Mappe Monde suivant la projection des cartes reduites.

This uncommon 1784 map of the world on a Mercator projection by Robert de Vaugondy occupies the ephemeral period between Captain Cook’s second and third voyages. Cooks explorations along the eastern coast of Australia as well as around New Caledonia and are in evidence while his later work in the Pacific, including his important exploration of American northwestern coastline, is noticeably absent. Instead the northwest coast of America is loosely ghosted in with minor inland notations regarding the fictional discoveries of Admiral de Fonte. Barthlomew de Fonte was supposedly a Spanish Admiral who, sailing up the Pacific coast c. 1640 discovered a series of gigantic lakes, seas, and rivers heading eastward towards the Hudson Bay. Upon one of these great inland lakes he met with a ship from Boston that claimed to have come through a Northwestern Passage. De Fonte’s story appeared in a short lived 1706 English publication entitled “Memoirs of the Curious”. The story inspired no less than Joseph-Nicholas de L’Isle, younger brother of the better known Guilleme de L’Isle. Joseph-Nicholas was at the time employed by the Russian Tzar Peter the Great in the compilation of Russian surveys an

Date

1784

Archive

Wikimedia Commons

Type

map

Original size

3,500 × 2,171 pixels

Need maps for a whole project? Add Find Any Map to Claude and ask for this one by its id: 144095.