The main image depicts the northern part of the Indian Ocean, accompanied by three insets. At left, the Mediterranean Sea traces the ‘Errors of Ulysses’; above it, a circular inset titled Annonis Periplus illustrates the northwest coast of Africa; while a second circular inset at the upper right presents the North Pole. 

Ortelius noted that this image of the Hyperborei was included ‘for better beautifying or proportioning of this map’, while also reminding viewers that repeated attempts by English and Dutch explorers to discover a northern passage to the Far East had failed. First published in 1601, the present example is taken from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum's Parergon (Antwerp: Balthasar Moretus, 1624).

Ex Carta

 charted the supposed wanderings of Odysseus, the first printed map to do so. By mapping mythic voyages alongside the real Mediterranean, Ortelius merged classical scholarship with the aesthetics of Renaissance atlases.

In 1597, Abraham Ortelius (1527–98), the great Antwerp cartographer and publisher, became the first to produce a map of Odysseus’s travels. Best known for compiling the 

 (1570), often regarded as the first modern atlas, Ortelius combined humanist scholarship with commercial acumen and a refined sense of design. (Koeman, 1964)

Like many Homeric geographers, he identified Scheria, the home of the Phaeacians, with Corcyra (modern Corfu), following Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), which records that the Phaeacians had once inhabited the island.

This widely accepted identification created a difficulty: Homer places Calypso’s island west of Scheria, yet no such island exists in the Ionian Sea beyond Corfu. Ortelius, following Pliny the Elder, resolved the problem by inserting a fictitious island off southern Italy and designating it as Calypso’s home.

This imaginary location persisted on maps into the mid-nineteenth century, and travellers continued to search for it well into the twentieth. Ortelius discusses the detail of Ulysses’ peregrinations with reference not only to maps, but to the ‘methods of ship building and navigation techniques’ of his own time. Ortelius’s conflation of Homeric poetry with new cartographic and other technologies reflects the period’s ‘growing intellectual investment in the relationship between narrative and place. (Badcoe, 2019)

Although first printed in 1601 following a privilege granted in 1597, this map originates from a 1624 edition of the 

and features contemporary hand colouring. It would have been included in the Parergon, a collection of historical volume of maps included at the end of Ortelius's landmark atlas.

The Errors of Ulysses from Ortelius's Parergon