California as an Island, c. 1650

The story of this map

For most of the seventeenth century, European mapmakers were convinced that California was an island. This manuscript map, drawn around 1650 by Joan Vinckeboons, a Dutch cartographer who worked for the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam, shows the idea at its most confident: a long, elegant island floating off the coast of North America, with a wide strait where the Gulf of California should continue north.

Because it is a manuscript rather than a printed map, it has a quality that engravings never quite match. The coastlines are drawn by hand in ink, the washes of colour are the mapmaker’s own, and the place names are lettered in a neat seventeenth-century script. The paper tone is warm and the whole sheet feels intimate, like a page from a captain’s portfolio.

It is one of the great cartographic myths, and it makes a wonderful talking point. It looks at home in a Californian living room, a beach house, a wine-country kitchen or the office of anyone who grew up on the West Coast. We include it in our Antique Maps of US States collection, and it pairs beautifully with the gold-rush-era Tassin map of California from 1851, when the island had long since been reattached.

Printed to order on archival matte paper, or on canvas, and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the warm tone of the manuscript paper and its original wash colours, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.