The Big Island of Ceylon, or Ilanare, Called Chilan by the Arabs, Persians and Chinese.

This fine map of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) was originally drawn to illustrate an account by the Portuguese historian João de Barros (1496-1570) of the voyage to Asia that Lopo Soares de Albergaria (circa 1453-circa 1532) made in 1515 on behalf of King Manuel I of Portugal. Relief is shown pictorially, north is oriented to the right, and scale is given in Dutch, Spanish, and French miles. The Portuguese established a foothold in Ceylon in the early 1500s, but it was only in 1517 that Lopo Soares, the third governor of Portuguese India, obtained permission from the local authorities to build a fortress at Colombo (marked Kolombo on the map). The Portuguese dominated the coastal areas of the island until they were expelled by the Dutch in 1658. The map shows Candy (present-day Kandy), Jafnapatnam (present-day Jaffna), and Fort Tirikonamalea (present-day Trincomalee). The edition of the map presented here was published in 1720 by Pieter Van der Aa (1659-1733), a publisher, editor, and bookseller in Leiden, Netherlands, who reproduced many rare maps by earlier travelers.