| Summary: | Taken from title: "From: Descriptio ac delineatio geographica detectionis Freti". This map is the first to depict Hudson Bay. It is found in the first printed record of Henry Hudson's fourth and final voyage. The career of Hessel Gerritsz, although apprenticed to Willem Jansz (Blaeu), flourished before that of his master's. Gerritsz became the official cartographer to the Dutch East India Company in 1617, and upon his death in 1632 this title passed to Blaeu. Hudson had already made three accomplished voyages of discovery. The third, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company in 1609, led to the discovery of the river named after him. A group of English merchants employed him to follow up earlier attempts to find a North West Passage. In April 1610 Hudson set sail in the Discovery, the same ship that carried Weymouth, and after reaching Greenland eventually worked his way into 'a spacious sea' and discovered Hudson Bay. Heading south along the eastern shore they wintered at the southernmost point of James Bay. After a bitter and cruel winter the melting ice finally freed the ship in early June and a few days later the crew mutinied. The crew set adrift Hudson, his son and seven others in a small open top boat. They were never heard of again. We have to thank one Abacuck Prickett for the survival of a map. Only eight men made it back to England in September 1611. Not one of them was ever punished. The map somehow made its way to Amsterdam where in 1612 Gerritz published the first account of the voyage. The map was issued first in the Dutch edition and then again in the same year in a Latin version entitled Descriptio ac delineatio geographica detectionis Freti . Each of these appears in two separate issues. The Latin edition was repeated in 1613, again in two distinct versions. In 1613 Johann Theodore de Bry published the tenth part of his Petit Voyages. Included was a description of Hudson's voyage and a reduced version of this map." (Burden) "Tabula Nautica, the most popular map of its day, sold as fast as ...
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