Venetian Edition of De L'Isle and Buache's Important Map of the North Pacific Showing the Fantastic Sea of the West
Nice example of Santini's edition of Joseph Nicholas De L'Isle and Philippe Buache's map of the Northern Pacific Ocean, North America, and Asia, including a fine depiction of the Bay of the West. When it premiered in June 1752, this map was the first to popularize the Russian discoveries of the Northern Pacific. In 1776, when Santini's edition was released, much of the speculative geography was still a point of intrigue for European explorers and states.
The map shows North America and Russia arrayed from the North Pole. An advertisement in the upper left corner explains that this map not only shares new geographic discoveries, it also improved upon the stereographic projection. Rather than show meridians and parallels meeting in right angles, the chart includes the curve of the earth, with latitude lines radiating in an arc, making it possible to show more area.
A large sea is in the interior of North America. A series of lakes nearly connects Baffin's Bay to the Mer du Sud, suggesting a Northwest Passage. To the north are glacial mountains while to the west are a series of archipelagoes and several large lakes. Further west, Russia appears well delineated, with the exception of a "Grande Terre" supposedly discovered by the Russians in 1723.
In the top two corners are oval frames containing portrayals of Indigenous peoples: to the right a North American native, to the right a Kamchatkan. In the middle is a decorative title cartouche proclaiming the novelty of this map. It also mentions that the map was released by Francois Santini in Venice. The original map was made by two of the most important mapmakers of the mid-eighteenth century. One was Philippe Buache, premier gèographe du roi, gèographe adjoint to the Acàdemie Royale des Sciences and son-in-law of the famous geographer Guillaume De L'Isle. The other was Joseph Nicholas De L'Isle, astronomer, geographer, and brother to Guillaume. J. N. De L'Isle presented the map to the Acàdemie Royale on April 8, 1750; it was printed in June of 1752.
Russian Discoveries
Joseph Nicholas De L'Isle spent much of his career in Russia, where he helped to found the Russian Academy of Sciences. While there, he had access to the latest findings of Russian explorers and was at the center of Russia's geographic establishment; for example, he helped produce the first Russian atlas, the Atlas Russicus, with Ivan Kyrilov. He returned to Paris in 1747 with a large map collection, an event that drew some criticism from Russian academicians who thought he absconded with delicate materials.
The map identifies Russian discoveries from the previous three decades. Two expeditions led by Vitus Behring (1728-30, 1733-43) explored Kamchatka and what is now Alaska, charting the strait between them. De L'Isle interviewed Bering and used his charts from the voyages. Their discoveries are marked with Bering's track in 1731, near Kamchatka, and the new geographic features in the Alaska area.
The map also includes the track of " Capitaine Tchirikow et Mr De l'Isle de la Croyere" in June and July of 1741. De L'Isle's half-brother, Louis De L'Isle de la Croyere, sailed with Captain Alexsei Chirikov (Tchirikov) to discover the fictional De Gama's Land, or Companies Land. Joseph Nicholas was convinced that the island existed and provided his half-brother with maps to support the hypothesis. de la Croyere perished on the voyage, but his brother received his papers and published his findings on the map.
Beyond the Russian discoveries, the map also shows the track of the 1743 Spanish galleon from Manila to Acapulco, as well as de Frondat's voyage of 1709. A Frenchman, de Frondat followed the usual galleon route and attempted to trade with Spanish settlers once he reached Baja California. He later sold his goods in Peru and Chile and returned home with a fantastic £2,000,000. Another note shows a small stream leading west from Hudson's Bay. This is Wager Inlet, first probed by Christopher Middleton in the early 1740s and supposedly one of the possible sources of a Northwest Passage.
