A striking general chart of Scandinavian and Arctic waters, extending from Scotland and Iceland eastward across Norway and Lapland to Nova Zemlya, with Jan Mayen and Spitsbergen to the north.

Published in Part I of Van Keulen’s Nieuwe Groote Lichtende Zee-Fakkel, devoted to the North and northern European seas, the chart gave a small-scale overview of a region treated in much greater detail by other charts in the atlas. The chart belongs to a long Amsterdam tradition of Arctic mapping, drawing on information accumulated by explorers, whalers, merchants, and earlier chartmakers.

The chart has a number of interesting features. At upper left a faint curving line marks the imperfectly known east coast of Greenland. The label “’t Landt door Gaal Hamkes opgedaan in ’t Iaar 1654” reflects land sighted by the Dutch whaler Gaal Hamke, probably near present-day Wollaston Forland or the Pendulum Islands. The feature had appeared on Dutch charts by Colom and Doncker decades earlier, and the faint engraving of the surrounding coast appears to acknowledge its speculative nature. The treatment makes an interesting contrast with Moses Pitt’s contemporary Map of the North-Pole (1680), which renders Greenland’s northeast coast with much more confidence.

Southwest of Spitsbergen, a ship and its boats pursue whales in the open sea, reflecting the importance of the Arctic whale fishery to the Dutch in the later 17th century. Also of interest is the so-called “Kimmen line,” the fine curving line at the southern end of the chart running from Norway through the gap between Scotland and the Faeroe Islands. This marked roughly the outer limit of the shallow, soundable waters northwest of Europe—the edge of what we would now call the continental shelf.

The chart’s most memorable feature is the cartouche, engraved by Jan Luyken[1], with figures engaged in characteristic northern activities: a man fastening on skis, another carrying a walrus head, a woman milking a goat, and a hunter firing from a reindeer-drawn sledge. At least some of the figures, particularly the skier and the hunter in the sledge, were evidently intended to represent the Sámi, or “Laplanders” in contemporary terminology. They have an interesting parallel in Luyken’s illustrations for the 1682 Dutch edition of Johannes Schefferus’s Lapland, which likewise depict Sámi hunting, skiing, and traveling by reindeer sledge.

References
F. C. Wieder, The Dutch Discovery and Mapping of Spitsbergen (1596–1829), #167. C. Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, vol. IV, p. 31.