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Description

Nice outline color example of Herman Moll's map of the Southern part of South America.

Detailed map showing the southern most part of South America's coastlines with hundreds of harbors, bays & capes. At the base of the map below Terra Del Fuego & Cape Horn are notes of 1.) Cape Horn discovered by La Maire the first that Passed this way into ye South Sea 1616. 2.) Here Capt. Cowley Passed for ye South Sea & 3.) Here Capts Rogers & Dampier Passed. Lat.61°.53. A.D.1709.

Living & working in London as an engraver & cartographer, Herman Moll (c.1654-1732) spent some of his free time in the London Coffee Houses, socializing with some of the foremost navigators, explorers and buccaneers of his time, who supplied him with surveys & sketches taken from their voyages, such as Capt. William Cowley who kept a journal of his round-the-world trip during 1683-1688, Capt. Woodes Rogers (1679-1732) a buccaneer in the South Seas, & Capt. William Dampier (1651-1715) who made 3 circumnavigations This fine early 18th century map includes a compass rose with fleur-de-lys pointer & is an excellent example of Herman Moll's work as a geographer, engraver & cartographer..

Herman Moll Biography

Herman Moll (c. 1654-1732) was one of the most important London mapmakers in the first half of the eighteenth century.  Moll was probably born in Bremen, Germany, around 1654. He moved to London to escape the Scanian Wars. His earliest work was as an engraver for Moses Pitt on the production of the English Atlas, a failed work which landed Pitt in debtor's prison. Moll also engraved for Sir Jonas Moore, Grenville Collins, John Adair, and the Seller & Price firm. He published his first original maps in the early 1680s and had set up his own shop by the 1690s. 

Moll's work quickly helped him become a member of a group which congregated at Jonathan's Coffee House at Number 20 Exchange Alley, Cornhill, where speculators met to trade stock. Moll's circle included the scientist Robert Hooke, the archaeologist William Stuckley, the authors Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and the intellectually-gifted pirates William Dampier, Woodes Rogers and William Hacke. From these contacts, Moll gained a great deal of privileged information that was included in his maps. 

Over the course of his career, he published dozens of geographies, atlases, and histories, not to mention numerous sheet maps. His most famous works are Atlas Geographus, a monthly magazine that ran from 1708 to 1717, and The World Described (1715-54). He also frequently made maps for books, including those of Dampier’s publications and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Moll died in 1732. It is likely that his plates passed to another contemporary, Thomas Bowles, after this death.