Philippe Vandermaelen: Océanique. Iles Galapagos. No. 17
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Cartographer:
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Philippe Vandermaelen
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Title:
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Océanique. Iles Galapagos. No. 17
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Date:
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1827
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Published:
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Brussels
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Width:
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22 inches / 56 cm
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Height:
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18 inches / 46 cm
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Map ref:
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SAM3206
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Description:
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Early large-scale lithographic map of the Gálapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean and part of the Republic of Ecuador. The volcanic archipelago is named Galápagos which means Tortoises, after it’s endemic population of reptiles. The knowledge of the archipelago for this time was quite good - the coastlines, shoals and some basic topographic features are fairly well mapped, although the map does feel somewhat sketchy.
Whilst the island group is first recorded as being visited by the Bishop of Panama Tomás de Berlanga in 1535 and appears on 16th Century maps by cartography greats such as Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator, one of the very first obtainable maps to focus on the Galápagos islands was published in 1774 by Emanuel Bowen for Harris’s “Navigantium”. This map was based on the 1684 landing and description by English Captain William Ambrosia Cowley who during his circumnavigation of the world sighted and stopped on the island. Just eight years after this map was published by Vandermaelen, in September 1835, the H. M. S. Beagle directed under Captain Robert FitzRoy and with a young Charles Darwin aboard would come to survey the island and study its geology, flora and fauna.
A panel of text occupies the left hand side of the map and is a continuation of the description for Australia (Nouvelle Hollandia).
Philippe Vandermaelen
Philippe Vandermaelen was born in Brussels in 1795 and, at the age of 21, inherited a fortune from his father who had been a successful soap manufacturer. Financially independent, Vandermaelen was able to devote his life to the study of geography and in 1829 he founded a geographical institute in Brussels.
Vandermaelen's most important work, entitled "Atlas Universel", was an enormous atlas consisting of over 400 separate map sheets covering the world on the huge scale of 1:1,6 million. Each map sheet was designed using a special projection so that, if the owner of the maps so wished, they could all be joined together to form a globe with a diameter of 7.75 meters (This globe was actually built in Vandermaelen's institute in Brussels). The map sheets were printed using the process of lithography, which was an early use of this printing method for map making, and were then usually delicately hand coloured to emphasise boundaries and outlines. The complete atlas took only 3 years to make, a very short time for such a large project, and it was sold in instalments over a two year period from 1825.
Examples of Vandermaelen's map sheets are of great interest to the collector for a number of reasons. Firstly their large scale. The sections depict many of the remoter regions of the world on a scale previously unknown or unattainable. Particularly for the collector of Americana and Australasia, the sheets covering the western United States and Pacific respectively, where exploration was still in very early stages, are unique in this respect. Their historical insets, descriptions and statistics, along with their great visual clarity, make Vandermaelen's maps fascinating and valuable antique documents which also have superb visual appeal.
Original hand colour. [SAM3206] |