IMPORTANT MAP OF THE GREAT LAKES

AUTHOR:

BELLIN, JACQUES NICOLAS

TITLE:

Carte des Lacs Du Canada

CONDITION:

11 1/4” x 17 1/4”. Uncolored copperplate engraving. A strong impression in excellent condition.

DATE:

1744

DESCRIPTION:

Bellin’s Carte des Lacs du Canada contained some of the first new material on the Great Lakes to appear since the landmark maps of Guillaume De L’Isle. It was compiled from the Chaussegros de Lery manuscripts and was notable for the creation of the fictitious islands of Philippeaux and Pontchartrain in Lake Superior, as well as continuing the myth of a mountain range in Michigan. The map was published in 1744 in Charlevoix’s Histoire et Description Generale de la Nouvelle France. Jacques-Nicolas Bellin was “the last great French map-maker to concern himself with the cartography of the French possessions in North America” -- Verner & Stubbs. He was the first Geographer to the French Admiralty, or Depot de la Marine, and Official Hydrographer to the King of France. As such, he “had access to official journals, sketches, maps and charts of the earlier explorers, using such sources with great care and discrimination to produce some of the finest mapping of French America available in the eighteenth century. It is qualities such as these which result in the high esteem with which much of Bellin’s mapping is still regarded by the late twentieth-century collector” – John Goss.

REFERENCES:

Kershaw, Early Printed Maps of Canada, Volume III, #946; Tooley, The Mapping of America, p. 316; Goss, The Mapping of North America, #56.

Inventory No. 7746