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Guyana, or, the Kingdom of the Amazons
This map of colonial Guiana (present-day Suriname) is the work of Jan Jannson (died 1664), a Dutch cartographer who married into the Hondius family of illustrious mapmakers. Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612) and his sons, Jodocus and Henricus, engraved maps of the Americas and Europe, and were instrumental in popularizing the work of Gerard Mercator, the developer of the Mercator Projection that allowed navigators to use a flat map reflecting the curvature of the globe. The Hondius family published an early pocket-size atlas of the Mercator map. The atlas series grew under ...
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National Library of Brazil
New and Precise Depiction of the Southern Part of America, Which Includes: Brazil, the Carribean, the New Kingdom of Guiana, Castilia del Oro, Nicaragua, the Antilles, and Peru: And Beneath the Tropic of Capricorn, Chile, the Rio de la Plato, Patagonia & the Straits of Magellan
This folding map of South America and the West Indies, printed on two separate sheets, with uncut margins, was engraved for the second edition of the fourth part of Hulsius' collection of voyages, which consists altogether of 26 parts. The "Vierte Schiffart" (Fourth voyage) is an account of Ulrich Schmidel's voyage to Brazil and the Rio de la Plata from 1534 to 1554. In this second edition of the map, three islands have been inserted below the bottom border of the lower map, with the name "Francisci Draco Ins ...
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Library of Congress
Porkknocker Ready for his Journey Across the Mountains, on his Back is a Warishi
This photograph shows a man on the savannahs of Guyana, carrying his equipment and belongings in a warashi (a knapsack-like basket) on his back. He appears to be prepared for a trek into the interior of Guyana, in search of gold and diamonds. A porkknocker is a Guyanese prospector and miner who extracts and processes gold and diamonds using simple methods. These rugged individualists have been responsible for some of the great discoveries of gold and diamonds in Guyana's interior. The photograph is from the collection of the Columbus ...
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Columbus Memorial Library, Organization of American States
Searching for Diamonds
This photograph shows three porkknockers in the interior of Guyana. A porkknocker is a Guyanese prospector and miner who extracts and processes gold and diamonds using simple methods. These rugged individualists have been responsible for some of the great discoveries of gold and diamonds in Guyana's interior. There are many stories of porkknockers who struck it rich, but then spent their fortunes in ways both tragic and comic. The photograph is from the collection of the Columbus Memorial Library of the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes 45 ...
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Columbus Memorial Library, Organization of American States
Travels of Francois Coreal to the West Indies, Containing the Most Remarkable Things He has Seen on His Voyage from 1666 to 1697
This three-volume work by a Spanish author of uncertain identity, Francisco (François) Coreal, was published in Amsterdam in 1722. It purports to be the French translation of a first-hand account, in Spanish, of multiple voyages to Brazil and Spanish America undertaken by Coreal over a span of 30 years, from 1666-97. Coreal's supposed voyages cover about half of the three volumes. The rest of the work is comprised of a heterogeneous set of texts taken from the travelogues of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) and several of his contemporaries. Many ...
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Library of Congress