An elaborately decorated map focused on the islands of Southeast Asia, from an enlarged and misplaced Ceylon to New Guinea; present day Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia are collectively labelled as India. The northern coastline of Australia is depicted, and inland are found a palm tree, a porcupine and a possum.

Suarez notes that Scherer shows a Bird of Paradise to the east of the Philippines. "The creature is shown without wings or feet, for, according to Linschoten, they keep themselves continually in the air. The bird is also depicted in Ortelius's 1567 map of Asia. Below this bird is a flying fish, which, according to Linschoten, fly together in great flocks until their wings and fins are dry and they can no longer fly. Some of Scherer's fauna is quiet alien to the region. In Vietnam he places a two-humped camel and in the waters below Java he puts a narwhal. The large compass rose shows a zero magnetic declination, with Scherer perhaps having noted the comments about negligible declination by Dudley and, or Halley" (Brown).

The mapmaker
Born in 1628, Heinrich Scherer spent the first 30 years of his career in academia as Professor of Hebrew, Mathematics, and Ethics at the University of Dillingen. Scherer's 'Atlas Novus', which he had first published in Munich between 1702 and 1710, was acknowledged as a revolutionary work: comprised of seven separate volumes, each dedicated to a different branch of geography, the work contained 180 maps characterized by their highly decorative Catholic iconography and imagery.

As a Jesuit, Scherer drew heavily on the history and development of the order, which had been established in the early-sixteenth century by St Ignatius Loyala and soon became the driving force behind the Counter-Reformation. His maps therefore chart the revival and spread of the Catholic faith, highlighting Jesuit missions, using light and dark to symbolize the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, and filled with images of Madonnas, thus taking some of the first steps towards the fields of thematic cartography.