The New World in Fifty Maps, 1561 to 1865

How Venice, Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris, London, Glogau and New York drew and redrew the Americas

Every map of the Americas is a statement about what its maker knew, and what he thought his readers needed to know. Put nearly fifty of them side by side, from a small Venetian copperplate of 1561 to a New York family atlas of the 1860s, and the continent changes shape before your eyes: an island becomes a peninsula, a republic appears and vanishes, a border moves south by a few hundred miles. This essay walks through the maps of the Americas now on our shelves, roughly in the order in which they were made.

Venice, 1561: the New World in a Ptolemy

The earliest maps in the group come from Girolamo Ruscelli's Italian edition of Ptolemy, printed in Venice in 1561. Most of its modern maps were enlarged copperplate versions of those Giacomo Gastaldi had made for the Ptolemy of 1548, and among the "new tables" that followed the classical ones was the New World itself. Tierra Nova shows the whole of South America, from the Caribbean to the Strait of Magellan. Brasil Nuova Tavola, a new composition rather than a copy of Gastaldi, is the first copperplate map devoted to Brazil, preceded only by the woodcut in Ramusio's Navigationi of 1556. Two further sheets, Isola Cuba Nova and Isola Spagnola Nova, enlarge Gastaldi's maps of 1548, among the first printed maps devoted to Cuba and to Hispaniola. Seventy years after Columbus, the islands where the Spanish conquest began were still being drawn island by island, as discoveries in their own right.

Spain and the Low Countries, 1598 to 1640

At the end of the century the Dutch began to make the world map their own business. Barent Langenes's pocket atlas, the Caert-Thresoor, appeared in Middelburg in 1598, and its little oval map of America carries on the verso a Dutch description of the New World for readers who had just begun to sail there.

Spain answered with authority. In 1601 Antonio de Herrera, the royal chronicler of the Indies, published the Descripcion de las Indias Occidentales with a set of maps based on official Spanish sources. The map of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo comes from that first edition of Madrid 1601. Petrus Bertius's miniature Mexicana, Amsterdam 1602, shows how quickly such material passed into the small Dutch atlases. The Mercator-Hondius map of the Greater Antilles, with Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico and an inset of Havana, belongs to the same world of Amsterdam engraving in the first years of the seventeenth century.

Two maps record the Dutch at sea and on the coast. Joris van Spilbergen's chart of the Strait of Magellan, from his Oost ende West-Indische Spiegel of 1619, shows the passage of the VOC fleet through the strait in 1615. Willem Janszoon Blaeu's Virginia and Florida maps the English and Spanish coasts of the South-East around 1640, and Janssonius's Peru, with south at the top, covers the viceroyalty from Quito to northern Chile.

Paris and Amsterdam, 1700 to 1720: correcting the continent

Around 1700 the map of the Americas was put on a new footing. Guillaume De l'Isle's L'Amerique Meridionale, published in Paris in 1700, corrected the shape and breadth of South America on the basis of the astronomical observations of the Académie des Sciences. Nicolas Sanson's maps of half a century earlier lived on in Dutch dress: South America, the West Indies and Florida, engraved by Anthonie de Winter for François Halma's Algemeene Weereld-Beschryving of 1705. Sanson's Florida of 1657 was one of the important early maps of Florida and the South-East.

In Nuremberg, Johann Baptist Homann's map of the Americas, in its first state of about 1710, still shows California as an island, a mistake that had become an article of faith on European maps for most of the seventeenth century. Henri Abraham Chatelain's map of Mexico, Florida and the Caribbean, about 1719, comes from the same years.

Madrid, c. 1726 to 1730: the official view of the Indies

Herrera's maps had a second life a century later, when his Descripcion was reissued in Madrid with the maps re-engraved. We have a long run of them: Spanish North America, New Spain, Guatemala, South America, Panama, the New Kingdom of Granada, Quito, Lima, Charcas and Chile. Together they show the Spanish empire as its own administration divided it, audiencia by audiencia, rather than as foreign mapmakers imagined it.

The eighteenth century: harbours, colonies and revolution

As the struggle for America between Britain, France and Spain sharpened, maps became tools of war and trade. Covens and Mortier's sheet of twenty-two harbour plans, about 1737 to 1745, gathers the ports of British and Spanish America, from Placentia and Boston to Havana, Cartagena and Porto Bello, after the insets of Henry Popple's great map. Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, hydrographer to the French navy, mapped South America and New England and the colonial North-East in the 1750s, the decade of the Seven Years' War.

Three maps belong to the American Revolution itself. Louis Desnos's large map of the Americas, in the edition of 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, is framed by twenty-four portraits of the explorers and conquerors of the New World. Thomas Kitchin's Gulf of Mexico, made for the first edition of William Robertson's History of America in 1777, shows the Caribbean as Britain, Spain and France were about to fight over it again. And Matthew Albert Lotter's Augsburg edition of Claude Joseph Sauthier's New-York and New-Jersey, also 1777, brought the provinces where German troops were then serving with the British army to readers at home, with the colonial counties still intact and the future Vermont still claimed by New York. Laurie and Whittle's South America of about 1794 closes the century from London.

1818 to 1865: a continent redrawn

The last group shows how quickly the map of North America could go out of date in the nineteenth century. Morris Birkbeck's map of the Territory of the Illinois, London 1818, was made for an English farmer's account of his journey to the prairies, where he founded a settlement and drew many English emigrants after him; Illinois became a state at the end of that year.

The maps of Carl Flemming's Hand-Atlas, published in Glogau under the name of Dr. K. Sohr, record the next great change almost as it happened. In the sheets dated 1844, the United States, North America and Mexico, Central America and Texas all show Texas as an independent republic and Mexico reaching to the Pacific. By 1853 the same atlas shows North America after the Mexican War, with the United States running from ocean to ocean, and the new West of California, Oregon, Utah and New Mexico in its first, short-lived political form. We have told that story at more length in our news item on these maps.

Two later maps of Mexico complete it. Joseph Wilson Lowry's Mexico for Blackie's Imperial Atlas, about 1859, shows the border after the Gadsden Purchase, where it still runs today. Johnson's Mexico, from a New York family atlas of the early 1860s, adds an inset of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, then the object of American plans for a passage between the oceans, at the very moment when French troops were in Mexico.

Reading the maps together

None of these maps is neutral. Each was made for a particular reader: a Venetian humanist, a Dutch merchant, a Spanish official, a French naval officer, a German family following the news from America, an English farmer thinking of emigrating. Read together, they show not only how the Americas were discovered and settled, but how Europe, and later America itself, kept changing its mind about what the New World was. All the maps mentioned here are available, and we are glad to show any of them, or a group of them, by appointment in Amsterdam.