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First State of the Depot De La Marine's Map of the Pacific Ocean

A fascinating sea chart, depicting the Pacific Ocean immediately before the great wave of exploration that occurred from the 1750s to the 1790s.  

Prior to this chart, the French had not made significant inroads into the charting of the Pacific Ocean, with only three voyages touching on the west coast of South America.  Between 1707 and 1744 France dispatched just three official expeditions that reached the Pacific. Louis Éconches Feuillée’s voyage of 1707-1711, financed by the Crown, rounded Cape Horn to chart the Chilean and Peruvian coasts while gathering astronomical and natural-history data. He was followed in 1712-1714 by Amédée-François Frézier, sent on a covert mission to reconnoitre Spanish ports and defences along the same shoreline, work that produced the first reliable French charts of that region. A generation later, the French Geodesic Mission to the Equator (1735-1744) led by Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer and Louis Godin crossed Panama, used Pacific ports such as Callao for logistics, and measured a degree of latitude in the Andes to resolve the debate over Earth’s shape. These three undertakings were the only state-sponsored French ventures to touch the Pacific in the first half of the eighteenth century; larger-scale French circumnavigations and Pacific exploration began only after 1750.

This fine chart, issued by the French Depot de la Marine, depicts the Pacific world as it was known by Europeans in the 1740s. It depicts the entire west coast of the Americas up to around 40 degrees North. California is correctly shown to be a peninsula and the casts of South America are quite well-defined, having been mapped by Jorge Juan y Santacilia in the 1740s. On the opposite side, while not absolutely precise, most of the features of East Asia are approximately where they should be, although the Korean Peninsula takes on an exaggerated size, and the area where Japan's Hokkaido should be located is left blank, the area not having yet been properly explored.

Further south, the depiction of Australasia is fascinating. The north coast of Australia up the western shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria reveals the discoveries of various Dutch explorers, particularly Willem Janszoon's voyage of 1605-6. Likewise New Guinea's coasts are partially revealed by the discoveries of Janszoon and Luís Vaz de Torres 1606 expedition. The south coast of Tasmania and the partial outlines of New Zealand are based on the mapping done by Abel Tasman from 1642 to 1644.

Otherwise the Pacific between the Americas and Asia and Australasia is largely an open enigma. There are various apocryphal islands, although the map shows the discovery of the Marquesas Islands by Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira in 1595 and the mysterious "Terre St. Esprit" (Vanuatu), discovered by Pedro Fernandes de Queirós during his 1605-6 voyage.

The chart thus depicts the state of play before the explorers Samuel Wallis, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and James Cook began to completely reveal the Pacific Ocean to European eyes. Within a generation of this map being made, the east coast of Australia and all of New Zealand would be mapped, while countless mid-Pacific islands would be discovered, most notably Tahiti and the Hawaiian Islands. This chart is thus a fascinating overview of the Pacific taken right before a transformative turning point in history.

This is the earliest version of the chart, which would be re-issued in 1756.