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Striking large format map of North America, featuring an immense Insular California and gorgeous full color cartouche, large vignette of the Cod Fisheries in Northeastern North America and 10 insets of major harbors, including Boston, New York, Charleston & Havana. Moll's Codfish map is on of the most decorative large format maps of North America printed in England. The Mississippi is considerably west of its actual location. The Great Lakes are misprojected. Lahontan's Longue River provides a source for the Mississippi as far west as Washington in Mozemleck Country. The Spanish Trade Routes and many Indian Tribes noted.
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.
![[First State of the Popple Key Sheet] A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements adjacent thereto by Hen. Popple.](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/92714.jpg)
![Amerique Septentrionale divisee en Ses Principales parties . . . . 1692 [California as an Island]](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/95812.jpg)
