Carte de L'Amérique Septentrionale

Book Description

London: Nourse, Vaillant, Millar, Rocque & Sayer, 1755. Copper-engraved map, with full original colour, lower centerfold strengthened outside of image area, in very good condition. 21 5/8 x 29 3/8 inches. A highly attractive map of North America, shown on the eve of the French and Indian War This very fine map, with its magnificent original colouring evinces a unique aesthetic quality that was the signature of Palairet. It captures the continent the year before war broke out between Britain and the allied forces of France and Spain. The map embraces the New World from the Spanish Main in the south up to Greenland and the Canadian Arctic in the north. The political realities as expressed in this map would shortly be completely transformed by the ultimate British victory. Britain's colonies from Georgia up to Nova Scotia hug the Atlantic seaboard, and are coloured in yellow and orange hues. Territories belonging to Britain's rivals, such as New France ("Canada"), Louisiana, and Spanish Mexico and Florida are coloured in green. Disputed territory, the possession of which was one of the main issues that sparked the war, is coloured in pink. The map shows that the continent west of the Mississippi and north of Mexico was largely a mystery to Europeans. The fact that they had scarcely visited let alone occupied these western lands did not stop the British from adding strips of land extending from the Pacific to the existing colonies, as demarcated by lines on this map. Palairet based this map on John Mitchell's immensely influential A Map of the British Colonies in North America, published earlier the same year. California is correctly shown to be a peninsula and the various provinces of New Spain and the islands of the Caribbean chain are all carefully labeled. The composition is completed by a magnificent title cartouche in rococo style. Jean Palairet was born in Montauban, France, but emigrated to England where he became a French tutor to the children of George II. He later wrote several informative books on arithmetic, language, arts and sciences, and geography. The present map is from the second edition of Palairet's greatest work, the Atlas méthodique, a magnificent cartographical demonstration, in which landmasses are shown in various stages of political definition. Phillips, Atlases in the Library of Congress, 3503, map 13; Sellers & Van Ee, Maps & Charts of North America & West Indies, 16

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