As Robert Baldwin, loc. cit., points out, circumnavigators and senior naval officials often had globes included in their portraits to mark the importance of their achievements; see, for example, Marcus Gheeraerts' portrait of Sir Francis Drake in the Plymouth City Museum
and Cornelis Ketel's portrait of William Frobisher in the Bodleian Library, both of which show the sitters with terrestrial globes. Dutch portraits of the seventeenth century tended by contrast to show such men alongside celestial globes owing to the fact that the Dutch made a particularly notable contribution to the recording and navigational exploitation of the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere. The navigator in the present portrait is depicted standing next to a celestial globe similar to the 1682 Van Keulen versions of earlier Blaeu globes. Seen through the doorway are two surveyors using a pedometer beneath guns that are according a salute, with Dutch ships of the United Netherlands East India Company in the distance