Map of the complete island of Cuba, 1639

Cuba stretches across this sheet like a long green fish, its coastline traced in yellow and its interior bristling with tiny hand-drawn hills and clumps of trees. The name CVBA is spelled out in large capitals along the spine of the island, while Jamaica and Hispaniola sit modestly in the bottom corners and a red line labeled the Tropic of Cancer cuts straight across the top. Everything else is a web of thin lines radiating from compass roses scattered over the page. These are rhumb lines, the navigator's tool for holding a steady compass bearing across open water, and they are the reason the chart looks more like a spider's work than a picture.

Joan Vinckeboons, also known as Johannes Vingboons, drew this around 1639 in Amsterdam, where he worked in the orbit of the great Blaeu mapmaking workshop and produced charts for the Dutch West India Company. Maps like this one were valuable business intelligence as much as decoration, showing harbors, reefs and anchorages in a Caribbean the Dutch were busy raiding and trading in. Vinckeboons rarely left his studio, so his knowledge came secondhand from pilots' reports and captured Spanish charts, which explains why the coast is confidently detailed while the interior is filled with generic little mountains. The elegant compass rose on the right, crowned with a fleur-de-lis pointing north, is the flourish of a craftsman who knew his work would be admired as well as used.