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This striking map of Africa, published in London in 1626 by George Humble, is the earliest folio map of the continent produced domestically for an English audience. It was issued in John Speed’s A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World and engraved by Abraham Goos, combining the most current Dutch cartography with Speed’s characteristically theatrical visual design. The result is a map as much a work of art as of geography.
The main map is drawn largely from the work of Willem Blaeu, with an emphasis on coastal accuracy and a still-speculative interior. Classical geography dominates the inland regions: the Nile traces its course from twin lakes fed by the fabled Lunae Montaine (“Mountains of the Moon”), while kingdoms such as Nubia, Zanfara, and Biafara are arrayed across the continent’s center. Decorative flourishes populate the seas and deserts: sailing ships and sea monsters cross the Aethiopian and Indian Oceans; lions, elephants, and a rhinoceros roam the Sahara. The cartouche, placed in Arabia, notes that the map was “newly done into English by I.S.”
The map’s visual richness is heightened by its elaborate framing. The upper border features eight vignette views of prominent North African cities and ports, including Tangier, Ceuta, Tunis, Algiers, Alexandria, and others, each engraved with real architectural detail. Along the sides, ten figures in native costume stand in vertical panels, offering a parade of ethnic types as imagined by European observers: a robed “Marocchian,” a “Senagensian,” a “Mozambiquean,” and others, culminating in a snake-bearing figure labeled “habi: of cape of good hope.”
Though its cartography leans heavily on Dutch sources, Speed’s map incorporates English interests in African trade, reflecting the influence of early voyages to Guinea and the ambitions that would later fuel the short-lived Company of Adventurers of Africa. It predates the English settlement at the Cape of Good Hope by a stretch but already emphasizes the continent’s strategic place on the sea route to the East Indies.
John Speed (1551 or '52 - 28 July 1629) was the best known English mapmaker of the Stuart period. Speed came to mapmaking late in life, producing his first maps in the 1590s and entering the trade in earnest when he was almost 60 years old.
John Speed's fame, which continues to this day, lies with two atlases, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (first published 1612), and the Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (1627). While The Theatre ... started as solely a county atlas, it grew into an impressive world atlas with the inclusion of the Prospect in 1627. The plates for the atlas passed through many hands in the 17th century, and the book finally reached its apotheosis in 1676 when it was published by Thomas Bassett and Richard Chiswell, with a number of important maps added for the first time.
