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Maps of Ezo, Sakhalin, and Kuril Islands
This map was made by Fujita Junsai and published by Harimaya Katsugorō in 1854, around the time period when the Tokugawa shogunate started sending expeditions to the area of Ezo, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. Russia was also showing interest in this area at this time. Place names are identified and indicated in the Japanese katakana characters (the angular Japanese phonetic syllabary). Various land and sea routes in the Ezo area (now Hokkaido) are shown in detail.
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Library of Congress
Manuscript Map of Dagua River Region, Colombia
This beautiful pen-and-ink and watercolor map shows the Dagua River and the town of Sombrerillo in what was then the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Grenada. The river empties into the Pacific Ocean near the present-day city of Buenaventura, Colombia. Sombrerillo was a “free town” populated by former slaves who had gained their freedom from the lowland mines and the highland haciendas of the region. The map is oriented with north at the bottom.
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Map of a Part of the Island of Cuba and of the Bahamas
Joan Vinckeboons (1617-70) was a Dutch cartographer and engraver born into a family of artists of Flemish origin. He was in the employ of the Dutch West India Company and produced maps for over 30 years for use by Dutch mercantile and military shipping. This map of a portion of central Cuba and the Bahamas reflects the careful mapping that the Dutch West India Company undertook to facilitate safe and successful navigation in that region. The map identifies the Bahamas Channel (i.e., the Gulf Stream) that served as the ...
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Map of the World
This late 18th-century Latin map of the world by the Augsburg map publisher Tobias Lotter (1717-77) is based on an earlier map by the French cartographer Guillaume de l'Isle (1675-1726). De l'Isle was among the group of French cartographers who wrested mapmaking preeminence from the Dutch in the late 17th century. De l’Isle was a child prodigy, having drawn his first map at age nine. He was trained in history and geography, as well as in mathematics and astronomy. He drew extensively on classical Arabic and Persian ...
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National Library of Brazil
A Chart of the Gulf Stream
This map, from the Peter Force Map Collection at the Library of Congress, was created by the Philadelphia engraver James Poupard. It was the third in a series featuring a chart of the Gulf Stream. The latter was well known to Spanish ship captains, who relied on it to sail from the Americas to the Iberian Peninsula, but there were no universal charts or maps due to Spanish secrecy. This map originally was sketched by Timothy Folger, a Nantucket fisherman and a cousin of Benjamin Franklin, who conceived the map ...
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Library of Congress
A General Chart of the West Indies: With Additions from the Latest Navigators
Captain Joseph Smith Speer was an English mariner who served 21 years on the Mosquito (Miskito) Coast in what is now Nicaragua. He later created detailed maps of the West Indies based on his first-hand knowledge of the region. In 1766 he published The West-India Pilot containing 13 maps, followed by an enlarged edition with 26 maps in 1771. A General Chart of the West Indies, shown here, is a large, detailed map (71 by 117 centimeters). It is based on an earlier map from 1774, “with Additions from the ...
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The Island and City of Metropolitan Goa of India
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563-1611) was a Dutch traveler and explorer who spent six years (1583-89) in Goa, an important trading center on the west coast of India that Portugal annexed in 1510 and was to occupy for the next 450 years. Linschoten was employed as bookkeeper to the local archbishop. After returning to the Netherlands, he wrote two books containing valuable information about the people and geography of India. Translated into English and published in London in 1598, Linschoten’s works helped to stimulate Dutch and English interest in ...
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National Library of Brazil
A New Map of Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton Island: With the Adjacent Parts of New England and Canada, Composed from a Great Number of Actual Surveys; and Other Materials Regulated by Many New Astronomical Observations of the Longitude as Well as Latitude
Thomas Jefferys (1710-71) was a royal geographer to King George III and a London publisher of maps. He is well known for his maps of North America, produced to meet commercial demand, but also to support British territorial claims against the French. The period from 1748-63 saw fierce global competition between England and France, culminating in the Seven Years' War, which produced a high demand for maps of the contested territories. This map presents Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island in the wake of the “great upheaval,” when the British ...
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A Plan of the Rosalij Compy. Estates, the Property of His Excelly. Charles O'Harra, the Honble. Leiut. Gov. Will. Stuart, James Clarke & Rob. & Phill.
