Carte De La Louisiane Et Du Cours Du Mississipi Avec Les Colonies Anglaises.

Description

This is Jean-Claude Dezauche’s reissue of Guillaume Delisle’s landmark 1718 map, with an extensively revised Eastern Seaboard. Comparing the two maps shows how the political landscape shifted and how settlements spread along the American East Coast over six decades.

Delisle’s map was full of “firsts.” It was the first map to name New Orleans, the first accurate depiction of the lower Mississippi, and among the earliest printed maps to use the name “Texas.” It was so influential that mapmakers copied it for the rest of the 18th century. The American Revolutionary War (1775–83) created demand for up-to-date maps of the region, and it was in this context that Dezauche published his version.

The two maps share much, starting with their geographical scope. Both extend from the Atlantic Seaboard west to Santa Fe, south to Florida and much of the Gulf Coast, and north to the Great Lakes, with only part of Lake Superior shown. Dezauche keeps many of Delisle’s groundbreaking features. A note along the Trinity River reads “Mission de los Teijas etablie en 1716,” the famous naming and locating of Texas. New Orleans is there as well, and so are the routes of explorers such as De Soto and Moscoso.

The first differences appear in the political boundaries. Delisle shows only the broad early 18th-century divisions between the great colonial powers: Spain, Great Britain, and France. As royal cartographer to the King of France, he paid little attention to the internal borders between British colonies, which to him were simply a rival’s territory. He even placed Caroline within French possessions, with a note that French explorers discovered it and named it in honor of Charles IX. Florida, too, appears ambiguously as part of French Louisiane.

Dezauche’s additions

Much had changed between 1718 and 1782. Dezauche splits the Carolinas and adds the Georgia colony. Dotted boundary lines and original outline color separate each visible colony: Georgia, the two Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Delaware is not distinguished, and the remaining colonies lie beyond the map’s borders. Dezauche also shows Florida as a separate territory. The following year, the 1783 Peace of Paris, the set of treaties that ended the Revolutionary War, returned Florida to the Spanish Crown.

Dezauche also completely reworks the settlements along the East Coast to reflect the region’s rapid population growth in the decades before the Revolution. The changes are especially striking along the Hudson River, now lined with towns absent from Delisle’s map. Pennsylvania extends farther west and gains roads and many new towns. The Carolinas are transformed as well, with a network of roads and towns linking the coast to the interior. In the Georgia colony, Savannah appears along with other new towns and forts.