John Senex

A large-scale English maps of North America, with the West Indies.

• John Senex (English).
• North America Corrected from the Observations Communicated to the Royal Society at London, and the Royal Academy at Paris. By John Senex F.R.S. 1710. To the Honorable Anthony Hammond Esq. One of the Comissioners of Her Maj[es]ties Navy. This Map is humbly Dedicated and Presented by his Obliged Servants.
• England: John Senex F.R.S., 1710 (-1728).
• Double-page engraved map on two sheets that have been joined, with full contemporary hand-coloring, decorative title cartouche with the armorial crest of Anthony Hammond.
• This work is presented framed.

One of the earliest large-scale English maps of North America. It represents a British attempt to consolidate new information about the region and borrows data from such recently published sources as De L'Isle's landmark Carte du Mexique et de la Floride and Carte de la Canada. Senex improves upon De L'Isle's work with a fine depiction of the Great Lakes region and the most accurate definition of the lower Mississippi River and its delta by an English cartographer of the period. Several of the most important and controversial cartographic discoveries of the period are discussed at length, including Lahontan's mythical Long River and the Salt Lake east of the Country of the Mozeemleck's, both of which are also depicted in remarkable (albeit fanciful) detail. Sir William Phipps' discovery of Spanish wrecks off the coast of the Caicos and Southern Bahamas is also noted. Senex also extended the map's coverage to the Canadian Arctic and the Terra Incognita above Baffin's Bay. Present-day Oklahoma and Texas are part of La Floride, considered at the time to be a possession of the French. The Red River and the Indian villages of East Texas are portrayed accurately, but Senex, following De L'Isle, incorrectly placed many Texas rivers, in addition to depicting some strange and unrecognizable names.

John Senex (1678-1740) was one of the foremost mapmakers in England in the early eighteenth century. He was also a surveyor, globemaker and geographer. As a young man, he was apprenticed to Robert Clavell, a bookseller. He worked with several mapmakers over the course of his career, including Jeremiah Seller and Charles Price. In 1728, Senex was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, a rarity for mapmakers. The Fellowship reflects his career-long association as engraver to the Society and publisher of maps by Edmund Halley, among other luminaries. He is best known for his English Atlas (1714), which remained in print until the 1760s. After his death in 1740, his widow, Mary, carried on the business until 1755. Thereafter, his stock was acquired by William Herbert and Robert Sayer (maps) and James Ferguson (globes).