Martin Aguilar, Juan de la Fuca, and Admiral de la Fonte
The Pacific Northwest shown here is defined by the discoveries of three men, Martin Aguilar, Juan de la Fuca, and Admiral De Fonte, all of which were to prove dubious at best. The former navigator was a Spanish captain who sailed with Sebastian Vizcaino on a reconnaissance expedition up the California coast in 1602-3. Aguilar, commanding the Tres Reyes, was blown off course, to the north. When the seas calmed, Aguilar reported that he had found the mouth of a large river. Eighteenth-century geographers, including De L'Isle and Bauche, conjectured that the river was the entrance to the Sea of the West, as it is positioned on this map.
There is another entrance to the sea, this one labeled as the discovery of Juan de la Fuca. The authors are referring to Juan de la Fuca, the Castilianized name of Greek navigator Ioánnis Fokás (Phokás). Little archival evidence survives of Fuca's career, but a chance meeting with an English financier, Michael Lok, in Venice in 1596 gave birth to rumors of Fuca's voyages in the Pacific. Fuca reported that he had been sent north from New Spain twice in 1592 in search of the Strait of Anian. The Spanish Crown failed to reward Fuca's discovery of an opening in the coast at roughly 47° N latitude and Fuca left the Spanish service embittered. His story lived on in Lok's letters and eventually was published in Samuel Purchas' travel collection of 1625. On many eighteenth-century maps, including this one, Fuca's Strait is linked with a River or Sea of the West. In 1787, the present-day Juan de Fuca Strait was named by the wife of naval explorer Charles William Barkley, making permanent a label that had previously just been hopeful conjecture.
Even farther north, there is a Lac de Fonte connected to a series of lakes and a Rio de los Reyes. Admiral de Fonte supposedly sailed to the area in the mid-seventeenth century. The first mention of Fonte appears in two letters published in London in 1708 in two issues of The Monthly Miscellany or Memoirs for the Curious. The Fonte letters had been reprinted by Arthur Dobbs in his 1744 An Account of the Countries adjoining Hudson's Bay and were mentioned in other travel accounts . De L'Isle's copy of the letters came from Lord Forbes, British ambassador to Russia, as he explained in a memoir, Nouvelles Cartes des Decouvertes de l'Amiral de Fonte (Paris, 1753). He also read of them in Henry Ellis' account of the 1746-7 expedition to Wager Inlet.
The letters recounted that Fonte had found an inlet near 53°N which led to a series of lakes. While sailing northeast, Fonte eventually met with a Boston merchant ship, commanded by a Captain Shapley. One of Fonte's captains, separated from the Admiral, reported he had found no strait between the Pacific and the Davis Straits, yet had reached 79°N, helped by local indigenous peoples. This story, with its suggestion of water passages connecting the Pacific Northwest with the east, inspired hope in some and doubt in others in the mid-eighteenth century. A few, like Irish mapmaker John Green, thought the entire story a farce. Many, including De L'Isle and Buache, thought the information conformed neatly to other recent discoveries and included Fonte on their map.
In this June 1752 map, Fonte's entrance is at roughly 63°N latitude. In the face of criticism, De L'Isle published another map in September 1752 moving the entrance to 53°N, as the letters had stated. This caused a rift between De L'Isle and Buache, as the latter stuck to the initial misreading of the letters. In this second map, the Mar de l'Ouest is significantly smaller than on the first. Both men, however, continued to believe Fonte a credible source and continued to include him on their maps in some capacity.
The Venetian edition and Pacific exploration in the late eighteenth century
All three men's discoveries, real or exaggerated, reshaped the Pacific Northwest for the next thirty years. Clearly Santini thought the map prescient and trustworthy enough to reprint it in 1776. Santini (ca. 1729-1793; fl. 1776-1784) was a Venetian publisher who specialized in reissuing maps by famous cartographers, including De L'Isle, Buache, Robert Vaugondy, and Homann Heirs. This particular map was printed at the dawn of the American Revolution, which would rewrite the boundaries of the eastern US, which is also shown on this map.
