This chart has an interesting history, bound up in the complex relationship between the great mapmaking rivals of the day - the houses of Hondius, Blaeu and Janssonius. Although they were fierce competitors, they also traded stocks of plates with one another. For instance, Blaeu's 'Appendix' was in part facilitated by his purchase of about forty plates for single-sheet maps from the stock of Jodocus Hondius II upon the latter's death in 1629, including this chart of the Moluccas. "By the 1620s, the family had published a number of loose-sheets, among them a detailed chart of the Moluccas which located all five principal members of the group with reasonably accuracy. Ternate, Tidore, Motir, and Makian are still a negligible bit too far south, while Bakin is shown by an inset map without coordinates identified. In 1629, Jodocus II died and these plates - roughly 40 in number - were sold to Blaeu, a transaction that the Hondius family quickly lamented. Blaeu changed the plates' attribution from Hondius's name to his own, and began publishing many of the maps, including that of the Moluccas [as here], in his 'Atlantis Appendix' (1630). The Hondius-Jansson family, needing to replace the plates to remain competitive, commissioned two engravers to prepare 36 new plates within 18 months. These were to be "Accurate and fine, yes, finer and better and not less in quality" than those they lost to the Blaeus. One of these new plates was the Moluccas chart [as here]" (Suarez).

Soon after these publications, Johannes Janssonius and Henricus Hondius took the decision to formalise their casual partnership, their first fully joint publication being the so-called "French Appendix" of 1633.

This large-scale chart of the Moluccas, or Spice, Islands, oriented with west at the top, shows the west coast of Gilolo, present-day Halmahera, and the islands of Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian and Bacan. There are, in fact, hundreds of islands in the group, but only a very select group feature in the more than two-hundred years of colonial strife that was the European spice trade. Until the eighteenth century, these rain-forested islands were the only obtainable source of cloves, nutmeg, and mace.

Arab traders "introduced cloves to Europeans around the fourth century but sought to keep their sources secret. Their monopoly was broken by the Portuguese after Vasco da Gama's voyage to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497. The Portuguese strengthened their stranglehold on the spice trade during the sixteenth century, when they found the central locus of the spices to be these islands. One of the native traditions was to plant a clove tree when a child was born, linking the child symbolically to the life of the tree. When the Dutch took over control of the Moluccas in the seventeenth century, they eradicated the clove trees from all the islands except Amboina (and a few adjacent islands) in order to enforce the spice's scarcity, keeping prices high.

As a result, cloves were worth more than their weight in gold. But, as one might expect, the Dutch tactic also instilled hatred and fomented rebellion among the islanders. Gradually, the spice was cultivated in other places of the world, like Brazil, the West Indies, and Zanzibar, reducing prices and making the commodity more available" (Princeton University Library online).

The mapmaker
The son of an established printer — publisher Jan Jansz., Johannes Janssonius (1588-1664), was Willem Jansz. Blaeu's main rival. In 1618, he set up his own cartographic publishing firm on the Damrak, the central canal and commercial hub of Amsterdam. In 1612, he married Elisabeth de Hondt, the daughter of Jodocus Hondius,… another of Blaeu's competitors. "Theirs was a rivalry which soon grew to include accusations of plagiarism and theft of intellectual property, a state of affairs not helped by Blaeu's use of the name "Jan Zoon" to sign his works" (Woods).

Although Janssonius's first independent work was an edition of Blaeu's 'Licht der Zeervaert' in 1620, he is first associated with the Mercator-Hondius atlas in 1633, when the French edition includes his name on the title-page. The Dutch editions of 1634, 1638 and 1647 were published by Janssonius alone; but the English edition, 1636, the Latin of 1638, were issued by both Janssonius and Hondius. After 1638 the name of the atlas changed to 'Atlas Novus…', and from 1649 Hondius's name no longer appears on the title-page or preface. In time, Janssonius would add a fifth volume, the 'Atlas Maritimus' (1657), a significant sea-atlas; and eventually, a further five volumes including maps from every corner of the globe, by about one hundred credited authors and engravers. The final, eleventh volume, Andreas Cellarius's celestial atlas, completed the 'Atlas Major' in 1660.