1852 Meyer Map of Central America

This is an attractive 1852 map of Central America by Joseph Meyer. It covers from the Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico south as far as Panama. It includes nine insets maps. In a clockwise fashion from the top center, these detail the Great Lake of Nicaragua, The Isthmus of Panama, the Friendly Islands (Tonga), Society Islands, Marquesas Islands (Mendana), Easter Island of Waihu, the Sandwich Islands or the Hawaiian Archipelago, Galapagos Islands and the Istmo de Tehuantepec. It also includes six elevation profiles. Several notes are also included throughout.

This map was an area of considerable public interest through the 1850s. Before the construction of the Panama Canal the most practical route from the Caribbean to the Pacific was through Nicaragua. Known as the Nicaragua Route, this passage was controlled by the Accessory Transit Company, a property of the American tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. This vital trade artery was disrupted in 1854, two years after this map was issued, by the outbreak Civil War in Nicaragua. In an attempt to keep the route open, the Liberal Party of Nicaragua, under Francisco Castellon, enlisted the aid of the American adventurer William Walker. Walker invaded Nicaragua with some sixty armed 'colonists' and managed to have himself fraudulently elected President, after which is began an Americanization program that included reintroducing slavery into the region. Eventually Walker's small private army was defeated by the Central American Collation and Walker himself was repatriated to New York, where he faced charges for illegally waging war. Loathe to let go of his imperial ambitions, Walker again returned to the region, this time to British Honduras (Belize), where he was captured and executed by the British governors who saw him as a threat to their own economic ambitions in the construction of a trans-oceanic canal.

This map was issued in Meyer's Zeitung Atlas. Although all the maps in this atlas are not individually dated, the title page and maps were often updated while the imprint with the date was not, causing confusion to the exact date for some of the maps. Moreover some maps in the atlas were taped in at a later date as an update to the atlas. We have dated the maps in this collection to the best of our ability.