1751 Portuguese Manuscript Map of Uruguay: Banda Oriental, Rio Grande de São Pedro

This is a meticulous c. 1753 manuscript map of the Banda Oriental, the region that became Uruguay, as well as parts of neighboring Argentina and southern Brazil. The anonymous Portuguese author likely penned the map after the 1750 Treaty of Madrid, which fixed the border between Spanish and Portuguese territory along the Uruguay River.

A Closer Look

The portions of the map to the west of the Uruguay River closely resemble the early 18th-century geography of Juan Francisco Dávila, but here Banda Oriental is far superior and shows much more intimate knowledge of the Portuguese territories. The scope of the map reaches from the Parana River to the coast, and from La Plata to the upper Parana. Its best detail focuses on the Banda Oriental: the area east of the Uruguay River, as far north as Florianopolis in southern Brazil. The chart is in Portuguese and names the rivers and streams of the watershed. The sandbanks and other obstructions of the Parana are shown pictorially with some exaggeration. Hills and forests are indicated pictorially. A faint line through the mountains south and west of the Lagoa dos Patos and Lagoa Mirim marks the border between Spanish territory in the Banda Oriental and the Portuguese Captaincy of Rio Grande de São Pedro.

Fitting The Historical Context

The map represents the frontier between the Spanish and Portuguese empires along the Atlantic coast of South America. In the early 18th-century, the Portuguese expanded their settlements at Colonia del Sacramento (Colonia is here the Isla San Gabriel). The Spanish pressed back, establishing Montevideo in 1724, while Portugal fortified their border a bottleneck formed by coastal lagoons. Here, the settlement of Montevideo (M. Vedio) is marked, as is Buenos Aires. The Portuguese captaincy capital Rio Grande de São Pedro is also noted. The map thus embraces what would be the theatre of the Spanish-Portuguese Wars of 1762-63, but it almost certainly pre-dates them. While the map includes the Portuguese frontier fort of San Miguel, established in 1737, (just legible at the southern tip of Lagoa Mirim) it does not include the more formidable Portuguese Fortaleza de Santa Tereza, which was built by 1762. The captaincy's capital, Rio Grande de São Pedro, includes no indication that the Spanish had taken it; we therefore do not think this map was produced after the outbreak of the 1762-3 Spanish-Portuguese Wars.

Conflicts with Indigenous Nations

The area east of the upper Uruguay, known as the Misiones Orientales, includes and names the seven Jesuit missions. These Spanish-controlled territories were ceded to Portugal in the 1750 Treaty of Madrid, and at that time, the missions there were relocated to the west bank of the Uruguay. The indigenous Guarani populating those missions, who fought for Spain against the Portuguese, refused either to relocate or to accept Portuguese rule, resulting in the Guarani War (1754 - 1756), in which combined Spanish and Portuguese armies cooperated in forcibly removing the Guarani. Here, these regions are assigned to neither Portugal nor Spain, but the traces of border further south suggest that the region might be Spanish. There is no note on the map of the battle of Caiboaté, which concluded the Guarani War; thus suggesting the map pre-dates 1756.

At the beginning of a northern tributary of the River Cebollati, in the manner of a battle, is noted 'Choque (dos) Minuanes'. The Minuane were an indigenous Uruguayan nation who tended to support the Portuguese. We suspect this note to refers to the 1751 killing of 120 Minuane by the Governor of Montevideo, José Joaquin de Viana.

Publication History and Census

Manuscripts of this sort are vanishingly rare; to find one so topical and detailed is a once-in-a-collectors'-lifetime opportunity.