Beautifully hand-colored example of Visscher's famous map of the Western Hemisphere, showing California as an Island and a small slice of New Zealand at the lower-left corner, next to the title cartouche.

Visscher's map became the proto-type map for Dutch maps of America for the next 50 years. The map includes California as an Island, one massive open-ended Great Lake, conjectural Northwest Passage, Straits on Anian, and rich illustration in the interior of North And South America, along with nearly a dozen ships at sea and two rich cartouches. California appears in the Briggs model, unlike later copies of the map by DeWit and others, who used the Sanson Model.

The majority of the cartographic details derive from Visscher's map which derives from Joan Blaeu's wall map of the world, published in 1648. The map includes a dedication cartouche to Nicolas Witsen, the Mayor of Amsterdam and driving force behind many voyages of commerce and discovery at the time.

Burden records two states of the map:

• State 1: 1658. No privilege
• State 2: circa 1677: Privilege added at center-right.