Carte geographique de la Nouelle franse en son vray meridiein
From Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois… Paris: Chez Iean Berjon, 1613. First edition, second state.
Copperplate engraving on a single sheet (12 1/8” x 14 7/8”, 308mm x 379mm; neat-line: 240mm x 323mm).
Framed floating behind Museum Glass. A dark impression with plate tone. Not viewed out of frame.
Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635) was the great French navigator-explorer of Canada, founder of Quebec City and governor of Nouvelle France (the whole of the French colonial territory in America, less Acadia, Louisiana and the cities of Trois-Rivières and Montréal). The present item is the first published account of his voyage to and exploration of the northern part of France’s vast American territory in the XVIIc, which would essentially collapse by 1763. Though Champlain would go on to traverse the Atlantic some two dozen times, here he includes accounts of his four voyages to America: 1604, 1610, 1611 and 1613.
Champlain was, as Burden notes, “the first truly scientific cartographer of North America,” and a crucial player in France’s territorial expansion on the continent. The present map is in Burden and Kershaw’s second state, distinguishable by the changed title (“…en son vray mondia” in the first state), by the sea-monster between Greenland and Labrador (a ship in the first state) and the addition for the first time of Champlain’s name at bottom center (“Faictte par le Sr Champlain Cappine po~ le Roy en la marine— 1613”). Kershaw opines that “the publisher had already started to print this map when Champlain returned to France in 1613 with additional information on the location of the Ottawa River, as well as on the Indian tribes of the Ottawa Valley.” Indeed, the second state of the map contains considerably more detail about the region south of Hudson’s Bay (its label in English as “the bay wher hud/son did winter”), especially noting mountains and ranges that could frustrate further exploration.
Burden (ad loc.) notes that the present map “depicts latitude but longitude also, something virtually never attempted before on a North American map of such detail. Champlain’s acute awareness of the deviation of the compass enables him to portray the St. Lawrence River in its more correct south-west to north-east flow rather than the more usual west to east seen on maps of the period.”
Burden 161; Kershaw, Early Printed Maps of Canada 62.
Item #JLR0687
Price: $125,000