Joannes de Laet

De Laet was born in Antwerp in 1581. In 1585, when he was about three years old, the city fell to Spanish forces during the Eighty Years' War. His family left Antwerp and settled in Amsterdam in the northern Netherlands. De Laet later studied theology and philosophy at Leiden University, where one of his teachers was the humanist scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger. In 1603, at about the age of 22, De Laet was sent to London to gain experience as a merchant. While there he married Jacobmijntje van Loor, the daughter of a prosperous Anglo-Dutch merchant. She died after only four years of marriage and he returned to Leiden in 1607.

De Laet increased his fortune through investments in land reclamation projects and overseas trade. In 1620 he became one of the founding directors of the Dutch West India Company, a position he held for the remainder of his life. As a director he was involved in the administration of the company during the early decades of Dutch commercial expansion in the Atlantic world. The company played an important role in Dutch trade and colonial activity in the Americas and West Africa. Through his position De Laet had access to reports from explorers, merchants and colonial officials working in these regions. These accounts provided information about geography, trade routes and newly encountered lands and peoples. De Laet drew on this material in his geographical writings on the Americas and the Caribbean. His descriptions of the New World combined information gathered through the company's activities with material drawn from earlier printed sources and travel accounts. These works helped circulate geographical knowledge about the Americas among European readers during the seventeenth century.

He published widely on topics ranging from church history to world history. He played a crucial role in the 1648 publication of Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, a compendium of research on the flora and fauna of Brazil by Georg Marcgraf and Willem Piso, whose patron was Johan Maurits, governor of Dutch Brazil. Marcgraf had written his portion of the work in a secret cipher, but died before the work was published. De Laet decoded it. A further contribution by De Laet was his preface to this important work, which emphasized the comparability of Northeast Brazil with other areas with a similar climate. The work subsequently circulated widely in northern Europe and beyond in scientific circles, and was not supplanted as an authoritative text for a hundred fifty years. He also edited Pliny's Historia naturalis and Vitruvius' De architectura, wrote a detailed account of the New World and compiled an (unpublished) Old English-Latin dictionary – to mention just a selection of his forty publications.

His correspondents include the English antiquaries William Camden, Sir Henry Spelman, Sir William Boswell, Abraham Wheelock, Sir Simonds D'Ewes, James Usher, Patrick Young, John Morris, and the Danish antiquary Ole Worm.

His History of the New World was published in several editions by Bonaventure & Abraham Elseviers, Leiden. The first edition was published in Dutch in 1625 as Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien, uit veelerhande Schriften ende Aen-teekeningen van verscheyden Natien; a second edition also in Dutch, came out in 1630 as Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien door Joannes De Laet. Tweede druk: In ontallycke placesen verbetert, vermeerdert, met eenige nieuwe caerten, beelden van verscheijden dieren ende planten verciert. A Latin edition from 1633, prepared by himself, was entitled Novus Orbis seu descriptionis Indiae Occidentalis Libri XVIII authore Joanne De Laet Antverp. Novis tabulis geographicis et variis animantium, Plantarum Fructuumque iconibus illustrata; in 1640 he published a French edition, in his own translation, as L'Histoire du Nouveau Monde ou description des Indes Occidentales, contenant dix-huict livres, enrichi de nouvelles tables geographiqiues & figures des animaux, plantes & fruicts. Each successive edition had significantly updated maps.

The Empire of the Great Mogul, translated by J.S. Hoyland with S.N. Bannerjee. Taraporevela, Bombay, 1928. Reissued Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, 1975, ISBN 81-7069-041-2. "Persia" (Latin: Persia seu Regni Persici Status Variaque Itinera in atque per Persiam: cum Aliquot Iconibus Incolarum), LVGD. BATAV. ex officina Elzeviriana, Anna MDCXXXIII (1633).