This paper concerns a seventeenth-century manuscript nautical atlas of the coast of Portugal that was compiled in the context of the Hispanic-Portuguese crisis of 1640. The atlas was the work of Antonio da Cunha e Andrada, a Portuguese operating under the orders of King Philip IV of Spain, who seems to have been an amateur cartographer. Andrada’s own description of his cartographical achievement as an atlas for privateers is upheld in the light of the accompanying text, which contains a strategy for blockading the coastal trade of secessionist Portugal to ruin her economy and force her back under Spanish rule. The extant version of the atlas is dated 1661, but the author tells us it was a copy of the one he had made in 1641. |
