Jacob Colom, L'ardante ou flamboyante colom de la mer (Amsterdam, 1644).

The north coast of Britain as seen through the eyes of a Dutch pilot, from a book of navigational charts produced by Jacob Aertsz Colom. It is possible to pick out Hartlepool and Sunderland on the diagram below, as well as Scarborough and Whitby. Colom was struggling to assert his own business against the monopoly that W.J. Blaeu held in the Dutch market for printed maps, and was not against using a cheap pun to do so. On the engraved title page to this French edition of his charts he has inserted his own name into the title, which refers to a French name for Tierra del Fuego. The pun worked just as well in his native Dutch (De vyerighe colom) so he used it as the title to a number of books of charts and maps, and in later English editions as well (The new fierie sea-colomne). Books of this type are quite rare as they were used in navigation and were consequently as vulnerable to the rigours of travel as the men who used them.

Gift of Matthew Prior.