Brasilia et Peruvia.

Description

El Dorado Placed on the Map, Two Years Before Raleigh Went to Find It.

One of the First Dedicated Maps of South America.

This magnificent map, Cornelis De Jode’s 1593 Brasilia et Pervvia, is one of the most significant and visually compelling maps of South America produced in the sixteenth century. Published in the sole edition of De Jode’s Speculum Orbis Terrae (Antwerp, 1593) and never reprinted, it is among the first dedicated maps of the continent to appear in any atlas, predated within the De Jode firm only by Gerard De Jode’s map of 1578. It surpassed contemporary treatments by Ortelius and De Bry in both accuracy and decorative ambition.

The map carries a distinction unique in the cartographic record: it is the first printed map to show the location of the mythical Lake of El Dorado, two years before Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1595 expedition to Guiana set out to find it. The example offered here is in exceptional original hand color.

The Map in Detail

The map extends from Central America and the Caribbean in the north to the full length of South America, terminating beyond the Strait of Magellan in a massive Terra Australis, labeled here Chaldia, seu Australis Terra, quà nautarum vulgo: Terra di Fuego vocant, alia Psittacorum Terram (Chaldia, or the Southern Land, which sailors commonly called the Land of Fire, others the Land of Parrots), understood not as a small island but as the edge of a vast unknown continent. The Pacific is labeled Mare Pacificum, the equator and Tropic of Capricorn are ruled across the sheet, and the Strait of Magellan is given both its common name (Estrecho de Magallanes) and the earlier designation Estrecho de la Victoria, named for Magellan’s flagship by Pigafetta. Very few maps preserve this usage.

In the interior, the great rivers are drawn with considerable care, and it is here that the map makes its most historically charged contribution. A large lake is shown at the headwaters of the Paraguay River, in the vicinity of the vast Pantanal flood plain. This is the first printed map to locate the mythical Lake of El Dorado, the fabled source of fabulous wealth. At this date, the legend had not yet migrated north to the Orinoco headwaters, where later cartographers following Raleigh’s account would place the equally legendary Lake Parime. De Jode’s version predates that shift, capturing the El Dorado myth at a precise and transitional moment in its geographical life.

Throughout the map, Latin annotations describe the peoples and creatures of the continent with a combination of ethnographic curiosity and outright wonder. The Brazilians are noted as cannibals who conduct seasonal raids on their neighbors, a charge given visual weight by the scene of figures in the Brazilian interior that, on close inspection, proves to be a cannibal episode. The Patagonians encountered by Magellan’s crew are noted as giants. Among the fauna: a giant hogfish (whose flesh is said to be very beneficial); the Alois, a scaleless fish resembling something between a goose and a plesiosaur; a creature with the foreparts of a fox and the hindparts of a monkey; and a beast that neither eats nor drinks, subsisting entirely on wind.

The decorative program is elaborate. Native figures appear throughout, some at peace, some in active combat with helmeted conquistadors. The Pacific and Atlantic carry galleons under sail, sea monsters, flying fish with vivid red fins, and native war canoes. The cartouche at the head of the sheet is an architectural ornament in red, blue, and gold. The whole is in vibrant original hand color: the landmasses washed in greens, yellows, and pink, the seas left clean, the decorative elements picked out with precision. The dedication at the head of the sheet names Theodore Echter von Mespelbrunn, Prince-Bishop of Würzburg and a leading figure of the Counter-Reformation in Germany.

Historical Context

By 1593 the coasts of South America had been known to European navigators for nearly a century, but the interior remained one of the great unknowns of the world, a space into which imagination flowed freely where geographical knowledge ran out. The Portuguese had been establishing settlements along the Brazilian coast since the 1530s, their captaincies strung along a littoral they controlled but had not penetrated far inland. The Spanish had moved with greater violence and greater speed: Pizarro destroyed the Inca Empire between 1532 and 1535, the Viceroyalty of Peru was established in 1542, and by mid-century the silver of Potosí was flowing north to the Caribbean and across the Atlantic to Seville in quantities that reoriented the European economy. Santiago had been founded, Buenos Aires had been attempted twice, and Orellana had descended the entire length of the Amazon in 1541–42, the first European to do so, returning with accounts that confirmed both the river’s staggering scale and the presence of large, organized societies along its banks. What the continent’s interior actually contained, however, remained the subject of active speculation — and the speculation was fed by a steady stream of conquistadors, missionaries, and survivors who brought back accounts that mixed careful observation with wishful invention.

The most consequential of these inventions was El Dorado. The legend grew from indigenous accounts of a ritual at Lake Guatavita in the highlands of what is now Colombia, in which a chief covered in gold dust was offered into the lake. This kernel of fact expanded, through retelling and desire, into the conviction that somewhere in the unmapped interior lay a city or lake of inexhaustible gold. By the 1590s, the legend had attached itself to various geographies depending on who was telling it and where they had been looking. De Jode’s map places it at the headwaters of the Paraguay, in the great floodplain of the Pantanal, a location that reflected current accounts from the south rather than the north. Two years after this map was published, Sir Walter Raleigh sailed to Guiana on the strength of different accounts, and his report shifted the legend’s geography permanently northward to the Orinoco basin and the lake he called Parime. De Jode’s version is a snapshot of the El Dorado myth before Raleigh moved it.

The other great legend represented on this map is the Terra Australis, the vast southern continent whose existence was deduced from the belief that the world’s landmasses must be balanced between hemispheres. Tierra del Fuego, glimpsed by Magellan’s crew in 1520 and by Drake in 1578, was understood not as an island but as the northern promontory of this immense land. It would take another century and a half of southern navigation to disprove the theory. In the meantime, the Patagonian shore was the site of its own legend: Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s voyage described the inhabitants as giants, and De Jode duly notes them. The map is, in this sense, as much a document of what Europeans believed about South America in 1593 as of what they knew.

Publication History and Census

Cornelis De Jode (1568–1600), engraver and publisher; Antwerp, 1593. Published in the sole edition of Speculum Orbis Terrae (Antwerp, 1593). The plates were subsequently acquired by Jan Baptist Vrients and destroyed.