In desperation, the Dutch decided to fight their way to the Spice Islands and Southeast Asia by way of the coast of Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. Dutch navigators, already familiar with the waters of the North Sea and the Baltic, probed vainly for a northern route to the Far East that would circumvent the Spanish and Portuguese fleets patrolling their trade routes, but the passage could not be found. The last decade of the 16th century heralded the emergence of the Dutch as the colonial power that was to supersede Portugal as the premier trading nation in Asia and establish a tyrannical hold on the East Indian Islands and the trade therefrom for the next 350 years. The Dutch Pioneering Voyage to the East Indies The four ships in De Houtman’s fleet are shown in the map sailing north of Java to the west and possibly representing the fleet returning to the Sunda Strait after circumnavigating Java island. The map shows the dangerous southern route to the Spice Islands via the Java Sea, which was threatened by Muslim States hostile to the Portuguese. The map is base on the work of Linschoten and derived from an identical map, but with the addition of six vignettes, compiled by Willem Lodewijcksz, a member of Cornelius de Houtman’s pioneering voyage to the East Indies in 1595-97. Antique Map of Sumatra, Borneo and Java by De Bry titled ‘Nova tabula Infularum Iava, Sumatra, Borneonis et aliarum Mallaccam usqua, delineate in insula Iava, ubi ad vivum designantur vada et Brevia Scopulique interjacentes defcripta a C.M.A.L’.Ī very rare and much sought-after late 16th century map of Sumatra, Borneo, Java and the southern part of the Malay peninsula engraved and published by the German engraver and bookseller Theodore de Bry in the German edition of Part II of De Bry’s Petits Voyages published in Frankfurt in 1598.
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