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A Prototype Chart of Florida and the Gulf Coast
Florida/ Gulf Coast/ Texas.
DEPOT GENERALE DE LA MARINE [Paris, 1800]
Carte des Cotes du Golfe du Mexique,...
23 ¾ x 35 ½ inches.
Marginal mends with no loss, centerfold reinforced, else excellent.
Very scarce. An elegantly engraved, well-detailed, large-scale chart that provided a state-of-the-art picture of Florida’s coastline and that of the entire Gulf region. This is the first French edition of "the first large-scale printed chart of Texas and the Gulf Coast based on actual soundings and explorations" (Martin & Martin) and "the first printed [map] to show and name Galveston Bay" (Taliaferro). The first printing of this handsome chart appeared just a year earlier, in Madrid in 1799. This French version, appearing in J. N. Bellin et al., Hydrographie Françoise, was issued by the official French hydrographic office that provided charts for both military and commercial vessels. While the French edition is virtually identical to the Spanish in geographic detail, it is more finely engraved.
The 1799 Carta esférica is one of the most important maps for the history of Texas. For the first time, the Texas coast was mapped from actual survey. Later map makers who made use of the chart in one fashion or another included Alexander von Humboldt and John Melish. It was not until the publication of Austin's map in 1830 that the Carta esférica’s delineation of the Texas coast was superseded. Both the Spanish and French editions are very scarce. Streeter located just eight copies of the [various issues] of the Spanish edition and four copies of the French among seventy-six important institutional collections that he surveyed.
In 1783 the interim governor of Spanish Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, commissioned one of his lieutenants, José Antonio de Evía, to explore and map the entire northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, from West Florida to Tampico. After a false start in 1783, Evía set out in 1785 and explored the coasts and bays of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico, reaching Tampico in September 1786. Along the way he explored San Bernardo Bay and took detailed soundings of Galveston Bay, which he named for his patron, who had by then been named viceroy of Mexico. More than a decade after Evía's careful explorations, his charts and sketches formed the basis for a new map of the Gulf Coast issued at the request of Don Juan Francisco de Lángara y Huarte, the Spanish secretary of state and of the navy. “Published in 1799, the Carta esférica que comprende las costas del Seno Mexicano represented an important advance in geographical knowledge and remained for many years the prototype for maps of the Gulf."
Martin & Martin 22A. |
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