Philippe Vandermaelen, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Straits of Malacca, 1827

Océanique - Presqu’ile de Malacca. No. 12

Early lithographic map of the southern provinces of Putrajaya, Negeri Sembilan, Malacca, Pahang, Johor, the island of Singapore and the Singapore Strait. To the west is the Malacca Strait and the north-eastern coastline of Riau province in Sumatra.

This map is the first atlas map to focus on Singapore and the surrounding area. Led by then Lieutenant-Governor of the British East India Company, Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826), a settlement and trading port was established on the island in 1819 - Singapore was founded. The island has been recorded as having been a successful trading port, dating back as early as the 14th Century. This map was published just one year before the famous "Jackson Plan" of Singapore Island and Singapore Town.

Despite the Europeans having colonised and traded in this area from as early as the 16th Century, the interior of Malaysia is not fully mapped but for a large mountain range, skilfully illustrated through the centre of the peninsula and the mouths of the rivers. Geographically the map covers the areas of modern day cities of Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. The Malaysian settlements of Selangor, Pahang and Malacca are marked. The map extends east into the South China Sea to show the Riau Archipelago.

Philippe Vandermaelen

Philippe Vandermaelen was born in Brussels in 1795 and, at the age of 21, inherited a fortune from his father who had been a successful soap manufacturer. Financially independent, Vandermaelen was able to devote his life to the study of geography and in 1829 he founded a geographical institute in Brussels.

Vandermaelen's most important work, entitled "Atlas Universel", was an enormous atlas consisting of over 400 separate map sheets covering the world on the huge scale of 1:1,6 million. Each map sheet was designed using a special projection so that, if the owner of the maps so wished, they could all be joined together to form a globe with a diameter of 7.75 meters (This globe was actually built in Vandermaelen's institute in Brussels). The map sheets were printed using the process of lithography, which was an early use of this printing method for map making, and were then usually delicately hand coloured to emphasise boundaries and outlines. The complete atlas took only 3 years to make, a very short time for such a large project, and it was sold in instalments over a two year period from 1825.

Examples of Vandermaelen's map sheets are of great interest to the collector for a number of reasons. Firstly their large scale. The sections depict many of the remoter regions of the world on a scale previously unknown or unattainable. Particularly for the collector of Americana and Australasia, the sheets covering the western United States and Pacific respectively, where exploration was still in very early stages, are unique in this respect. Their historical insets, descriptions and statistics, along with their great visual clarity, make Vandermaelen's maps fascinating and valuable antique documents which also have superb visual appeal.

Original hand colour. [SEAS3162]

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Philippe Vandermaelen

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Philippe Vandermaelen