Spanish Broadside Map of the 1781-82 Conquest of Menorca.
Rare separately issued broadside map showing information related to the Conquest of Menorca in February, 1782.
The map shows the support provided by the Spanish in aid of the Duke of Crillon, as well as the ships which were not able to support the mission because of unfavorable winds.
The map provides a contemporary account of the Conquest of Menorca, wherein a French and Spanish fleet successfully attacked Fort St. Philip, leading to the ceding of Menorca by the British to Spain under the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
The invasion of Menorca was planned during the first few months of 1781, led by Don Luis Berton de los Blats, Duque de Crillon. The siege commenced in August of 1781 and lasted for 5 months.
Following his success, the Duc de Crillon was awarded the title "duque de Mahón" and put in charge of the attempt to recapture Gibraltar.
Britain captured Minorca again in 1798, during the French Revolutionary Wars, but returned it permanently to Spain in 1802, following the Treaty of Amiens.
The map is extremely rare. OCLC locates only 2 examples.
Tomás López de Vargas Machuca (1730-1802) was one of Spain’s most prominent cartographers in the eighteenth century. He was born in Toledo but studied at the Colegio Imperial in Madrid, where he focused on mathematics, grammar, and rhetoric. Along with a small group of colleagues, in 1752 the Spanish government sent López for training in Paris with the renowned geographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville. When he returned to Spain he was named Geógrafo de los dominios de Su Magestad and put in charge of the geographic collections of Charles III. He published many maps, including his fascinating maps of the Americas, and a variety of geography manuals. Some of his most famous maps are of the Iberian Peninsula, part of his large project to create a majestic atlas of Spain. Unfinished in his lifetime, López's children published the Atlas Geográfico de España (Geographical Atlas of Spain) in 1804. It was republished in 1810 and 1830.