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De Fer’s Map of the Southwest Based Upon the Earliest Reports of Father Kino -- One of the Few Regional Maps to Show the Island of California
Fine example of De Fer's map of California, first published in 1700.
This is one of a select few regional maps to feature the island and it is also the first to show Father Eusebio Kino’s highly-detailed findings from his expeditions to what is now the American Southwest and northern Mexico. The map shows the entire southwest of North America, with the island of California prominently featured. California appears with an indented northern coast and is labeled "Californias ó Carolinas."
Taking up most of what is now Texas, and the Plains States is a massive list of 314 names, which correspond to places in the New Mexico area. The names include Santa Fe, Taos, Pecos, El Paso, and numerous New Mexican pueblos and haciendas; twenty-three place names on the map are entirely new. These toponyms are the result of Kino’s travels and represent the most up-to-date information about the geography and settlements of the area. For example, the Casa Grande descubierta la 27 Nov. 1694 refers to a site found by Kino that is just south of the location of Phoenix, Arizona.
On the mainland, to the north, is the toponym Gran Quivira. This is another great cartographic myth of the early modern period. Quivira refers to the Seven Cities of Gold sought by the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1541. In 1539, Coronado wandered over what today is Arizona and New Mexico, eventually heading to what is now Kansas to find the supposedly rich city of Quivira. Although he never found the cities or the gold, the name stuck on maps of southwest North America, wandering from east to west.
The title, in the lower left, explains that a Spanish gentleman sent a version of the map to the Academie Royale des Sciences, from which de Fer made this example. This is believed to refer to a 1696 map by Kino now in the Jesuit Library in Rome, according to Burden. This is the first of two states of this map: their only difference being the date of issue. The first state is from 1700 and the second from 1705, which was when the atlas it was intended for, L’Atlas Curieux, was finished. The first state also appeared in de Fer’s Cartes et Descriptions Generales et Particulieres…d’Espagne (1701).
Kino’s explorations in the Southwest
De Fer's map is one of the few regional maps to focus exclusively on California during the period it was mapped as an island, and one of the largest depictions of an insular California. Ironically, the map is primarily a product of the information reported back from California by Father Kino (1645-1711), who had arrived in Mexico as a missionary in the late seventeenth century. In addition to setting up missions and converting indigenous peoples to Catholicism, Kino also wanted to verify if California was really an island, as reported in an earlier Spanish account.
Some of Kino's earliest reports included updated cartographic descriptions of the southern portion of Baja California, as he awaited his chance to proceed north to the source of the Sea of Cortez. This map and Scherer's maps of California and Baja California were heavily influenced by Kino, who would later shatter the island myth. The map was engraved by Inseln, who also engraved Father Kino's seminal 1705 map which re-attached California to the mainland.
The popular misconception of California as an island can be found on European maps from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. From its first portrayal on a printed map by Diego Gutiérrez, in 1562, California was shown as part of North America by mapmakers, including Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius. In the 1620s, however, it began to appear as an island in several sources. While most of these show the equivalent of the modern state of California separated from the continent, others, like a manuscript chart by Joao Teixeira Albernaz I (ca. 1632) now in the collection of the National Library of Brasil shows the entire western half of North America as an island.
The myth of California as an island was most likely the result of the travel account of Sebastian Vizcaino, who had been sent north up the shore of California in 1602. A Carmelite friar, Fray Antonio de la Ascensión, accompanied him. Ascension described the land as an island and around 1620 sketched maps to that effect. Normally, this information would have been reviewed and locked in the Spanish repository, the Casa de la Contratación. However, the manuscript maps were intercepted in the Atlantic by the Dutch, who took them to Amsterdam where they began to circulate. Ascensión also published descriptions of the insular geography in Juan Torquemada’s Monarquia Indiana (1613) (with the island details curtailed somewhat) and in his own Relación breve of ca. 1620.
The first known maps to show California as an island were on the title pages of Antonio de Herrera’s Descripción de las Indias Occidentales (1622) and Jacob le Maire's Spieghel Der Australische Navigatie (1622). Two early examples of larger maps are those by Abraham Goos (1624) and another by Henry Briggs, which was included in Samuel Purchas’ Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625). In addition to Briggs and Goos, prominent practitioners like Jan Jansson and Nicolas Sanson adopted the new island and the practice became commonplace. John Speed’s map (1626-7), based on Briggs’ work, is well known for being one of the first to depict an insular California.
The island of California became a fixture on mid- and late-seventeenth century maps. The island suggested possible links to the Northwest Passage, with rivers in the North American interior supposedly connecting to the sea between California and the mainland. Furthermore, Francis Drake had landed in northern California on his circumnavigation (1577-80) and an insular California suggested that Spanish power in the area could be questioned.
Not everyone was convinced, however. Father Eusebio Kino, after extensive travels in what is now California, Arizona, and northern Mexico concluded that the island was actually a peninsula and published a map refuting the claim (Paris, 1705). Another skeptic was Guillaume De L’Isle. In 1700, De L’Isle discussed “whether California is an Island or a part of the continent” with J. D. Cassini; the letter was published in 1715. After reviewing all the literature available to him in Paris, De L’Isle concluded that the evidence supporting an insular California was not trustworthy. He also cited more recent explorations by the Jesuits (including Kino) that disproved the island theory. Later, in his map of 1722 (Carte d’Amerique dressee pour l’usage du Roy), De L’Isle would abandon the island theory entirely.
Despite Kino’s and De L’Isle’s work, California as an island remained common on maps until the mid-eighteenth century. De L’Isle’s son-in-law, Philippe Buache, for example, remained an adherent of the island depiction for some time. Another believer was Herman Moll, who reported that California was unequivocally an island, for he had had sailors in his offices that claimed to have circumnavigated it. In the face of such skepticism, the King of Spain, Ferdinand VII, had to issue a decree in 1747 proclaiming California to be a peninsula connected to North America; the geographic chimera, no matter how appealing, was not to be suffered any longer, although a few final maps were printed with the lingering island.
Nicholas de Fer (1646-1720) was the son of a map seller, Antoine de Fer, and grew to be one of the most well-known mapmakers in France in the seventeenth century. He was apprenticed at twelve years old to Louis Spirinx, an engraver. When his father died in 1673, Nicholas helped his mother run the business until 1687, when he became the sole proprietor.
His earliest known work is a map of the Canal of Languedoc in 1669, while some of his earliest engravings are in the revised edition of Methode pour Apprendre Facilement la Geographie (1685). In 1697, he published his first world atlas. Perhaps his most famous map is his wall map of America, published in 1698, with its celebrated beaver scene (engraved by Hendrick van Loon, designed by Nicolas Guerard). After his death in 1720, the business passed to his sons-in-law, Guillaume Danet and Jacques-Francois Benard.
