Early miniature map of New Guinea

A miniature map of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Alhough the map is attributed to Bertius, he only supplied the text for the atlas: Hondius engraved a new set of maps for this edition with longitude and latitude lines.

This map was published a decade after Willem Janzoon's charting of the Cape York Peninsula of Australia in 1606, although there is no reference to Janzoon's belief that the land he mapped was a southern promontory of New Guinea. Instead New Guinea has become an island, separated from the Great Southern Continent, with the north coast filled with names but the south shown only as conjectural. However an elongated land mass runs south from the Solomons which resembles Cape York, suggesting Hondius was using an unknown source that knew the peninsula was not part of New Guinea, superceding Janzoon.