ABSTRACT
Georg Marggrafe made important scholarly contributions to three scholarly fields: cartography, natural history and astronomy. However, his death, in 1643, prevented him from personally finalizing and publishing his results. That’s why his written legacy was split into three parts at the time. Marggrafe’s maps were given to the cartographic publisher Johannes Blaeu, who published these maps as four careful engravings in Caspar Barlaeus’s Rerumper octennium in Brasilia (1647) and combined them into a large wall map the same year. About the two other fields, natural history and astronomy, Marggrafe’s personal Maecenas, Johan Maurits von Nassau-Siegen, the former governor of Dutch Brazil, reported the following in one of his letters:
[Marggrafe’s] manuscripts and drawings concerning the natural history of Brasil, with the description and dimensions of this country have been given by us to Mr. de Laet, and the manuscripts relating to the astronomical observations, to Professor Gool, in order that its content be studied at our cost, and compiled to be published [our italics], as has partly been done. 1
