Bird's-eye View of Ambon, with a Portrait of Frederik Houtman (1571-1627) in a Cartouche

Frederik Houtman commissioned this map of Ambon himself and put his own portrait in the lower right corner. He became the island's first Dutch governor in 1605, after the Dutch East India Company took the Portuguese fort, drawn oversized at the centre, without a fight. Clove trees are dotted everywhere, since cloves were why the company wanted Ambon. Houtman first kept good relations with the Ambonese chiefs. Later the company sent ruthless punitive expeditions to stop islanders selling cloves to its rivals.

The map hung in the meeting room of the company's directors in Amsterdam. In 1620 Admiral Steven van der Hagen, who had actually taken the fort, protested, and the directors let him swap Houtman's face for his own. It never happened. Only the inscriptions beside the portrait were painted over in white.

The Rijksmuseum lists the painter as anonymous, and map historians have linked it to the mapmaker David de Meyne.