This is a fac-simile of a cut in Lorenzo Crasso’s Elogii d’ Huomini letterati, Venice. 1666. There’s a portrait of him at sixty-two in the 1584 edition of Ptolemy, the second of Mercator’s own editing. It is engraved by Francis Hoggenberg. The engraving in the 1613 edition of Mercator’s Atlas represents Mercator and Hondius seated at a table, and is colored. There is said to be an engraving in the 1618 edition of Ptolemy, but it is wanting in the Harvard College copy. Cf. fac-similes of old prints in Raemdonck’s Mercator, in C. P. Daly’s address on The Early History of Cartography, and in Scribner’s Monthly, ii. 464. There is another portrait of Mercator in J. F. Foppens’ Bibliotheca Belgica, Bruxelles, 1739.
Reference has been made elsewhere to the conspicuous work of Gerard Mercator, which was a sort of culmination of his geographical views, in his great mappemonde of 1569.[730] Then after giving his attention to a closer study of Ptolemy and to the publication of an edition of the great Alexandrian geography, with a revision of Agathodæmon’s charts, but without any attempt to make them conform to the newer knowledge, he set about the compilation of a modern geographical atlas (applying this word for the first time to such a collection, though modern usage has somewhat narrowed the meaning as he applied it); and he had published two parts of it, when he died, in December, 1594,—the second part having appeared at Duisburg in 1585, and the third in 1590. Shortly after his death, a son, Rumold Mercator, published in 1595, at Dusseldorf, part i., and prefixed to it a Latin biography of his father, by Walter Ghymm, which is the principal source of our knowledge of his career.[731] The son Rumold died in 1600, and in 1602, at the expense of the estate, the three parts of the Atlas were united and published together, making what is properly the earliest edition of the so-called Mercator Atlas. It had one hundred and eleven maps and a Latin text. It is very rare, for Raemdonck says he has met with but two copies of it. Up to this time it had contained no American maps. A map of America, as one of the four quarters of the globe, was called for in part iii.; but Raemdonck (p. 257) says he has never seen a copy of that part which has it.
Mercator’s maps were followed, however, pretty closely in Mathias Quad’s or Quadus’s Geographisch Handtbuch,[732] Cologne, 1600, which contained a map of the world and another of North America, with some other special American maps; and such were also contained in the Latin version called Fasciculus geographicus, Cologne, 1608, etc.
This is a fac-simile of an engraving in J. F. Foppens’s Bibliotheca Belgica, 1739, vol. i. p. 3. There is another engraving in Lorenzo Crasso’s Elogii d’huomini letterati, Venice, 1666.
In 1604 Mercator’s plates fell by purchase into the possession of Jodocus Hondius,[733] of Amsterdam, who got out a new edition in 1606,[734] to which he added fifty maps, including a few American ones; and thus began what is known as the Hondius-Mercator Atlas. The text was furnished by Montanus,[735] and the new maps were engraved by Petrus Kærius, who also prepared for Hondius the Atlas minor Gerardi Mercatoris in 1607.[736]