A handsome early chart of the northern seas, extending from Scotland and the Shetlands across Iceland and Jan Mayen to the northern reaches of Scandinavia. Among its more unusual features are the diagonal orientation and the curving “De Kimmen” line at lower left, representing mariners’ early practical knowledge of the European continental shelf.

Doncker’s chart belongs clearly to a cartographic lineage established by the Colom family, and particularly to Arnold Colom’s “Nieuwe Pascaart” of ca 1655. Its unusual orientation, geographic coverage, and much of its detail are strongly reminiscent of the Colom. With north toward the upper right rather than the top of the sheet, the long Norwegian coast can be treated in detail, while enabling Iceland, Jan Mayen, and Spitsbergen to be included at a useful scale.

But Doncker’s chart was hardly a slavish copy of Colom’s. Comparison of the two reveals numerous added place names, modifications to coastal outlines, and other changes. Of particular interest is Doncker’s addition of “De Kimmen,” the fine, curving line at the southern end of the chart running from Norway and through the gap between Scotland and the Faeroe Islands. THis so-called Kimmen Line marked roughly the outer limit of the shallow, soundable waters northwest of Europe—the edge of what we would now call the continental shelf.

This process of adaptation and correction was characteristic of Hendrick Doncker. He entered the Amsterdam book trade in 1647 and emerged as a chartmaker and publisher during the 1650s, issuing the first edition of his De Zee-Atlas ofte Water-Waereld in 1659. Doncker invited working mariners to report errors and new observations for incorporation into later editions, and Koeman praises him for correcting and replacing his charts more frequently than his contemporaries. The present chart provides a good example: according to Wieder, Doncker revised it in 1665, principally by substituting an improved delineation of Spitsbergen for the older Colom-derived geography used here.

In all, an appealing chart from the early years of Doncker’s Zee-Atlas, indebted to Arnold Colom but elaborated and updated in Doncker’s usual manner.

References
R. V. Tooley, “Printed Charts of Scandinavia,” Map Collectors’ Circle, no. 70 (1971), #408. F. C. Wieder, The Dutch Discovery and Mapping of Spitsbergen (1596–1829), #118 (and #134 for the 1665 2^nd state of the chart). For the Kimmen Line, see Jeremy Pool, “The Kimmen Line: Seventeenth-Century North Atlantic Navigation and the Continental Shelf,” Terrae Incognitae 38:1 (2006), pp. 26–35. For Koeman’s comment on Doncker’s approach, see Cornelis Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, vol. IV, pl 154.