chapter ii

. we followed the cartography of New France down to the opening of the seventeenth century. We saw in the map of Molineaux (1600) an indication of a great inland sea, as the prototype of the Great Lakes; but the general belief of the period, just as Champlain was entering on his discoveries, is well shown in the map, “Americæ sive Novi Orbis nova Descriptio,” which appeared in Botero’s _Relaciones universales_, published at Valladolid in 1603.[755]

The Spanish and the Dutch only repeated, but hardly with as much precision, what the map in Botero had shown;[756] and we only get approximate exactness when we come to the map of Lescarbot in 1609, of which sections are given in the present and in other chapters.[757] Champlain’s first map was made in 1612, and his second in 1613,[758] both of which appeared in _Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain_, Paris, 1613. Between the issue of these 1612 and 1613 maps of Champlain and his greater one in 1632, the cartography of New France is illustrated by several conspicuous maps. Those of Hondius and Mercator, so called, of the same year were of course unaffected by the drafts of Champlain. We begin to notice some effects of Champlain’s work, however, in several of the Dutch maps; in that of Jacobsz, or Jacobsen, of 1621, for instance, of which account will be found on another page.[759] Maps by Jodocus Hondius and Blaeu represent a number of streams flowing from small lakes uniting to form the St. Lawrence. One by Jannson, in 1626, nearly resembles for the St. Lawrence region that portion of a “new and accurate map of the world, 1626,” which makes part of Speed’s _Prospect of the most famous Parts of the World_.

In 1625 the _Pilgrimes_[760] of Purchas introduces us to two significant maps. One is that which Sir William Alexander issued in his _Encouragement to Colonies_ in 1624, and was reproduced by Purchas, calling it “New England, New Scotland, and New France.” The essential part of it is given in Vol. III. chap. ix. The other is that called “The North Part of America,” ascribed to Master Briggs.

[Illustration: BOTERO, 1603.]

In the original edition of De Laet’s _Nieuwe Wereldt_,[761] published in 1625, we have a map of North America; but in the 1630 (Dutch) edition we find a special map of New France, which was repeated in the (Latin) 1633 edition. Harrisse[762] is in error in assigning the first appearance of this map to the 1640 French edition.

Champlain’s great map appeared in his 1632 edition.

[Illustration: NEWFOUNDLAND, 1609.

Part of Lescarbot’s map. There is in the Kohl Collection, in the State Department at Washington, a map of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River of about this date, copied from one in the Dépôt de la Marine at Paris. Kohl also includes a map by Joannes Oliva, copied from a manuscript portolano among the Egerton Manuscripts in the British Museum, which purports to have been made at Marseilles in 1613. Its names and legends are Italian and Latin; and the map, while inferior to Hakluyt’s map, bears a strong resemblance to it. It is much behind the time, except as respects the outline of Newfoundland, which seems to be more accurately drawn than before. This island was still further to be improved in Mason’s map of 1626. Oliva seems to have been ignorant of Lescarbot’s book.]

[Illustration: EASTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S 1612 MAP.

These fac-similes of the 1612 map are made from the Harvard College copy. There are other fac-similes in the Boston and Quebec editions; and one by Pilinski (fifty copies at 40 francs) was made in Paris in 1878. Sabin’s _Dictionary_, p. 478, says: “The copies vary in the maps. Mr. Lenox’s copy differs from that in the New York Historical Society. Sometimes in one map there are more references than in the others, and the spelling of the references varies. The large map is usually in two parts, and is very often wanting or defective.” Harrisse, nos. 306-318, enumerates the proper maps of this 1613 edition. The title of the 1613 edition speaks of this map: “La première servant à la navigation, dressée selon les compas, qui nordestent, sur lesquels les mariniers navigent.”]

[Illustration: WESTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S 1612 MAP.]

[Illustration: PART OF CHAMPLAIN’S 1613 MAP.

The title of the 1613 edition speaks of this map as being “en son vray Meridien, avec ses longitudes et latitudes: à laquelle est adjousté le voyage du destroict qu’ont trouvé les Anglois, au dessus de Labrador, depuis le 53^e degré de latitude, jusques au 63^e én l’an 1612, cerchans un chemin par le nord pour aller à la Chine.”]

[Illustration: AMERICÆ SEPTENTRIONALIS PARS (_Jacobsz_, 1621).]

[Illustration: BRIGGS IN PURCHAS, 1625.]

It will be observed that Champlain had reached, in his plotting of the country east of the Penobscot, something more than tolerable accuracy. Farther west, proportions and relations were all wrong. The country between the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine is much too narrow. The Penobscot is made almost to unite with the more northern river; and this error is perpetuated in the Dutch maps published by Blaeu, and Covens and Mortier many years later. The placing of Lake Champlain within a short distance of Casco Bay was another error that the later Dutch cartographers adopted in one form or another. Lake Ontario is not greatly misshapen; but Erie is stretched into a strait, while beyond a distorted Huron a “grand lac” is so placed as to leave a doubt if Superior or Michigan was intended.

[Illustration: SPEED, 1626.]

