New, Plaine, & Exact Mapp of Africa
Peter Heylyn's 1652 Cosmographie included a world map by Nicolas Visscher that depicted the kingdom of Prester John. Despite the fact that the Dutch cartographer came from a family of mapmakers possessed of the most contemporary cartographic information, Visscher relied heavily on classical and biblical traditions in his mapmaking, which can be see in his depiction of Prester John's kingdom.
That is not to say that his map of Africa is completely inaccurate. The shape of Africa was one of the most accurate for its time and the tropics and equator were fixed precisely. Along the border of the map, Visscher depicted various African rulers, including Prester John, depicted as a youngish crowned black man and titled "King of Abissines." As Brooks notes (p. 209), the ornamentation of Prester John is compoaratively more European than that of the other African kings depicted on the map.
Prester John's Abyssinia takes up roughly a full third of Africa, hearkening back to the tradiition established by Fra Mauro in his mappaemundi.
From Brooks (p. 209):
It is also within the imagined boundaries of the kingdom of Prester John that Visscher included quite a vareity of mythical and legendary items beleived by late medieval and early modern Europeans to exist in Africa. Visscher included a "Zair Lake" from which the Congo and Nile Rivers supposedly emanated, which was a body of water that Visscher claimed was "where ye Tritons and Mermaids are said to be."
The southern borders of the laand of Prester John are the location of the Mountains of the Moon, also believed by Europeans to be the source of the Nile River.
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