Interestingly, the region shown here was about to be redrawn. 1776 marks the year James Cook struck out on his third Pacific voyage. On his first voyage (1768-1771), Cook observed the Transit of Venus from Tahiti and was the first European known to have landed on the east coast of Australia. On his second expedition (1772-1775), Cook sailed the far southern Pacific, dispelling the myth of a massive southern continent, Terra australis incognita. In 1776, he set out to test the final great cartographic myth, the Northwest Passage. Although the United States and Britain were already at war, Cook's ships were given safe passage, as their voyage was seen as furthering science, not war.
On Cook's third voyage, he sailed south around Cape Horn and east across the Indian Ocean to Tasmania and then New Zealand. Then, he turned north and landed at Hawaii for the first time. He then struck out for the west coast of North America, arriving off the coast of what is now Oregon. He coasted to the north, searching for the inlets mentioned on this map, but he found none. Eventually, he rounded the Aleutian Islands and touched in Russia before returning to Hawaii. There, he was killed in an altercation with islanders at Kealakekua Bay.
Cook's crew sailed on without him, reporting their findings and replacing a speculative coast with actual surveys of Vancouver Island and other geographical features. The crew also brought back news of seals which sparked a mad dash for seal pelts and other regional natural resources. By the end of the eighteenth century, all talk of Fonte and Juan de Fuca had ceased, although Fuca's name lives on in a strait named for him. The galleon route, marked on the map, was about to end only to be replaced by whalers searching every corner of the ocean for their prey. Santini's reprint captures a fascinating projection of what the Pacific could be on the eve of Europeans finding what it actually was.
Many European maps of North America in the eighteenth century depict a large, western inland sea, hundreds of miles in diameter, with a small inlet to the Pacific and even some interior islands. The origins of this myth can be traced to several different sources and are tied to the search for a Northwest Passage. Like many cartographic myths, the Sea of the West persisted for decades, even in the face of strong evidence pointing to its non-existence.
One of the first European navigators to supposedly explore this area was Martin Aguilar. A Spanish captain, he sailed with Sebastian Vizcaino on a reconnaissance expedition up the California coast in 1602-3. Aguilar, commanding the Tres Reyes, was blown off course, to the north. When the seas calmed, Aguilar reported that he had found the mouth of a large river. Eighteenth-century geographers later conjectured that the river was the entrance to the Sea of the West.
Other maps placed the entrance to the Sea of the West via the Juan de Fuca Strait. Juan de la Fuca is the Castilianized name of Greek navigator Ioánnis Fokás (Phokás). Little archival evidence survives of Fuca’s career, but a chance meeting with an English financier, Michael Lok, in Venice in 1596 gave birth to rumors of Fuca’s voyages in the Pacific. Fuca reported that he had been sent north from New Spain twice in 1592 in search of the Strait of Anian. The Spanish Crown failed to reward Fuca’s discovery of an opening in the coast at roughly 47° N latitude and Fuca left the Spanish service embittered. His story lived on in Lok’s letters and eventually was published in Samuel Purchas’ travel collection of 1625. On many eighteenth-century maps, Fuca’s Strait is linked with a River or Sea of the West. In 1787, the present-day Juan de Fuca Strait was named by the wife of naval explorer Charles William Barkley, making permanent a label that had previously just been hopeful guesswork.
The source of the modern (18th Century) myth of the Sea or Bay of the West (Baye ou Mer de L'Ouest in French), are manuscript maps by Guillaume De L'Isle, who served as the Royal Geographer to the King of France at the end of the 17th Century and beginning of the 18th Century and is widely regarded as the most important map maker of his time. There is a map in Yale's map collection, which depicts a 16th Century Thames school map of North America with a large, "Branch of the South Sea," which closely resembles De L'Isle's Mer de L'Ouest, and may well be the source of De L'Isle's idea.
