1684 / 1702 van Keulen Nautical Map of Bermuda

Johannes Van Keulen (1654 – 1715) was a Dutch cartographer active in Amsterdam during the late 17th century. Van Keulen was the son of Lucas van Keulen. Van Keulen's firm, ‘In de Gekroonde Lootsman' (In the Crowned Pilot), was founded in 1678 and registered with the Amsterdam bookseller's guild as 'Cross staff-maker and bookseller.' (The cross-staff is a nautical instrument used to determine latitude.) Two years later, in 1680, they obtained a patent from the States General of Holland and West Friesland to publish nautical charts and atlases. Together with his partner, the cartographer Claes Janz Vooght, Van Keulen published numerous atlases and nautical charts, including the Zee Atlas and Nieuwe Lichtende Zee-Fakkel. It was a massive five-volume atlas containing more than 130 nautical charts. The Zee-Fakkel established the Van Keulen firm as the pre-eminent maker of Dutch sea charts in the late 17th and early 18th century. In 1714, one year before Johannes Van Keulen's death, his son, Gerard van Keulen (1678 - 1726), took charge. Gerard continued to update and republish the Zee-Fakkel until his own death in 1726. The firm was later passed on to Gerard's son, Johannes II Van Keulen (1704 - 1755), who significantly updated the atlas, especially with regard to Asia, issuing the 1753 4th Volume, known as the 'Secret Atlas'. The final editions of the atlas were published by Gerard Hulst van Keulen (1733 - 1801), Joannes II's son. The final true Van Keulen edition of the Zee-Fakkel was published posthumously in 1803. It is noteworthy that though ostensibly controlled by the Van Keulen men, it was the Van Keulen widows who maintained and managed the firm in the periods following their husbands' deaths. After the death of Gerard Hulst Van Keulen's son, Johannes Hulst Van Keulen, ownership of the family plates and business fell into the hands of the Swart family, who continued to publish until the company closed its doors 1885, ending a cartographic legacy spanning nearly 207 years. More by this mapmaker...

Richard Norwood (c.1590 – 1675) was an English mathematician, diver, and surveyor. He has been called 'Bermuda’s outstanding genius of the seventeenth century'. He had been sent to Bermuda by the Bermuda Company, not initially to survey the islands but to harvest pearls. Norwood had devised an early form of diving bell, with which he had succeeded in retrieving a cannon from Lymington Harbor, England. The Company hoped to employ Norwood's device to harvest pearls from the oyster beds they believed surrounded the islands. When a wealth of pearls failed to materialize, the Company instead reassigned Norwood to survey the islands, and he executed several surveys between 1614 and 1617. These would provide the basis of the dominant printed images of Bermuda of the seventeenth century, first published by Speed in 1622 and copied by Blaeu and Hondius. Despite accusations of collusion with the governor to assign to the governor and himself eight shares of the best land in the islands, he retained a long association with the place. Although he held land patents in Virginia, he does not seem to have ever travelled there, remaining instead in the Bermudas until the 1630s. He primarily made his living at that time in London as a teacher of mathematics, but continued geographical work, producing for example a sophisticated survey of the route between London and York. Using observations of the sun at various latitudes, he produced the most accurate estimation of the length of a degree of the meridian that had ever been done in England: his work would be noted by Newton in his Principia Mathematica. During the English Civil War he returned to Bermuda, there to work underr a government grant as a schoolmaster. He is credited with founding Bermuda's oldest school, Warwick Academy, in 1662; that same year he produced a further survery of the islands. He died at Bermuda in 1675, aged about eighty-five. Learn More...

Arent Roggeveen (1658 - November 27, 1679) was a Dutch hydrographer, cartographer, mathematician, poet, and astronomer active in the second half of the 17th century. Robgeveen was born in Delfshaven. Little is known of his education, but in 1658, he settled as a schoolmaster in Middleburg, seat of both the EIC and VOC. He later worked as a surveyor and a measurements expert in the wine industry - positions that made him reasonably wealthy. Around 1670, the VOC contracted him to compile and rectify their disparate archive of highly-secret sea charts. These were engraved and published in 1675 by Roggeveen and Pieter Goos. Roggeveen became obsessed with the notation of Terre Australis; a speculated continued occupying much of the southern hemisphere. In 1767, he received a patent from the Staten-Generaal to lead an expedition of discovery to the South Seas, but was unable to attract the necessary investment; it did not launch until the early 17th century, when his son, Jacob Roggeveen (1659 – 1729), made the voyage from 1721-22, in the process discovering Easter Island. Learn More...