Notwithstanding this pronounced belief in large inland seas, and the publication of the belief, the notion did not make converts in every direction. Two years later (1634) a map of Petrus Kærius, and even his other map, which appeared in Speed’s _Prospect of the most famous Parts of the World_, published in London, gave no intimation of Champlain’s results. The same backwardness of knowledge or apprehension is apparent in the map which accompanies the Amsterdam edition of Linschoten in 1644; in that of the world, dated 1651, which appeared in Speed’s 1676 edition; in the map in Petavius’s _History of the World_, London, 1659; and in two maps of N. I. Visscher, both dated 1652, which make the St. Lawrence River rise in the neighborhood of the Colorado. We might not expect the _Zee-Atlas_ of Van Loon to give signs of the inland lakes; but it is strange that the map “Americæ nova descriptio,” ignoring the great interior waters, was used in editions of Heylin’s _Cosmographie_, in London, from 1669 to 1677.

[Illustration: NOVA FRANCIA ET REGIONES ADJACENTES (_De Laet_).

Cf. another section of De Laet’s map in chap. viii. De Laet was much better informed than Champlain regarding the relative position of Lake Champlain to New England; and he placed it more in accordance with the English belief, as expressed by Thomas Morton, _New English Canaan_ (Adams’s edition, p. 234), who speaks of Lake Champlain as being three hundred miles distant from Massachusetts Bay,—a distance somewhat in excess. De Laet’s map is also given in Cassell’s _United States_, i. 240.]

Some of the Dutch cartographers were not so inalert. Johannes Jannson in his _America septentrionalis_, and even Visscher himself in his _Novissima et accuratissima totius Americæ Descriptio_ give diverse interpretations to this idea of the inland seas. The draft in the Hexham English translation (1636) of the Mercator-Hondius atlas is not much nearer that of Champlain.

[Illustration: JANNSON.]

Harrisse (_Notes_, etc., nos. 190, 191) refers to two charts of the St. Lawrence of 1641 which are preserved in Paris, and are known to be the work of Jean Bourdon, who came to Quebec in 1633-34. Perhaps one of these is the same referred to by Kohl, as dated 1635, and in the _Dépôt de la Marine_, of which a copy is in the Kohl Collection in the State Department at Washington. Harrisse also (no. 324) refers to a _Description de la Nouvelle France_,—a map published by Boisseau in Paris in 1643.

The map in Dudley’s _Arcano del Mare_ (Florence, 1647), called “Carta

## particolare della terra nuova, con la gran Baia et il Fiume grande

della Canida: D’America, carta prima,”[763] presents a surprise in making the St. Croix River connect the Bay of Fundy with the St. Lawrence; and Dudley seems to have had very confused notions of the sites of Hochelaga and the Saguenay. The annexed sketch is much reduced.

The same transverse strait appears in _Carte générale des Costes de l’Amérique_, published at Amsterdam by Covens and Mortier. A treatment of the geographical problem of the lakes which had more or less vogue, is shown in Gottfried’s _Neue Welt_, 1655, in a map called “America noviter delineate;” and this same treatment was preserved by Blaeu so late as 1685.

[Illustration: VISSCHER.]

A most decided advance came with the map, _Le Canada, ou Nouvelle France_, of Nicolas Sanson in 1656,[764]—a far better correlation of the three lower lakes than we had found in Champlain, with an indication of those farther west.[765] Contemporary with Sanson was the English geographer Peter Heylin, whose map, as has already been noted, betrays no knowledge of Champlain. His _Cosmographie in Four Books_ appeared in 1657,[766] and the second part of the fourth book relates to America, and is accompanied by the map in question. The contemporary Dutch maps of Jannson, Visscher, and Blaeu deserve little notice as contributions to knowledge.[767]

[Illustration: EASTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S MAP 1632.

The great map of 1632, by Champlain, has been reproduced full size in the Quebec edition of his works, and also in the Prince Society edition. A fac-simile, somewhat reduced, is given in O’Callaghan’s _Documentary History of New York_, vol. iii. Another, full size, was made by Pilinski in 1860, and published by Tross, of Paris (thirty-six copies, and of date, 1877, fifty copies at 40 francs). Field calls it “imperfect.” Brunet, however, says it has “une admirable exactitude.” The copy of the 1632 edition in the Bibliothèque Nationale lacks this map. The Harvard Le Mur copy has no map (Field, _Indian Bibliography_, no. 268).

Sabin (no. 11,839) says that the map here copied (the original of which is in the Harvard College “Collet” copy) belongs properly to the copies having the Le Mur and Sevestre imprints, and has the legend, “Faict l’an 1632 par le Sieur de Champlain;” while the proper Collet map is smaller, and is inscribed, “Faict par le Sieur de Champlain, suivant les Mémoires de P. du Val, en l’Isle du Palais.” The earliest copy, however, which I have found of the map thus referred to bears date 1664, and is called _Le Canada, faict par le S^r. de Champlain, ... suivant les Mémoires de P. du Val, Géographe du Roy_. This map appeared with even later dates (1677, etc.), preserving much of the characteristics of the 1632 map, though stretching the plot farther west, and at a time when much better knowledge was current. Harrisse, nos. 331, 348; but cf. no. 274. Kohl, in the Department of State Collection, has one of date 1660.]

