North America--Coronelli, Vincenzo Maria.

Burden, Mapping of North America II 643; Cohen, Mapping the West pp.43-47; Cumming, Exploration of North America p.148; Leighly, California as an Island 88; Martin & Martin, Maps of Texas and the Southwest p.87; McLaughlin, California as an Island 103

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One of the most important and influential maps of North America published in the late seventeenth century.

Coronelli was geographer to the Louis XIV, and this gave him access to all manner of unpublished French materials on North America, that contribute to the significance of this map in the mapping of the region.

Coronelli's chief debt is to Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin, Géographe du Roy, whose famous manuscript map of North America, or at least one of them, is in the Bibliothèque Historique Centrale de la Marine, in the Château de Vincennes.

Coronelli's map is the best delineation of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi published to date, based on the explorations of Louis Jolliet, Jacques Marquette and René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, from his first expedition of 1679-1682, accompanied with extensive notes in the body of the map. However, he was mistaken in repeating la Salle's belief that the mouth of the Mississippi was to be found in modern Texas, some 600 miles west of its actual location.

Coronelli's map is also important for the greatly improved delineation of the Spanish south-west, from the materials of Diego Dionisio de Peñalosa Briceño y Berdugo, who had tried to induce the French King to attack the Spanish there. The map inserts many new place names, for example labelling the upper course of the Rio Grande the "Rio Norte", and the lower reaches the "Rio Bravo" and showing the river, correctly, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Again, however, his delineation of the of the west is better known for his mistake – the left hand sheet is dominated by a huge depiction of California as an island, perhaps the most famous and long-running cartographic misconception, with this map one of the most prized examples of that mistake.

The map is notable also for the large number of delicate vignette scenes, in the manner of Theodore de Bry, illustrating the lives of the natives, their customs, canoes, villages and hunting.