France and Britain vied for control of Dominica for many years. In 1763, the British gained possession of the island. This detailed map shows British-owned estates and a plantation on the Atlantic side of the island. Details on the map include individual buildings and structures, roads, sections of the plantation identified by number, administrative divisions of the estates identified by letters, streams, pictorial representations of vegetation and relief, the coastline and coastal features, and a vignette of ships in the harbor. The map also includes a keyed legend listing the ...
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A Modern and Quite Precise Depiction of America (or the Fourth Part of the World)
In 1554, Diego Gutiérrez was appointed principal cosmographer to the king of Spain in the Casa de la Contratación. The crown commissioned the Casa to produce a large-scale map of the western hemisphere, often called the “fourth part of the world.” The purpose of the map was to assert Spain’s claims to new world territories against the rival claims of Portugal and France. Spain claimed all lands south of the Tropic of Cancer, which is shown prominently. The map was engraved by the famous Antwerp engraver Hieronymus Cock, who ...
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Library of Congress
Ancient Assyria Divided into Syria, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and Assyria
Little is known about the French mapmaker Philippe de La Rue. He was associated with the pioneering French cartographer Nicolas Sanson, and specialized in Biblical themes. In 1651, he published La Terre sainte en six cartes géographiques (The Holy Land in six maps), the first collection of maps laid out in a chronological sequence around a unifying theme. La Rue’s goal was to trace the history of the world “from the origins to the present.” The six maps cover the land of Canaan and the Exodus, the Promised Land ...
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Portable Atlas, or, the New Theater of War in Europe
Daniel de la Feuille was a watchmaker, goldsmith, engraver, and bookseller in Amsterdam in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. He was also a prolific mapmaker. In this “portable atlas,” de la Feuille documented the intricacies of the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14), which began after the Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II, died and left his kingdom to Philip, the Duke of Anjou and the grandson of the French Bourbon king, Louis XIV. Worried that France’s Sun King intended to dominate Europe by consolidating his power in ...
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Library of Congress
Austria-Hungary
The Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918) was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual empire governed by a dual monarchy that exercised Habsburg rule across Europe’s second largest sovereign territory. Although considered a Great Power in the concert of European nations, the empire was internally divided by internecine quarrels among its national minorities and ultimately broke up under the strains of World War I. This 1906 Rand McNally map shows the empire in the decade before its dissolution. William Rand founded the company that became Rand McNally in Chicago in 1856, initially to print guidebooks ...
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Library of Congress
Emigrant's Map and Guide for Routes to North America
This map by Gotthelf Zimmermann reflects the importance of German immigration to North America in the mid-19th century. When the Revolution of 1848 failed to produce desired reforms within the German confederation, droves of disillusioned Germans turned their sights abroad. Maps such as this helped show them the way. At the time, land in the United States was cheap, fertile, and plentiful, making it an ideal choice for immigrants eager to establish new settlements and to begin new lives. German communities in the United States became so prevalent that on ...
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Peking
The German East-Asian Expeditionary Corps was sent to China in 1900 by Kaiser Wilhelm II as part of the eight-nation (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, United States, Japan, Austria, Italy) operation to suppress the Boxer Rebellion against foreign influence in China. The German force arrived in Beijing in mid-October, by which time the conflict was largely over. In late 1900-early 1901, the corps engaged in a series of brutal punitive expeditions designed to end Boxer resistance in the countryside and force China to sign a peace treaty with Germany. This detailed ...
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Library of Congress
Boundary Between Turkey and Armenia: As Determined by Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America
The disintegration of the Ottoman and Russian empires at the end of World War I gave birth to a number of new states. In May 1918, Eastern Armenia, formerly part of the Russian Empire, declared itself an independent republic. In April 1920, the victorious Allied Powers, dismantling the Ottoman Empire, directed that Western Armenia be attached to the new republic and appointed U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to arbitrate the boundary between Turkey (successor to the Ottoman Empire) and Armenia. In November 1920, Wilson set a boundary based on a ...
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Brazil
This map of Brazil is a Tallis map, identifiable by the scrolling on the borders and the finely-drawn scenes inscribed on the map. John Tallis and Co. was a British mapmaking firm that operated from roughly 1835 to 1860. The map was drawn and engraved by cartographer John Rapkin. Tallis maps were known for their accurate designs and numerous place names and geographical details, as well as for the use of shaded areas to indicate topographical features. The fine craftsmanship of the map can be seen in the color illustrations ...
