"All men are as grass and all their glory as flowers of the field. The wages of sin is death." Edward Luther Stevenson's Personal Facsimile of One of the Greatest Dutch World Maps Ever Made.

A fantastic Edward Bierstadt facsimile of the Jodocus Hondius (or Jodocus Hondius II) 8-sheet world map, first published in Amsterdam circa 1611.

This map, known in only two examples of supposed later states (with a third having been destroyed in the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906), is one of the great triumphs of the Hondius firm, with Shirley (273) calling it "an outstanding masterpiece of cartographical engraving which may be considered to surpass even those wall maps of Blaeu (1605), Plancius (1607), and Hondius' own predecessor map of 1608 on Mercator's projection." Shirley outlines the ambiguity surrounding the authorship of the map, saying "Jodocus Hondius senior died in 1612 and it cannot be positively established whether the original map was by him or by his elder son of the same name." Shirley says of the North American cartography: "In North America, Hondius has used the occasion to expound current theories postulating a vast inland sea west of present-day Virginia." This was in fact the early John Smith mapping of Virginia, which Jodocus Hondius had seen from Henry Hudson in 1608.

The map includes information from Weymouth's expedition to Maine, Smith's early exploration of Virginia recounted in 1608, the 1609 Hudson voyage to Nova Zemblaya, but not the later Hudson expeditions. In this updated state it shows the Schouten and Le Maire discovery.

One of the most striking aspects of the map is its inclusion, in the upper-left quadrant, of a momento mori cartouch with death's own coat of arms. The text, in Latin, are the Biblical phrases: Peter 1:24 "All men are as grass and all their glory as flowers of the field." and Romans 6:23 "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." The cartouche takes on particularly poignance when it is considered that the map was made in the final year of Jodocus Hondius's life.

The map comes with a 19-page pamphlet edited by Edward Luther Stevenson and Joseph Fisher. It and the map were published in 1907. The pamphlet describes the production of the facsimile map:

The photographic negatives of the map, made in Feldkirch by the photographer Alois Gnädinger under the direction of Professor Gottfried Richen, S.J., were sent to Mr. Edward Bierstadt, New York City, and in his establishment, which is distinguished for the excellence of its work, the map has been artistically reproduced, faithful to the original in every detail. The printing of the map and of the descriptive text has been under the supervision of Professor Stevenson. The expense of the undertaking is jointly carried by The American Geographical Society and The Hispanic Society of America.

This is a facsimile of the 1618 example of the map which today still resides in Schloss Wolfegg where Fischer found it in 1901.

The Edward Luther Stevenson Collection

Edward Luther Stevenson was among the most important scholars of early cartography active at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. He was responsible for numerous cartobibliographic books, including the first translation of Ptolemy to English, as well as a series of impressive facsimile maps produced while he was at the Hispanic Society of New York. Dr. Stevenson viewed facsimiles as integral to the study of early cartography, and he committed himself to building an unparalleled collection of photographs of early maps and globes. Much of his collection was donated to Yale University after his death (click on the title link above for about that), but the present item comes from a large collection of photos, manuscripts, and related material that were part of Stevenson's library, but were not donated to Yale. It is truly an impressive collection and many of the items, though reproductions, have serious antiquarian merit. As Alexander O. Vietor said about Stevenson collection that went to Yale "this is the stuff of which great libraries are made."