Guillaume Delisle, Carte Du Mexique et de la Floride des Terres Angloises et des Isles Antilles du Cours et des Environs de la Riviere Mississipi . . . 1703

Guillaume Delisle . . . shocked the geographical world out of its complacency . . . He shifted land masses and moved islands to the consternation of his elders, but all such radical changes were made on the basis of information usually obtained by astronomical observation or actual surveys.  —Lloyd Brown

One of the three great maps of regional North America conceived by Delisle during the early eighteenth century. The present map covers the area from the Great Lakes to New Mexico, extends southward as far as Panama and Venezuela, and includes the West Indies. The map correctly shows the Great Lakes region, and is further distinguished as the first printed map to accurately represent the Mississippi River. Reinhartz and Colley observe, “. . . the attempt to portray the northern gulf, so brilliantly begun by Pineda in 1519, reached its culmination nearly two centuries later in [this] first generally reliable map.” As much detail as was available appears, including locations of Indian tribes and villages, French and English forts, and perhaps most importantly, the early Spanish and Indian settlements in what are now Texas and New Mexico. Geographic features and river systems are drawn according to original eyewitness Jesuit missionaries, colonizers, and explorers, including d’Iberville, Bienville, and Le Sueur. Delisle also carefully studied and incorporated information from firsthand reports by the survivors of La Salle’s final expedition to the Gulf of Mexico.

The 1708 edition Carte du Mexique et de la Floride was issued by Delisle himself, with minor changes to the map, as well as the Quai de Horologe address. In 1722, Delisle arranged for a new plate to be produced and issued by Covens and Mortier. Phillip Buache, who married Delisle’s daughter, reissued the original plate in 1745, adding his imprint at the lower right. Copies of this seminal map appeared throughout the century, including versions by Seutter, Lotter, Chatelain, Schenk, and Homann. The present impression is a fine early state of this historic and influential map by one of the most important French geographers of the eighteenth century.

Delisle’s superiority as a mapmaker arose in part from his utilization of observations made at the Royal Observatory of Paris. The establishment of the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1666 had ushered in a new era of scientific methods, and the career of Guillaume Delisle (1675–1726) was instrumental in France’s ascent to dominance in the science of cartography. Delisle became a leader in scientific methods of map making, and was eventually appointed Royal Geographer to Louis XIV.

Refs.: Brown, The Story of Maps, pp. 242-243; Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps, no. 137, pl. 43 (1708 ed.); Jackson, Flags along the Coast, pp. 42, 44, pl. 17; Martin and Martin, Maps of Texas and the Southwest, p. 93, pl. 14, color pl., p. 50 (1707-08 ed.); Reihardtz and Colley, The Mapping of the American Southwest, pp. 16-17, pl. 7; Rumsey, no. 300061; Schwartz and Ehrenberg, p. 137, pl. 82 (1703 ed.); Tooley, The Mapping of America, pp. 22-23, pl. 12 (1722 ed.); Wagner, Cartography of the Northwest Coast, no. 474; Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West, vol. I, no. 84, pp. 58–59.