Les Isles Philippines Molucques et de la Sonde.

An uncommon late printing of Sanson's important mid-seventeenth century map of the East Indies, covering modern Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and parts of Southeast Asia and New Guinea. At a scale of about 1:10,000,000, it shows the cities and smaller settlements, rivers, mountain chains, and even forests.
Large single-sheet engraved map (plate size 40.5 x 56.5 cm) with title and imprint in a cartouche at upper right, decorated with 2 winged female figures; with the equator marked and latitude and longitude indications in the borders.
It was engraved by J. Somer for the elder Nicolas Sanson with a privilege for twenty years, and appeared in Sanson's 1658 Cartes generales de toutes les parties du monde and in later editions. Pastoureau's 1650 date appears to be an error for 1654. In spite of later developments in the cartography of the East Indies the map remained unchanged, with the original date and Pierre Mariette's name as publisher, for nearly a century. It therefore reflects the historical situation and the state of cartographic knowledge in the middle of the seventeenth century.
The paper of the present copy is watermarked "PI|[double heart]|GO M" = chaplet, a mark of P. Gourbeyre (similar to Heawood 240, of c. 1745), and the map was formerly bound with others dating from c. 1742-1745, including other late printings of seventeenth-century Sanson maps and maps by Gilles Robert (1688-1766) also on P. Gourbeyre paper. Robert, a great-grandson of the elder Nicolas Sanson, acquired some Sanson materials from his uncle Pierre Moullart-Sanson in 1730, reprinted Sanson's seventeenth-century maps from the original plates and added new ones of his own.
After nearly a hundred years of use, the plate was beginning to show signs of wear, but the map is nevertheless in very good condition, and of considerable historical interest for the state of European knowledge of the East Indies in the mid-seventeenth century.
Reference: BMC Printed Maps XII, col. 867; Cat. Nat. Mar. Mus. 271, map 15; Nordenskiöld 275, vol. 1, map 17; Pastoureau, Sanson V, map 12; Quirino, Philippine Cartography, p. 83; all recording earlier printings only.