Map of the island Aruba

Title Leupe: Plan van het Eyland Aruba, opgenomen met de planchet, door Engelbertus Horst, Capitain Lieutenant en Ingenieur.

As Aruba was of little economic importance and unfortified, its presence in the cartography of the region is extremely limited. In fact, this map is the only one that has been handed down to us from the period of the New WIC: an enormous, almost 4.5 metre-long outline map of Aruba which was made in 1773 by an artillery captain and engineer Engelbertus Horst. Horst was appointed Inspector of Fortifications on Curaçao in 1767. Unlike the maps of Curaçao from the same period, which consistently depict the island too broadly, Horst’s map of Aruba produces the shape of the coastline relatively accurately.

North is upper left.

Scale-bar of 300 Rhineland Rods = [approximately 1 : 6,000].