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National Library of Brazil
British Empire Throughout the World, Exhibited in One View
John Bartholomew and Co. was a mapmaking firm established in Edinburgh, Scotland, by John Bartholomew, Sr. (1805-61). His son, John Bartholomew, Jr. (1831-93), carried on the business. In the 1830s, the firm secured the commission to produce the maps in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which it held for the next 90 years. The business grew in the late 19th century as the British Empire expanded abroad and educational opportunity increased at home, driving up demand for maps. Among the cartographic innovations attributed to the firm were the use of red to ...
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Library of Congress
Campaigns of the Hesse-Darmstadt Contingent Under the First Empire
During the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, many Germans fought on the side of the French Empire. After Napoleon defeated Austria and Russia in the December 1805 Battle of Austerlitz, he grouped 16 German states that were part of the Holy Roman Empire into a French-controlled Confederation of the Rhine. He then dissolved the Holy Roman Empire. The states that were members of the confederation were compelled to supply military units and soldiers to Napoleon’s armies. This map and the accompanying table show the military engagements in ...
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Library of Congress
Cape of Good Hope
John Arrowsmith (1790-1873) was best known for the 1834 publication London Atlas of Universal Geography, widely considered among the best European sources of maps at the time. In 1810 he had joined the mapmaking firm of his uncle Aaron Arrowsmith, one of the premier publishers of the day, known for rendering the latest geographical findings into impressively detailed maps. Arrowsmith was a founding member of the Royal Geographic Society, which awarded him its gold medal in 1863 for his maps of Australia, North America, Africa, and India. Arrowsmith’s 1842 ...
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Map of the Straits of Magellan and Part of the Land of Fire, Prepared in 1786
This composite map of the 1785-86 scientific expedition to the Strait of Magellan under the command of Antonio de Córdoba (1740?-1811) represents the first comprehensive study of the region. The map includes references to ports, bays, channels, and other natural features, a keyed legend, and a detailed explanation and notes. Córdoba was a commander (teniente general) in the Spanish Navy who participated in various battles, campaigns, and scientific expeditions throughout the Spanish Empire and beyond. These activities took him to Havana in 1761, Algiers in 1767, Peru, Chile, and ...
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Map of Barbary, Nigritia and Guinea
Jan Barend Elwe was a publisher and seller of maps who was active in Amsterdam in the period between 1777 and 1815. He is best known for his pocket atlases of the Netherlands (1786) and of Germany (1791). Many of Elwe’s publications were reprints of earlier maps by well-known European cartographers. He reissued several maps by the great French mapmaker Guillaume de l’Isle, including this 1792 map of West and North Africa, which de l’Isle first published in 1707.
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Map of Quantong Province or Lyau-tong and of the Kingdom of Kau-li or Korea: For the Universal History of a Society of Men of Letters
This 1745 map of Korea was prepared for a universal history published in France in the 18th century. Based on an earlier English map, it is mainly in French but includes some names in German, e.g., “Das gelbe Meer” for the Yellow Sea. The notation at the bottom indicates that the prime meridian is set at Ferro Island, otherwise known as El Hierro, the southwestern-most of the Canary Islands. In his Geographia, the ancient astronomer and geographer Ptolemy (87-150) specified that maps should use coordinates stated in degrees, with ...
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Map of Africa
This 1820 map of Africa by Adrien Hubert Brué (1786-1832), one of the leading French cartographers of the day, shows the state of European geographic knowledge of Africa in the early 19th century. Unlike many sedentary mapmakers, the Parisian Brué had traveled widely from a young age, on long sailing voyages to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and as a midshipman on a French naval expedition along the Australian coast. These voyages damaged Brué’s health, however, so that he returned to Paris where he began to draft maps under ...
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Map of Australia
Adrien Brué (1786-1832) accompanied the French explorer Nicolas Baudin on his 1803 voyage to Australia. Baudin described Brué as “a young man of good disposition and with a zeal for geography,” and named the Brué Reef off Australia’s northwestern coast in his honor. Brué returned to France to become the royal geographer and an important publisher of high-quality maps. The detailed notes on this 1826 map identify its sources. Brué calls Australia “New Holland,” the name first given to it in 1644 by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman. Only ...
