L'Isle de la Martinique

Paris, 1667. No Binding. Near Fine. 12 ½ x 17 inches. Original outline color; excellent. Earliest map of Martinique listed in Phillips, featuring attractive original color and an elegant cartouche. This map depicts the situation on the island before 1660, when it was still largely inhabited by natives, and only about half of it had been claimed by colonists for sugar cane farming. The map goes so far as to mark with a printed line the partition dividing the "demeure des François" and the "demeure des savages." However, by 1660, the entirety of the native population was either dead, expelled, or in slavery, and Martinique was a full-fledged, sugar cane-farming, European colony. Phillips, Maps, P. 389.