Beschreibung:

BARENTSZ, Willem (c.1550-1597). Caertboeck vande Midlandtsche Zee [ Description de la Mer Mediterrannee auquel son delinees & descriptes au vif toutes les costes de la Mer Mediterrannee: Commençant de Gibraltar le long de Granade, Valence, Cataloigne, Provence & Itali e]. Amsterdam: Corneille Nicolas, 1607 [but 1609]. Extremely rare French-language edition of the first pilot atlas of the Mediterranean with printed charts. Waghenaer's Thresoor der Zeevaert (Leiden, 1592) was the first printed description of the Mediterranean, but was published without charts. The present lot first appeared in print in 1595, and was heavily influenced by the Italian tradition of portolans, both charts and written sailing directions; at the end of the present work appears a translation of Paolo Gerardo's Il Portolano del Mare , published in 1584. However, as Koeman notes, the text and coastal profiles are almost certainly original to the present work. Barentsz's chart book of the Mediterranean and his explorations in the Arctic were to make him one of the best-known pilots of the Low Countries in the latter part of the sixteenth-century. It formed a follow-up to Waghenaer's description of the western and northern coasts of Europe (see lot 7) and according to Koeman 'set the standard for all future pilot guides published in Amsterdam (Blaeu, Colom, Lootsman etc)'. Barentsz's chartbook would continue to be the only pilot of the Mediterranean until Blaeu published the third part of his Licht der Zeevaert in 1618. Although the French title-overslip is not present here, the collation appears to conform most closely to Koeman IV, Bar 4C, recording one institutional copy only at Yale, which lacks the general chart of the Mediterranean; we have only been able to trace one other similar copy, at the Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, Antwerp. Worldcat records another at the Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris, but this is in fact the 1626 edition. Folio (420 x 280mm). French text edition, engraved title, without the printed overslip in French, 1 folding map on 3 joined sheets and 9 double-page engraved maps (title with minor loss at inside edge, margins strengthened, and re-guarded, map 1 'Thalassographica' with small tear at fold (without loss), map 2 'Tabula hydrographica in qua Hispania' re-margined with border in facsimile and backed with loss to some words in text on verso, map 5 'Hydrographica descriptio in qua Hispaniae' with loss at lower right hand corner and restored with some facsimile, map 9 'Hydrographica tabula, in qua Siciliae' shaved at margins with left-hand edge cropped and loss at lower right hand corner restored with some facsimile, map 10 supplied from another copy, leaf 8.4 scored in margin and repaired, some variable light browning). Modern pasteboard binding (the whole reguarded). Provenance : erased bookplate.