Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612) was born in Wakken, the son of Olivier de Hondt,  and Petronella d'Havertuyn. His family moved to Ghent when Jodocus was still very young and by the age of eight he had taken up drawing and engraving. In 1584, because of the war with Spain and to escape religious persecution, Jodocus fled to London.
     He trained with the English cartographers Richard Hakluyt and Edward Wright, and in 1593 he returned to Amsterdam and established a business specializing in map and globe making. In 1604 Jodocus bought the plates of Mercator's Atlas, which had fallen behind in competition with Ortelius' popular atlas. He combined Mercator's original maps with about 40 of his own more up-to-date maps and from 1606 published enlarged editions of the Atlas, still under Mercator's name but with his own name as publisher.
      In 1595 he published Vera totius Expeditionis Nauticae, based, in part, on a map he acquired by Rumold Mercator, Gerhard's son. The continents of North and South America and Europe-Asia-Africa are divided between the two hemispheres. South America is drawn more accurately than on the Mercator map, but the continent of Australia is still misunderstood.
     Sir Frances Drake's course around the earth in 1580, traced in red, is not completely accurate. The route South from England swings too far west northwest of Africa. Drake made a number of stops on both the east and west coasts of South America which are not marked. And the route through the East Indies is incorrect. However, Nova Albion on the coast of California is marked. The original also shows the course of Thomas Cavendish a few years later (1586–1588).

The sheet commemorates the 400th anniversary of Drake's voyage around the world

    Between 1605 and 1610 he engraved the plates for the maps in John Speed's The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. The souvenir sheet is a simplified version of Hondius' America meridionalis, published in 1608. The sheet was issued in 1988 to mark the ARABAPEX '88 Philatelic Exposition.

     Shortly before his death in 1612, Jodocus' daughter Elisabeth married another prominent publisher, Jan Jansson.  From 1632 the premises were known as De Wackeren Hondt.