Portraits Surnames K to P

Antonio de Herrera 

1622

Untitled Portrait of Jacob le Maire holding chart of the Southern regions of South America

12 x 18 cms. Uncoloured. Trimmed to platemark. Fine impression and example.

A rare and attractive portrait of the Dutch circumnavigator, Jacob le Maire [c1585-1616], the discoverer of an alternative maritime route into the Pacific Ocean via the Straits that now bear his name, which lie to the south of the Straits of Magellan. By the end of the 16th Century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was growing in confidence and seeking to circumvent the monopoly on Asian trade and access to Asian markets hitherto controlled by Spain and Portugal. Frustrated by the controlling Amsterdam clique within the upper echelons of the VOC and their unwillingness to push forward with voyages of exploration in search of a new passage in the waters to the South of the Straits of Magellan and around the southern tip of an insular Tierra del Fuego (& mooted by explorers and cartographers since the time of Francis Drake's first English circumnavigation in the late 1570's) Isaac Le Maire, an Amsterdam merchant and VOC director, established his own company, the Southern Company, in the hope of finding just such a new passage into the Pacific and thereby accessing the immensely profitable Asian spice markets. In 1614 he persuaded the Dutch Estates General to grant trading rights hitherto reserved exclusively for the VOC for any Dutch citizens who might discover new passages into the Pacific Ocean. The following year, with the financial backing of his own home town of Hoorn, he equipped two ships, the Eendracht and the Hoorn, under the command of his son Jacob and with the  experienced mariner, Willem Schouten, as the expedition's principal navigator and Captain of the Eendracht. After the loss of the Hoorn to fire in December 1615, in January 1616, they passed the entrance to the Straits of Magellan and sailing southward discovered a new passage which was named the Straits of Le Maire, after Jacob's father. The land on the port side was named Staten Landt,  after the Dutch Estates General, whilst Cape Hoorn, named after Le Maire's home town, & the most southerly landmass sighted on their voyage was rounded on January 29th 1616. The expedition eventually arrived in the VOC headquarters at Batavia, present-day Jakarta, where the Governor General, Jan Coen took an exceedingly dim view of the newly arrived interlopers and their infringement on the long-established VOC trade monopoly. The Eendracht was impounded, Le Maire and Schouten arrested and shipped back to Europe with the remnants of Joris van Spilbergen's fleet, who had also penetrated the Pacific and reached Batavia via the Straits of Magellan in the previous year. Le Maire sadly died on the way home. Spilbergen himself became increasingly well-acquainted with Le Maire during the return voyage to Europe and noted with considerable sadness in his diary :

On December 22 [1616], there died Jacob Le Maire, who had commanded the aforesaid Amsterdam vessel through the passage of the South Sea, wherefore our Admiral and all the others were deeply grieved, for he was a man endowed with remarkable knowledge and experience in matters of navigation.

On the homecoming of the remaining crew of the expedition to Holland in July 1617, Le Maire's father sued the VOC for return of his property and goods, including his son's journal of the expedition, which was jealously guarded by VOC custodians, anxious that news of the new-found passage should not leak out to contemporary European cartographers and mapmakers. In fact by 1618 Willem Blaeu and Jodocus Hondius had already included the new found strait on two of their recently published maps of the World. A detailed account of the voyage, using information gleaned from Willem Schouten and crediting him with discovery of the passage, was also published by Blaeu in 1618. After several years of legal wranglings, Issac Le Maire finally obtained redress from the VOC and in 1622 the account of his son's voyage appeared in print in Antonio de Herrera's book published in Amsterdam in both Dutch and French, and crediting Jacob as leader of the expedition and discoverer of the passage that still bears his name. Unusually this example of the portrait does not have any apparent verso text and is on heavier card-like paper stock, so may perhaps have been published separately. In any event examples of this attractive and rare Le Maire portrait are now increasingly hard to find.