Book Description

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) was one of the most important cartographers of the 16th century. His 'Atlas of the World' is one of the highlights in the cartographic collection of the Maritime Museum Rotterdam. It was assembled out of three copies of Mercator's famous Map of the World of 1569. In this map Mercator employed a new type of projection, with increasing latitude towards the poles. This so-called 'Mercator projection' marked the beginning of a new era in the evolution of navigation charts and is still widely used today. Today, only three copies of the world map and two fragments in the 'Mercator Atlas of Europe' (collection British Library) have been preserved. But only the copy of the Maritiem Museum Rotterdam has been carefully assembled, probably by Mercator himself in the form of an atlas: the 'Atlas of the World'. It contains remarkably large maps of oceans and continents, and is therefore thought to be a prototype for a sea-atlas that was never taken into production. 0Translation of the Dutch edition (2009), 978-90-5730-611-2.