At the end of the 17th Century, Guillaume De L'Isle had access to the best available maps of the interior of North America, which were being provided from a number of missionary sources, as the French Missionaries pushed west of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River and obtained information from the indigenous Indian tribes. De L'Isle was regularly producing and updating his manuscript maps in an attempt to integrate new and often conflicting information and improve upon the existing maps of North America. Many of his maps can be viewed as drafts, which were discarded in favor of other and considerably different models.
There are several De L'Isle manuscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, prepared as early as 1696 (dated), that depict this cartographic myth. Interestingly, while De L'Isle was a prolific publisher of printed maps, he never depicted the Sea or Bay of the West on any of his printed maps, which strongly suggests that he was not able to reconcile this information with the best available source information from America. During this same period, Jean Baptiste Nolin, who had in the prior decade collaborated with Vincenzo Maria Coronelli on his monumental globe for Louis XIV and produced a series of highly important maps of North America and its regions, would have also had access to many of the same reports and maps as De L'Isle. Nolin apparently gave greater credence to the concept than De L'Isle.
The earliest printed map to show the Bay of the West is Jean Baptiste Nolin's rare wall map of the world, published in about 1700. Nolin plagiarized the idea from Guillaume De L'Isle, as he testified when suing Nolin for plagiarism. He said, the Sea of the West “was one of my discoveries. But since it is not always appropriate to publish what one knows or what one thinks one knows, I have not had this sea engraved on the works that I made public, not wanting foreigners to profit from this discovery” (as quoted in Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography, 109). The court sided with De L'Isle and issued an order requiring Nolin to destroy the copper plates for the map (see Shirley 605). Nolin's map was in turn copied by the Mortier family, who issued 3 world maps shortly thereafter, showing Nolin's version of the Sea of the West, but the myth ignored for nearly half a century.
While the myth of the Sea or Bay of the West temporarily languished, the proliferation of Russian exploration off the Northwest Coast of America after 1740, as reported by Guillaume's younger brother Joseph Nicholas De L'Isle, reinvigorated interest in the region and forced the most prominent map makers of the period to re-examine existing knowledge. Joseph Nicolas served as a geographer to the Russian Academy and returned with this information to Paris. The re-introduction of the sea in the mid-eighteenth century was the result of Guillaume De L’Isle’s son-in-law, Philippe Buache’s review of his father-in-law’s papers. Although Guilluame De L’Isle never published a printed map showing the sea, he had postulated that it could exist, and that it might connect to a Northwest Passage through New France, not through English territory farther north.
The sea was a major part of Buache and Joseph-Nicholas Delisle’s maps of the North Pacific, published in the 1750s. While controversial, the features of those maps were quickly copied by other mapmakers, including the Sea of the West. The inland body of water lingered on maps until the later-eighteenth century.
During a period between 1750 and 1770, the most prominent French and British map makers advanced multiple and widely varying theories on the Northwest Coast of America. Denis Diderot dedicates several of the 10 maps in his monumental Encylopedie (1779 and after), to a comprehensive survey of the maps proffered by Joseph Nicholas De L'Isle (Guillaume's brother), Philippe Buache, Thomas Jefferys and others. The debate ended with Captain James Cook's and later George Vancouver and Comte Jean de la Perouse's explorations in the late 18th Century.
Lucie Lagarde, "Le Passage du Nord-Ouest et la Mer du l'Ouest dans la Cartographie Francaise du 18e Siecle," Imago Mundi 41 (1989): 19-43.
Mary Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
H. R. Wagner, "Apocryphal Voyages to the Northwest Coast of America," Proceedings of the AAS XLI (1931): 179-234.
Glyndwr Williams, “An eighteenth-century Spanish investigation into the apocryphal voyage of Admiral Fonte,” Pacific Historical Review 30, no. 4. (1961): 319-327.
Paolo Santini (1729-1793) was an Venetian engraver known especially for his religious prints and fine cartographic engravings. He published in Venice and may have a been a member of the clergy. In his maps, he largely adopted and adapted the work of his French counterparts, especially the brothers de Vaugondy.