Ormeling, Ferjan2010-04-132010-04-132009Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Onomastic Sciences978-1-55014-521-2http://hdl.handle.net/10315/4017In 1690, the board of the Dutch East India Company (VOC “Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie”) in Amsterdam commissioned the cartographer Isaak de Graaf to produce an atlas of the company’s trading area, which stretched from Cape Town to Japan. The atlas, produced to support the strategical decisions of the VOC board, contains about 10 000, mostly coastal, names. These have been identified and analysed. First, the feature categories discerned were noted, and subsequently the names imposed by the European nations identified; these were compared with the feature categories, in order to find out the kind of features named preferentially by the Europeans. Some national characteristics in the naming behaviour of the various European nations were tentatively marked. This paper then zooms in on the names imposed by the VOC mariners; a distinction was made between descriptive names, conceptual names, religious and commemorative names. This last category is subdivided into features named for the home country, the explorer’s ship, its officers, its patrons or its home town. The Dutch explorers seem to stand out by their custom to name groups of small islands for the towns in their home country or province. This phenomenon is christened nostalgia archipelagos.enThe following articles are © 2009 with the individual authors. They are made available free of charge from this page as a service to the community under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative Works license version 3.0. For full details go to http://creativecommons.org.licenses/ny-nd.3.017th Century Atlas and Dutch East India CompanyNames and Dutch East India CompanyArticle