Pas-Caart van Guinea en de Custen daer aen gelegen Van Cabo verde tot Cabo de Bona Esperanca.

Description

The Slave Coast, the Gold Coast, Angola, and the Cape — The Whole of West Africa on One Dutch Sea Chart.

Heightened in gold and with original contemporary color.

This handsome sea chart presents the entire west coast of Africa from Cape Verde in the northwest to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, covering the full extent of the coastline that Dutch merchant and naval vessels were required to navigate on voyages to and from the East Indies. Published by Pieter Goos in Amsterdam as part of his De Zee-Atlas ofte Water-Wereld, first issued in 1666, it is a working chart in the pas-caart tradition (a course chart designed for practical navigation) and combines careful hydrographic detail with the decorative assurance that made Goos the pre-eminent sea chart publisher of the Dutch Golden Age.

The Map in Detail

The African coastline occupies the left portion of the sheet, rendered in the characteristic Dutch manner with a colored coastal strip and dense Portuguese- and Dutch-derived toponymy. The regions of West Africa are identified by their commercial designations: Mandinga, Melegette, and Greencust in the Senegambian zone; Guinea proper; Quaquas (the Ivory Coast); Goutcuft (the Gold Coast); Benin; Gabon; Loango; Angola; and the Cimbas region further south, leading toward the Cape. The Cape Verde Islands appear in the lower left, the largest shown in green wash.

The equatorial line, Linea Equinoctialis, bisects the sheet, and the Tropicus Capricorni crosses the lower portion. Three compass roses govern the composition, with rhumb lines radiating across the full expanse of the South Atlantic. The name AFRICAES is inscribed in large decorative italic script across the ocean. A scale bar at the lower center gives distances in three standards, Dutch, Spanish, and English and French leagues, for the benefit of navigators of different nations. The cartouche in the upper left, framed in a Baroque surround of coral-red scrollwork, carries the full title.

Historical Context

The coast charted here was the commercial and human artery of the Dutch trading empire at its seventeenth-century zenith. The Gold Coast and the Slave Coast — the Quaquas, Goutcuft, and Benin regions of the chart — were the zones in which the Dutch West India Company operated its trading forts and conducted the slave trade that supplied the Caribbean plantations of European colonial powers. Angola, further south, was the principal Portuguese slaving zone, and the route past its coast and around the Cape was the only sea road to the Dutch East Indies.

Goos published his Zee-Atlas at the precise moment when Dutch maritime power and cartographic production were at their simultaneous peak, and his charts circulated across northern Europe regardless of the buyer’s nationality — a point made explicit by the trilingual scale bar. His Amsterdam shop, in de Vergulde Zee-spiegel (at the Gilded Sea Mirror) on the Nieuwendijk, was among the most important addresses in European cartography.

Publication History and Census

Published by Pieter Goos (c. 1616–1675) in Amsterdam as a plate in De Zee-Atlas ofte Water-Wereld, which first appeared in 1666 and was reissued in successive editions through 1675, the year of Goos’s death. The atlas subsequently passed to other Amsterdam publishers.