded in several later editions, became the single most authoritative Dutch account of the Americas in the first half of the seventeenth century. Combining detailed descriptions of coastlines, peoples, flora and fauna, and natural resources with historical narratives of discovery, colonisation, and conflict, it offered European readers an unprecedentedly factual and wide-ranging synthesis of the New World.

A defining feature of the Beschrijvinghe, and a key reason for its enduring significance, is its suite of maps, executed by Hessel Gerritsz, the leading Dutch cartographer of his generation and official hydrographer of the VOC and the WIC.

Gerritsz had exclusive access to WIC archives, including pilots’ logs, reconnaissance charts, and intelligence reports that were unavailable to other European mapmakers. This resulted in some of the earliest reliable printed cartographies of the Caribbean, Brazil, the Guianas, and especially New Netherland.