1793 Novyy Atlas / Janvier Map of the Americas

This is a 1793 Russian-language map of the Americas produced for the 'New Atlas' (Novyy Atlas / Новый атлас), an important work that made the latest French cartography available to a Russian audience.

A Closer Look

This fascinating map covers the Americas in their entirety, along with much of the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and a portion of Africa. The boundaries of countries, colonies, and Spanish colonial provinces are traced in outline color, while territories, geographic regions, mountains, lakes, rivers, islands, large cities, and other features are labeled throughout.

This map is based on the 1783 edition of Jean Janvier's map 'L'Amerique divisée par grands etats,' which differed considerably from earlier editions in eliminating cartographic myths (such as a huge 'Sea of the West' in western North America) and updating the geography of the west coast of the Americas and islands in the Pacific (including New Zealand / Новая Зеландия), incorporating the findings of Cook's voyages, including his then still-recent third voyage of 1776 - 1780.

Historical Context

Among the maps in the New Atlas, the present map is particularly interesting as it coincided with the beginnings of a sizable Russian presence in Alaska. From the 1740s, smaller groups of promyshlenniki (промышленники, frontier trapper-traders) began to arrive in the Aleutian Islands, and by the end of the century began forming into larger corporations, especially the Shelikhov-Golikov Company (founded 1783), which was the basis for the later state-chartered monopoly (Russia's first joint-stock company), the Russian-American Company, founded 1799. The move into the Aleutians and the Alaskan mainland was followed by tentative posts further south in the following decades, including trading posts in today's Sonoma County, California, and on Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands (Sandwich Islands / острова Сандвичевы here, with a note marking them as the site of Captain Cook's death). An agent of the Russian-American Company named Georg Anton Schäffer (1779 - 1836) even attempted to hatch a conspiracy to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy and seize the Hawaiian Islands for Russia in 1815, unbeknownst to the company's leadership. This plot failed and cost the company a small fortune in losses when Schäffer had to flee (he was later more successful recruiting Germans to settle in Brazil). In this context, the present map would have been an important source of information for any traders or imperial officials with dreams of a Russian Pacific empire.

Publication History and Census

This map appeared as Plate No. 48 in the New Atlas or Collection of Maps of all Parts of the Globe (Новый атлас или собрание карт всех частей Земного Шара), subtitled 'taken from various writers and printed in St. Petersburg for the use of Youth in 1793 at the Mining School'. Most of the maps in the Novyy Atlas were derived from those from Rigobert Bonne / Jene Lattré's Atlas Moderne, and this map fits the model, being based on Jean Janvier's map L'Amerique Divisée par Grands Etats that appeared in the 1783 issue of Lattré's atlas ( c.f. America-lattre-1783). Neither this map nor the Novyy Atlas are cataloged among the holdings of any institutions outside of Russia and individual maps from the atlas are scarce to the market.