[Illustration: WESTERLY PORTION OF CHAMPLAIN’S 1632 MAP.]

[Illustration: DUDLEY, 1647.]

Of the map of Creuxius, made in 1660 and published in 1664, a fac-simile of a part is annexed.[768] For the eastern parts of the country reference may be made to the map _Tabula Novæ Franciæ_, of about 1663, given in the chapter on Acadie.[769]

[Illustration: CREUXIUS, 1660.]

[Illustration: CARTE GÉNÉRALE OF COVENS AND MORTIER.]

One of the volumes of the great _Blaeu Atlas_ of 1662, _America, quæ est Geographiæ Blavianæ Pars quinta_, very singularly ignored all that the cartographers of New France had been long divulging, and the same misrepresentation was persistently employed in the later _Blaeu Atlas_ of 1685, which contained in other American maps a variety of notions equally erroneous, and which had been current at a period very long passed.

[Illustration: GOTTFRIED, 1655.]

The map in Montanus’s _De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld_, 1670, “per Jacobum Meursium,” not the same as the “Novissima et accuratissima totius Americæ Descriptio” of John Ogilby’s great folio on _America_, 1670, and later years, seems to be substantially N. Visscher’s map of the same title, issued in Amsterdam in the same year.[770]

The maps of Hennepin (1683-1697) form a part of a special note elsewhere in the present volume; and the map accompanying Le Clercq’s _Etablissement de la Foy_, 1691, is also reproduced in Shea’s translation of that book.[771] It makes the Mississippi debouch on the Texas shore of the Gulf of Mexico, as many of the maps of this period do.

Maps of a general character, indicating a knowledge of the interior topography of America, sometimes expanding, and not seldom retrograde, followed rapidly as the century was closing, of which the most important were the maps of _Amérique septentrionale_ (1667, 1669, 1674, 1685, 1690, 1692, 1695), by the Sansons, and the Roman reprint of it in 1677,[772] as well as _La Mer du Nort_ of Du Val in 1679,[773] Sanson’s _Le Nouveau Mexique_, of the same year, which extends from Montreal to the Gulf;[774] the _North America_ of the English geographer, William Berry (1680);[775] the _Partie de la Nouvelle France_ of Hubert Jaillott (1685);[776] and the same cartographer’s _Amérique septentrionale_ of 1694, and _Le Monde_ of 1696; the _Carte Generalle de la Nouvelle France_[777] (1692) engraved by Boudan; the _Amérique septentrionale_ of De Fer (1693); the marine _Cartes_ (1696) of Le Cordier;[778] the _New Sett of Maps_ published by Edward Wells in London in 1698-99; and finally the _Amérique septentrionale_ of Delisle.[779] The maps of La Hontan (1703-1709) are the subject of special treatment in another note.

[Illustration: SANSON, 1656.

This is the same map, whether with the imprint, “Paris, chez Pierre Mariette, 1656,” or “Chez l’Autheur” in his _America en plusieurs Cartes_, 1657, though the scale in the former is much larger.]

[Illustration: BLAEU, 1662 AND 1685.

Cf. a section in Cassell’s _United States_, i. 312.]

[Illustration: NOVI BELGII TABULA, 1670.

From Ogilby’s _America_, p. 169.]

[Illustration: OGILBY’S MAP, 1670.]

If we run through the series of maps here sketched, we cannot but be struck with the unsettled notions regarding the geography of the St. Lawrence Valley. Beginning with the clear intimation by Molineaux, in 1600, of a great body of interior water, which was the mysterious link between the Atlantic and the Arctic seas, and finding this idea modified by Botero and others, we see Champlain in 1613 still leaving it vague. The maps of the next few years paid little attention to any features farther west than the limit of tide-water; and not till we reach the great map which accompanied the final edition of Champlain’s collected voyages in 1632 do we begin to get a distorted plot of the upper lakes, Lake Erie being nothing more than a channel of varying width connecting them with Lake Huron. The first really serviceable delineation of the great lakes were the maps of Sanson and Du Creux, or Creuxius, in 1656 and 1660. Here we find Lake Erie given its due prominence; Huron is unduly large, but in its right position; and Michigan and Superior, though not completed, are placed with approximate accuracy. This truth of position, however, was disregarded by many a later geographer, till we reach a type of map, about the end of the century, which is exemplified in that given by Campanius in 1702.

[Illustration: FROM CAMPANIUS, 1702.]

A water-way which made an island of greater or less extent of the peninsula which lies between the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, appeared first in 1600 on the Molineaux map, and was repeated by Dudley in 1647; but on other maps the water-sheds were separated by a narrow tract. So much uncertainty attended this feature that the short portage of the prevailing notion was far from constant in its position, and on some maps seems repeated in more than one place,—taking now the appearance of a connection on the line of the St. Croix, or some other river of New Brunswick; now on that of the Kennebec and Chaudière; again as if having some connection with Lake Champlain, when a misconception of its true position placed that expanse of water between the Connecticut and the Saco; and once more on the line of the Hudson and Lake George.

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