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The first printed sea chart of the Gulf of Mexico. |
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| Item Number: |
43847 |
| Title: | Carta particolare della Baia di Messico con la Costa. | | Artist: | Sir Robert Dudley
| | Category: | Maps
| | Location: | Florida
Mexico
Southeast, U.S.
Texas
| | Publisher: | Published in Florence, Italy. | | Medium Used: | Copper plate engraving. | | Year: | 1647. | | Size: | 18 1/2 x 29 1/4" (470 x 743 mm) plus margins | | Condition: | Good condition. Black & white. | | Price: | $56,500.00 Add To Basket | | Description: | The Arcano del Mare “is the most famous of all early sea atlases” (Printing & the Mind of Man) and “one of the most significant landmarks in the history of cartography” (Martin & Martin). Its principal importance lies in the fact that all the maps and charts are drawn for the first time in such a large sea atlas on Mercator’s Projection and that it gives the prevailing winds and currents at all important harbors and anchorages and the magnetic declination of a large number of places. The principle of “great circle sailing,” as expounded by Edward Wright and others, is greatly improved and made practical. It was this principle that enabled modern navigators to realize that the quickest route from Copenhagen to Tokyo is over the North Pole. Dudley was the illegitimate son of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, brother-in-law of Thomas Cavendish, and favorite of Elizabeth I. He sailed with Sir Francis Drake and went to Guiana and Trinidad in 1594 in search of El Dorado. He eventually settled in Florence and in a naval capacity entered the service of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. His sea atlas was conceived in connection to that service. It is one of the most ambitious and beautiful cartographic works ever published. Twelve years and 5,000 pounds of copper were expended in the preparation of the plates, which were the work of Antonio Lucini, pupil of Callot and friend of Stefano della Bella. Only a small number of copies of the atlas were printed and sold. The chart of the Gulf of Mexico is by far one of the most desirable from the Arcano del Mare. For the first time the Gulf, then a Spanish lake, was treated as a self-contained entity and on a large scale. The entire coast of the present-day Southern United States is included from Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic coast of Florida to the Rio Grande. Dudley includes many place names, many of which do not occur elsewhere. The coast is dominated by a great unnamed bay into which flows a “R. de San Spirito” which many scholars hold to be the Mississippi. |
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