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Map of the Provinces of Nicaragua and Costa Rica
Jacques Bellin (1703-72) was a prolific cartographer attached to the French Marine Office. In 1764, he published Le Petit Atlas Maritime (Small maritime atlas), a work in five volumes containing 581 maps. Nicaragua and Costa Rica, shown in this map from the second volume of the atlas, were at the time provinces of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, part of the Spanish Empire. The left side of the image shows the title page of Bellin’s atlas. Nicaragua and Costa Rica both declared independence from Spain in 1821.
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Map of the Three Arabias: Excerpted Partly from the Arab of Nubia, Partly from Several Other Authors
This map of “the three Arabias” by French royal geographer Nicolas Sanson d’Abbeville is one of the few 17th-century maps of the Arabian Peninsula. Despite its importance as a crossroads of trade between three continents, the geography of Arabia remained largely unknown to European cartographers until the era of European exploration and expansion in the 15th century. Although published in 1654–by the Parisian printer and engraver Pierre Mariette-Sanson’s map remained largely based on the medieval work of the 12th-century Arab cartographer Al-Idrisi (1099-1164), whose work Geographia Nubiensis ...
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Map of the Belgian Congo
Little is known about the actual cartographer and engraver of this map, Léon de Moor. More is known about the publishing house, J. Lebègue and Co. The firm published many geographical documents, including maps and travel accounts. In 1896, when this map was published, the Belgian Congo–known as the Congo Free State–was actually a personal possession of King Leopold II and not an official Belgian colony. The king was engaged in a vigorous publicity campaign aimed at convincing the other European powers to recognize the legitimacy of his ...
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Central America, the West Indies South America and Portions of the United States and Mexico
This 1909 map, published by the United Fruit Company, shows the extensive shipping, railroad, and wireless telegraph network built and maintained by the company to carry out its main business, the production and marketing of bananas. United Fruit was founded in 1899 by the merger of the Boston Fruit Company and several other firms involved in the banana industry in Central America, the Caribbean, and Colombia. The history of the company goes back to 1872, when Minor C. Keith began to acquire banana plantations and build a railroad in Costa ...
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Central Africa after the Newest Research
Dr. Joseph Chavanne’s map of central Africa, most likely created in the early 1880s, is a product of the European imperial “scramble for Africa.” Although the Dutch and Portuguese established trading posts along the coasts of Africa as early as the late 15th century, the European race to claim significant tracts of territory in sub-Saharan Africa began in earnest only in the late 19th century. Belgium, Britain, France, and Germany all carved out competing claims, based on the discoveries of inland explorers whose expeditions Chavanne documents. Originally from Vienna ...
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Chart of the Galapagos: Surveyed in the Merchant-Ship Rattler and Drawn by Captain James Colnett of the Royal Navy in 1793, 1794 ; Engraved by T. Foot
In 1793, Captain James Colnett of the Royal Navy in the merchant ship Rattler undertook a survey of the Galapagos Islands. Colnett was on an extended voyage to the Pacific that he chronicled in a book published in 1798 under the lengthy title A voyage to the south Atlantic and round cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean, for the purpose of extending the spermaceti whale fisheries, and other objects of commerce, by ascertaining the ports, bays, harbours, and anchoring births in certain islands and coasts in those seas at which ...
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Map of Asiatic Russia
Weimar was the cultural and intellectual capital of Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the home of poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. This 1822 engraved map by the Weimar Geographic Institute shows provincial boundaries, population centers, and the different nationalities of Siberia. Ethnic Germans from the Baltic region in the service of the tsarist government played prominent roles in the exploration of Siberia in the 18th century and the region remained an object of fascination to many Germans.
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National Library of Russia
Map of South and North Korea in Eight Provinces
This 19th-century Japanese pen-and-ink and watercolor map of Korea possibly was copied from an original manuscript map of 1785 by Hayashi Shihei, “Sangoku tsūran zusetsu” (Illustrated survey of three countries). It depicts eight provinces that became the basis of the current administrative provinces and municipalities in South Korea and North Korea. The Tokugawa shogunate banned Hayashi’s original map in 1791, along with his book of the same year, Kaikoku heidan (Discussion of the military problems of a maritime nation). The Tokugawa shogunate considered Hayashi a dangerous critic of official ...
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Colombia and Venezuela
Chicago-based Rand McNally became a major publisher of atlases, maps, globes, and travel guides in the United States in the second half of the 19th century. This map of Colombia and Venezuela is from the 1898 edition of Rand, McNally & Cos. Indexed Atlas of the World, Containing Large Scale Maps of Every Country and Civil Division upon the Face of the Globe, together with Historical, Statistical and Descriptive Matter Relative to Each. The atlas contains two volumes, one with maps of the United States, the other maps of foreign countries ...
