Pieter van der Aa; 1659-1733.

Van der Aa, started his own book making shop in Leyden in 1672, publishing an enormous amount of materials. He did branch out seriously in the atlas business in 1707, probably on account of the strong interest for geography with the dutch public of that time.
The golden age of the East India Company was over, but international trade was still a major economic trump for the Low Countries.
His cartographic knowledge and skills were rather limited, but he borrowed extensively from the masters of the art. His maps were quite decorative, and made the success of "Atlas nouveau et curieux" in 1710, and above all of the 27 volume "La gallerie agréable du monde" in 1729.

Chili, grand pays de l'Amerique meridionale, vers la mer du midi,.

This very attractive map (14 ¼" X 11 ¼") was published in the "La gallerie agreable du monde". Its style is very typical of Aa: a cartouche with anecdotal vignettes helping the reader to better grasp the local environment and the character of its population (a bit misleading in this case, since there was not much precious metal smelting to do in this land which was considered by the spanish as better used for farming purposes).
At that time, the province of Chili, was much shorter than the Chile we know now (the northern sector being part of the vice-kingdom of Peru), and somewhat wider (the spaniards preferred to expand eastward from the Pacific coast, to avoid confrontation with the portuguese on the Atlantic side (re. the 1494 treaty of Tordesillas). It is only in 1883, that Chile will extend its territory north up to Arica at the expense of Peru.
Aa gives a vivid description of the terrain dominated by the Andes, replete with spewing volcanoes. It also shows the fertile valleys, which are in present day Argentina.
Notice the Juan Fernandez archipelago WSW of San Iago de la nueva Estremadura (today's Santiago), where the castaway extraordinaire Robinson Crusoe (true name: Alexander Selkirk) survived from 1704 till 1708.
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