Océanique - Partie de l’Ile de Java. No. 26

Early detailed lithographic map of the west of the island of Java, covering the modern day provinces of Banten, West Java, Central Java and Yogyakarta. The map marks the important trading city of Batavia (now Jakarta) and the major settlements of Banten, Cirebon and Semarang, showing administrative divisions. The island extends to show part of the Sunda Strait in the northwest, the Java Sea in the east and the Indian Ocean in the south.



In the lower centre of the map, a large text panel titled "Notes about the Asian Colonies of the Kingdom of the Netherlands". In the late 16th Century, a Dutch expedition led by Cornelis de Houtman landed in Indonesia, and along with other European expansionists like to Portuguese and British, they began to colonise the islands of the South East Asian archipelago. The Dutch used Java's capital Batavia as a primary base, forming the Batavian Republic in 1795, making full use of the island's natural wealth and its access to the Spice Islands. By 1800, the country was under the full jurisdiction of the Dutch East India Company, Indonesia even became known as the Dutch East Indies. This episode of colonisation was said to have worked well for both the Javanese and Dutch sultanates due to internal differences and civil wars. During the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) the Dutch and their territories fell into French hands. In 1811 the British launched an invasion on Java, landing in the undefended city of Batavia. Sir Stamford Raffles was appointed Governor of the island, which remained British territory until the ratification of the Treaty of Paris in 1814, when the Dutch regained control.



The geographical knowledge and the topographical detail on this map is astounding, incredibly illustrated using the lithographic process in striking original hand colour. (SL) [SEAS3161]


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.