Seconda Tavola - The Western Coast of India

1554

Woodcut on paper

Print size: 11.5 x 15.25 in (29 x 39 cm)
Sheet size: 12.5 x 17.25 in (31.5 x 44 cm)

First Edition Gastaldi for Ramusio — A Landmark Woodcut Charting Portuguese India and the Indian Ocean World (1554)

This exceptionally rare first-edition woodcut map of the Indian Ocean, orientated with north placed to the lower edge of the sheet, represents one of the most important early printed cartographic documents of Portuguese India and the Arabian Sea world. Issued in 1554, it was published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio in Volume I of his monumental Delle Navigationi et Viaggi—universally regarded as the first great European collection of travel literature and among the foundational documentary achievements of the Age of Discovery. The map is the work of Giacomo Gastaldi, the foremost Venetian cartographer of the mid-sixteenth century, whose woodcut geography played a decisive role in transmitting Portuguese maritime intelligence into authoritative printed form for European audiences.

Cartographically, the sheet stands among the earliest accurate attempts to depict the northern Indian Ocean and the Arabian Gulf, vividly recording the maritime framework of the Estado da Índia, with Calicut first—and later Goa—identified as the political, military, and episcopal centres of Portuguese power in Asia. The map traces the principal sea routes from eastern Africa, including Socotra Island, across the Arabian Peninsula into the Persian Gulf, where Bahrain appears alongside an unusually early depiction of an Emirates port city, before reaching the great Portuguese strongholds of Hormuz, Diu, Goa, and Cochin.

The Maldives are clearly shown, as is the remote island of Diego Garcia, while Ceylon is positioned with striking accuracy, with Adam’s Peak explicitly marked. The Indian peninsula itself is richly animated with emblematic land imagery—elephants, lions, and a hunting tableau with Scythian horsemen—while the map extends eastward to the Gulf of Bengal, the Ganges estuary, northern Sumatra with the port of Acheh (Pedir), and the Nicobar Islands, situating India within the vast Indo-Oceanic sphere of commerce and navigation.

Portuguese carracks are engraved under full sail, inscribed with their voyages—Vado a Calicut and Vado alle Moluche—linking the western coast of India directly to the Spice Islands of the Moluccas. Characteristic distortions of early modern hydrography remain: Diu, a Portuguese possession until 1961, is rendered disproportionately prominent; the Indus is exaggerated and misplaced eastward on the wrong side of Gujarat; and the surrounding ocean is populated by four superb vignettes of sea monsters, emblematic of the wonder and peril still associated with these waters in Renaissance European imagination.

Produced for Ramusio’s pioneering travel corpus, grounded in eyewitness testimonies of merchants, sailors, and diplomats, this map is an essential artefact of the earliest European encounters with the western Indian littoral—capturing the moment when the Arabian Sea world entered the printed cartographic imagination. Examples from the 1554 first edition are scarce, and complete surviving leaves remain highly sought after by collectors of early India-related cartography.

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