1686 Jaillot Map of North America w/ California as an Island

An impressive and scarce 1696 elephant-folio map of North America issued by Alexis-Hubert Jaillot on a massive scale. The map covers all of North America and Central America from Baffin Bay to the Spanish Main. It extends westward to past an Insular California to include Terre de Iesso (a speculative mapping of Hokkaido) and eastwards past the Azores to include the British Isles.

Sanson's Cartography

Jaillot derived this expanded format map from the earlier work of Nicholas Sanson, a figure who revolutionized French cartography. We can trace the fundamental design of this map to two Sanson maps. First, his 1666 map of North America - on which most of the basic cartography is based. Second, he 1657 map of California, which influenced the rise of the Insular California theory.

Insular California: Luke Foxe / Sanson Model

The insular California presented here is often erroneously referred to as the 'Sanson Model.' The term is in fact derived from a 1635 map of the North American Arctic drawn by Luke Foxe. It was Foxe who invented many of the place names as well as added various bays and inlets to northern California. Among these are Talaaago, R. de Estiete, and the curious peninsula extending westward form the mainland, Agubela de Cato. Foxe's sources remain a mystery and his mapping may be based upon nothing more than fantasy, but Sanson embraced the model whole heartedly. Although Sanson did not invent this form of insular California, his substantial influence did popularize it with subsequent cartographers.

Insular California Origins

The idea of an insular California first appeared as a work of fiction in Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo's c. 1510 romance Las Sergas de Esplandian, where he writes

Know, that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons.

Baja California was subsequently discovered in 1533 by Fortun Ximenez, who had been sent to the area by Hernan Cortez. When Cortez himself traveled to Baja, he must have had Montalvo's novel in mind, for he immediately claimed the 'Island of California' for the Spanish King. By the late 16th and early 17th century ample evidence had been amassed, through explorations of the region by Francisco de Ulloa, Hernando de Alarcon, and others, that California was in fact a peninsula. Nonetheless, by this time other factors were in play. Sir Francis Drake had sailed north and claimed Nova Albion (identified here on the northwest coast of California Island) near modern day Washington or Vancouver for England. The Spanish thus needed to promote Cortez's claim on the 'Island of California' to preempt English claims on the western coast of North America. The significant influence of the Spanish crown on European cartographers, especially the important French house of Sanson, in the form of the presently offered map, caused a major resurgence of the Insular California theory. Just after this map was made Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit missionary, traveled overland from Mexico to California, proving conclusively the peninsularity of California.

Fascinating Great Lakes

In addition to its remarkable presentation of California, this map also offers a very ephemeral perspective on the Great Lakes. While all five lakes are present, Lake Superior and Lake Michigan (Lac des Puans) are open at their westernmost extremes, thus illustrating the primitive sate of exploration in the region as well as the high hopes of European monarchs that one of these lakes may provide a passage to the Pacific and the lucrative markets of Asia. Lake Huron is identified according to its original Huron-Petun (Wyandot) name, Karegnondi (tr. 'Big Lake').

Mississippi River

The Mississippi River, here identified a Chucagua, a term derived from the journals of the De Soto expedition, is relocated well to the east - a major advancement over previous maps. Jaillot's reasoning behind this relocation is unclear but may have been influenced by reconnaissance associated with the recently returned expedition of Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet.

Great Freshwater Lake of the Southeast

In Spanish Florida, which extends north to include most of the American Southeast, Lake Apalache, often called Lacus Aquae Dulces or the 'Freshwater Lake of the American Southeast' is noted. This lake, first mapped by De Bry and Le Moyne in the mid-16th century, is a mis-mapping of Florida's Lake George. While Theodor De Bry, working in 1565, correctly mapped the lake as part of the River May or St. John's River, subsequent navigators and cartographers in Europe erroneously associated it with the Savannah River, which instead of Flowing south from the Atlantic (Like the May), flowed almost directly from the Northwest. This error was taken up by Hondius and Mercator who, in their 1606 map, invert the course of the May River thus situating this lake far to the northwest in Appalachia. Consequently, 'through mutations of location and size [this] became the great inland lake of the Southeast' (Cumming, 478) – an apocryphal cartographic element that would remain one of Le Moyne's most tenacious legacies. Lake Apalache was subsequently relocated somewhere in Carolina or Georgia, where Jaillot maps it and where it would remain for several hundred years.

This map was first issued independently as early as 1674, but was not published in Jaillot's spectacular L'Atlas Nouveau until 1681. The present edition is dated 1696, a scarce state not identified by Burden.