Cartographic Wonders
Blaeu's Strait of Magellan
The narrow way round the bottom of the world.
- Map
- Tabula Magellanica
- Mapmaker
- Willem Janszoon Blaeu
- Date
- 1635 to 1664
- Held by
- Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
This is the Strait of Magellan, the sea passage at the foot of South America, as Willem Janszoon Blaeu published it, etched and coloured by hand, with Latin text set in type on the back. A coat of arms sits in the upper right. The strait was the door between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and the map gives its twisting channel the whole sheet, so the narrowness is the first thing you see. It was made to be read with the text on its back, as one chapter of an atlas. A small sheet about a small passage, on which whole voyages turned.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain map held by Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam — the work is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper or 400gsm canvas; framed pieces sit behind acrylic.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed and linen-backed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our maps cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the sea monsters, the tiny place-names, the burin lines — on matte paper that holds every line without glare.
