Jean Rotz, also called Johne Rotz, was a 16th-century French artist-cartographer. He was born to a Scottish father and a French mother.

Career

Rotz was a member of the school of the

Dieppe maps The Dieppe maps are a series of world maps and atlases produced in Dieppe, France, in the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s. They are large hand-produced works, commissioned for wealthy and royal patrons, including Henry II of France and Henry VIII of Engla ...

. He may have accompanied Jean Parmentier to

Sumatra Sumatra is one of the Sunda Islands of western Indonesia. It is the largest island that is fully within Indonesian territory, as well as the sixth-largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 (182,812 mi.2), not including adjacent i ...

in 1529, and he definitely went to

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

in 1539. His work was greatly influenced by these early French explorations, which induced him to create highly decorative maps. Failing to find employment with King

Francois I Francis I (french: François Ier; frm, Francoys; 12 September 1494 – 31 March 1547) was King of France from 1515 until his death in 1547. He was the son of Charles, Count of Angoulême, and Louise of Savoy. He succeeded his first cousin once ...

, Rotz went to

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

in 1542 and entered the service of

Henry VIII Henry VIII (28 June 149128 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages, and for his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disa ...

. He presented Henry with his manuscript atlas, the ''Boke of Idrography,'' which contained a two-hemisphere world map. This map showed the ''distraits of magallane'' (Strait of Magellan), the two Unfortunate Islands (''Insulas desfortunadas''), unnamed on the map, discovered during

Ferdinand Magellan Ferdinand Magellan ( or ; pt, Fernão de Magalhães, ; es, link=no, Fernando de Magallanes, ; 4 February 1480 – 27 April 1521) was a Portuguese explorer. He is best known for having planned and led the 1519 Spanish expedition to the East ...

's voyage across the Pacific, and the strait between ''Lytel Java'' (Java Minor) and ''the Londe of Java'' (Java Major) through which the ''Victoria'', the last surviving ship of Magellan's expedition, was thought to have passed on the return voyage to Spain. In the early nineteenth century, the resemblance of his ''Londe of Java'' to Australia was noted. Charles Ernest Coquebert de Montbret, having been able to examine the Rotz atlas at the British Museum during a visit to London following the

Peace of Amiens The Treaty of Amiens (french: la paix d'Amiens, ) temporarily ended hostilities between France and the United Kingdom at the end of the War of the Second Coalition. It marked the end of the French Revolutionary Wars; after a short peace it se ...

in 1802, claimed in a lecture to the

Société Philomathique de Paris The Philomaths, or Philomath Society ( pl, Filomaci or ''Towarzystwo Filomatów''; from the Greek φιλομαθεῖς "lovers of knowledge"), was a secret student organization that existed from 1817 to 1823 at the Imperial University of Vilniu ...

in 1803 that its ''Londe of Java'' was evidence of a discovery of the east coast of Australia by Portuguese based in the Moluccas, who perhaps were accompanied by French seafarers who thereby found the opportunity to obtain the intelligence upon which the map, and others of the Dieppe school, was prepared. His claim was refuted by Frédéric Metz in a letter to the ''Revue Philosophique, Littéraire et Politique'' of 11 Novembre 1805. Metz noted the absence of New Guinea and the Gulf of Carpentaria, and pointed out that a chart that recorded the voyage of navigators who had gone as far as the southern extremity of the east coast of Australia could not have failed to indicate the breadth of sea that separated Australia from Java, whereas the Rotz map showed only a narrow channel between the two. The Italian traveler

Ludovico di Varthema Ludovico di Varthema, also known as Barthema and Vertomannus (c. 1470 – 1517), was an Italian traveller, diarist and aristocrat known for being one of the first non-Muslim Europeans to enter Mecca as a pilgrim. Nearly everything that is known ...

visited Java in 1506 and said it “prope in inmensum patet (extends almost beyond measure)”. Rotz apparently identified this “Java patalis” with the

Regio Patalis ''Regio Patalis'' is Latin for “the region of Patala”, that is the region around the ancient city of Patala at the mouth of the Indus River in Sindh, Pakistan. The historians of Alexander the Great state that the Indus parted into two branches ...

, a huge promontory of the

Terra Australis (Latin: '"Southern Land'") was a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Its existence was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that ...

, depicted on the 1531 world map of the royal cosmographer, Oronce Fine. Robert J. King, “Henry VIII’s Atlas; Jean Rotz, The Boke of Idrography”, David Pool (ed.), ''Mapping our World: Terra Incognita to Australia,'' Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2013, p.74.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rotz, Jean 16th-century cartographers 16th-century French people French cartographers French hydrographers Year of birth missing Year of death missing

Career

See also

Notes