South America.

Pinkerton's extraordinary 1818 map of South America. Covers the entire continent from Panama to Tierra del Fuego. Includes the Falklands and South Georgia Island. Pinkerton offers impressive detail throughout noting indigenous groups, missions, towns and cities, swamps, mountains, and river systems. Lower right hand quadrant features the title plate and four distance scales, British Miles, Portuguese Leagues, Castile Leagues and French Leagues. Cartographically speaking this is an often neglected part of the world - especially in the early 19th century. Though the coastlands and open plains had been well mapped early in the 17th and 18th centuries, the interior was rarely penetrated. The combination of mountainous terrain, daunting jungles, malaria, and unfriendly indigenous groups combine to make this area all but unexplorable - even today. Nonetheless, Pinkerton make a commendable attempt to piece together early conquistador accounts, explorer's journals, missionary records, and indigenous reports into a coherent mapping of the area. In doing so he achieves a number of significant advances. Probably the most interesting aspect of this map is Pinkerton's treatment of the apocrypha

Date

1818

Place

South America

Archive

Wikimedia Commons

Type

map

Original size

3,603 × 5,000 pixels

Need maps for a whole project? Add Find Any Map to Claude and ask for this one by its id: 237567.