• Home >
• Exploration >
• Venturing Out

• 
  Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
• 
  Dutch East India Company
• 
  Description de L'Egypte

Venturing Out

In the 15th century the first European explorers set sail along the coasts of Africa and then to the Americas and the Pacific on behalf of their home countries, or on commerical expeditions as with the Dutch East India Company. They brought back with them strange tales of unknown lands. The published accounts of these voyages and travels gave those back home a first glimpse of the world beyond the known borders.

The Greek geographer Ptolemy had set out the principles of map-making in the 2nd century. But it would be more than a thousand years later that the outlines of the world, including the heavens, began to take shape.

European cartographers assiduously gleaned information from ships’ logs and travellers’ tales, bit-by-bit filling in the blank spaces of their maps as knowledge became available, collecting it in editions like the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, considered one of the first atlases.

The illustrations included in the earliest travel books were as much fantasy as fact, frequently depicting strange beasts and mythical creatures. They were often produced not from life, but from the descriptions of those returning from new lands. 

These early travel books provided fugitive glimpses of distant worlds, both real and imagined. Sometimes, as with Description de L’Egypte, they described the past as a foreign land, while charting the physical geography of a place.