Dutch Maritime Museum

Joan Blaeu is regarded as the Rembrandt of cartographers. He lived in the 17th "Golden Age" in the Netherlands. From 1638 to 1673, he made maps for the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Joan Blaeu is known for his globes and his masterful atlas which can be found in the beautiful Maritime Museum or the Shipping Museum of Amsterdam. On his globes and maps, you can see that by the 17th century, there was already a quite good technique to determine longitude (EW position) and thus draw the coastlines of the continents fairly accurately. This is a significant difference from maps that are a century older. On those maps, it appears that the continents were drawn rather "crookedly." This was caused by the lack of a good method to determine longitude. However, there were already good techniques to accurately determine latitude. You can also see on Blaeu's maps that Antarctica and the shape of Australia were not well known. Only 30 signed maps by Blaeu are known. Recently, in 2006, the last 8 were discovered in a drawer in a library in Oxford, which were purchased by the Maritime Museum.

Dromos