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Colton's Japan: Nippon, Kiusiu, Sikok, Yesso and the Japanese Kuriles
J.H. Colton & Company was founded in New York City, most likely in 1831, by Joseph Hutchins Colton, a Massachusetts native who had only a basic education and little or no formal training in geography or cartography. Colton built the firm into a major publisher of maps and atlases by purchasing the copyrights to other maps and re-publishing them. Most of the Colton maps were of individual states or groups of states in the United States, but some were of other countries. This 1855 map of Japan is attributed to ...
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Coast of Cuba from Cape of San Antonio to the Bay of Cardenas
This Spanish map of a portion of the north coast of Cuba shows the coastline, coastal features, soundings, navigational hazards, a fortification, and settlements. It includes a decorative wind rose and five coastal profile views. The map is oriented with south at the top. It is from the Real Escuela de Navegación in Cadiz, Spain, and was acquired by the Library of Congress from the Maggs Brothers, London.
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General Depiction of the Empty Plains (in Common Parlance, the Ukraine) Together with its Neighboring Provinces
Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan was a French engineer who worked in Poland between 1630 and 1647. He built fortifications in Ukraine, most of which was then under Polish control, took part in battles with the Cossacks and Tatars, and in 1639 traveled by boat down the Dnieper (Dnipro, in Ukrainian) River. Beauplan produced two important early maps of Ukraine that were based on his own observations and his own careful astronomical and topographic measurements. His map of 1648, shown here, includes detailed information about the border areas, including Tatar ...
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Egypt and Arabia Petraea
This illustrated chart of Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula is a Tallis map, identifiable by the scrolling on the borders and the finely drawn scenes inscribed on the map. John Tallis and Co. was a British mapmaking firm that operated from roughly 1835 to 1860. Egypt and Arabia Petraea was part of their large-scale project, the Illustrated Atlas and Modern History of the World, Geographical, Political, Commercial & Statistical, published in 1851. Arabia Petraea was a name dating from the Roman Empire, consisting of land that is now Egypt’s ...
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Economic Map of Yakutsk Oblast
This Soviet-era economic map of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic is from an atlas, Yakutia ASSR: Atlas, Socialist Yakutia. It shows six different economic regions in this vast region of Siberia. Depicted on the map are centers for the production of machinery, electricity, and foodstuffs, and for extractive industries producing coal, natural gas, gold, mica, salt, building materials, and diamonds. The development of the mining industry in Yakutia, which started in the 1960s, brought an influx of migrants from European Russia and the other Slavic republics of the Soviet ...
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Russian State Library
Ethnographic Map of the Balkan Peninsula
The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I transformed the political organization of the Balkans. The war had started in the Balkans with the assassination of the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a militant Bosnian Serb seeking independence for his country from the dual empire. Jovan Cvijić, the author of this “ethnographic map” of the Balkans, published in 1918 by the American Geographical Society of New York, was a professor of geography at the University of Belgrade. Cvijić completed his doctorate at the University of ...
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General Map Showing the Explorations and Surveys of the Expedition, 1907-09
The British Antarctica Expedition of 1907-09, led by Ernest H. Shackleton, left Port Lyttelton, New Zealand, in the ship Nimrod on January 1, 1908. On February 3, the Nimrod deposited Shackelton and a party of 14 men at Cape Royds. The men divided into three groups. One would try to reach the South Pole, a second went north to reach the South Magnetic Pole, while a third was to explore the mountains west of McMurdo Sound. Shackleton, three companions, and four ponies set out for the South Pole on October ...
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General Map of Asiatic Russia: Showing an Up-to-Date Division into Provinces and Regions, Maritime Administration of the Maritime Region, and the Routes of Russian Seafarers
This Russian map of Siberia shows the borders of regions and districts, population centers, roads, fortresses, redoubts, outposts, guard posts, factories, mines, and ruins. It also indicates the territories of the various nationalities of Siberia and shows in fine detail the routes taken by the major Russian explorers--Bering, Billings, Kruzenshtern, Golovin, Sarychev, Gall--on their expeditions to the North Pacific and Alaska. The map was produced by the Corps of Military Topographers which, under a government regulation of 1822, was attached to the General Staff and the Military Topographical Depot “to ...
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National Library of Russia