This absolutely gorgeous map, whose title translates to The City of Kochi located on the coast of Malabar, was created in the early 1700s to help sea-traders travelling from other regions to Coetsjien (Kochi). The map was a hand-coloured copper engraving by Francois Valentijn, an explorer and naturalist from the Netherlands who wrote about the history of the Dutch East Indian company and chronicled the countries of the Far East. His maps were considered very valuable, and his narrative style made him known as a prominent Dutch writer of his time.

The coastal map shows the dock as well as the landmass from a bird’s-eye vantage point. The dock entry is fortified and the embankment runs all along in the inland, embracing the fort of Kochi. The unfortified section, meanwhile, represents the local residences, filled with tiny waterways, streams, places of worship and vegetation. The top left of the map has an illustration of a profile view of the dock entry, to give travellers a clearer idea about the elevation. The elaborate attention to detail and the almost toy-like drawing style makes this map irresistible.

Even though Bombay (present-day Mumbai) was the centre of trade and commerce in Colonial India, strangely very few early maps survive of the region. This particular map, created in the 1700s by well-known French cartographer Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, is a rare exception. Bellin used the earlier nautical maps of the ‘Island Of Bombay and Sallset’ by Samuel Thornton which were created to aid mariners, and added new information to his version.

The map shows the Islands of Bombay and Salset, and has a unique section marked the ‘Isle des Jésuites’ on the extreme left. It is possible that this is present-day Vasai (Portuguese Bassein), as the area had a large Jewish population in the early colonial era. In the ‘Isle Salset’ and the ‘Isle De Bombay’ various important trading/residential points are marked — look out for Bandura (Bandra), Mazagoem (Mazgaon), Sion, Majem (Mahim), Fort Anglois (Fort), Isle des Vielles Femmes (Colaba or the Old Women’s Island) and Isle de l’Elephant (Elephanta Island).

On the right side of the map is a portion marked out as Isle de Chaul, which was a Portuguese town colonised around 1521 with a fort built in the region. Today, the village of Chaul lies in ruins near the town of Revanda, in the Raigarh district of Maharashtra. The presence of numbers and navigational pointers drawn over the sections showing water bodies suggests that this too was a nautical map drawn for the benefit of seafarers.