Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Chapter VII.
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leading geographer of his age. Hence, as a geographer,
he was merely an echo of his brother.
One of Guillaume De l’Isle’s most famous essays had
been on the island of Yezo. In 1643 the stadtholder of
Batavia, the able Van Diemen, sent the ships
Kastrikon and Breskens under the command of Martin de
Vries and Hendrick Corneliszoon Schaep to Japan for
the purpose of navigating the east coast of the island of
Nipon (Hondo), and thence go in search of America by
sailing in a northwesterly direction to the 45th degree of
latitude; but in case they did not find America, which
people continued to believe lay in these regions, they
were to turn toward the northeast and seek the coast of
Asia on the 56th degree of latitude. De Vries partly
carried out his chimerical project. At 40° north latitude
he saw the coast of Nipon, two degrees farther north,
the snow-capped mountains of Yezo, and thence sailed
between the two Kuriles lying farthest to the south,
which he called Staaten Eiland and Kompagniland. He
then continued his voyage into the Sea of Okhotsk to
48° north latitude, where he turned about, saw Yezo in
latitude 45°, but came, without noticing La Perouse
Strait, over to Saghalin, which he considered a part of
Yezo, and as he followed the coast of Saghalin to Cape
Patience in latitude 48°, he thought Yezo a very
extensive island on the eastern coast of Asia. Through the
cartography of the seventeenth century, for example
Witsen’s and Homann’s Atlas, but especially through
Guillaume De l’Isle’s globes and maps, these erroneous ideas
were scattered over the earth, and, when the first accounts
of Kamchatka, without being accompanied by a single
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