1788 La Perouse Map of the Kuril Islands

Here is La Perouse's fascinating and pioneering 1788 mapping of the Kuril Islands, which his expedition had visited the year prior. It is the earliest detailed chart of the islands by a European explorer, part of La Perouse's groundbreaking work in developing geographical knowledge about Northeast Asia.

A Closer Look

Although La Perouse's voyage made many important discoveries and retraced the steps of Captain James Cook's voyages of the late 1760s and 1770s, which was an incredible feat in its own right, its most distinctive contribution was to knowledge of the Pacific around Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Russian traders may have been in Kamchatka as early as the mid-17th century and Russian explorers undertook partial exploration of the Kurils both before and after La Perouse's visit. Also, Dutch mariners and European Jesuits in the employ of the Chinese emperors both developed some geographic knowledge about Sakhalin. But La Perouse's work was the first true charting of the islands (earlier maps had included them as part of the Asian mainland), including the Strait which bears his name dividing Sakhalin from Hokkaido, and differed significantly from contemporaneous Russian or Japanese maps.

An inset at top-left shows the islands directly to the east of the southern part of Kamchatka. The subtitle refers to Jean-Baptiste de Lesseps, who was the only survivor of the expedition as he disembarked at Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka and traveled overland to Paris to report on the progress of the expedition, bringing notes and this map with him.

La Perouse interacted with several groups of indigenous Ainu (on the islands marked as 'habité'), who lived on the boundary between and interacted with the Japanese, Russians, and Manchus. La Perouse's cartographic efforts were aided tremendously by a map drawn for him by a group of Ainu on Sakhalin, and the ethnographic notes here provided Europeans an early glimpse about the islands and their inhabitants.

The Kurils and Sakhalin between Russia and Japan

Despite their reputation for xenophobia and a lack of interest about the outside world, the Tokugawa clan that unified Japan in the early 17th century did make efforts to strengthen control over frontier regions, though this was delegated to daimyo relatives of the ruling family, namely the Matsumae clan. Maps from early in the Tokugawa period marked out the Kurils as part of the shogun's domain, one portion of a larger northern frontier known as Ezo (often as Yezo or Yeso in European sources, with Sakhalin as Oku-Yeso), though understanding of the geography of the Kurils was quite limited.

The importance of maps for marking out and claiming territory was brought home after the expedition of Commodore Matthew Perry and American 'black ships.' Soon after the Convention of Kanagawa with the U.S., the Tokugawa signed the Treaty of Shimoda in 1855, trying to fix the border between Japan and Russia in the Kurils. In 1875, Japan and Russia signed the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, which ceded the Kurils (Chishima shotō 北海道千島諸島) to Japan in exchange for the entirety of Sakhalin (Karafuto) being ceded to Russia, though Japanese could continue to reside in the southern portion of Sakhalin.

The southern half of Sakhalin was given to Japan in the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 following the Russo-Japanese War, and then taken by the Soviet Union in the closing days of the Second World War. The Kurils were more firmly under Japanese control before World War II but were likewise occupied by the Soviets and are administered by the Russian Federation today. The status of both the Kurils and Sakhalin remains disputed and has been a major sticking point in Soviet/ Russian-Japanese relations in the postwar period.

Publication History and Census

This map was drawn by La Perouse in 1787, carried by Jean-Baptiste de Lesseps across Eurasia in 1788, and published posthumously as Plate No. 69 in the first edition of the Atlas du Voyage de la Perouse. It was engraved by Bouclet, edited by Hérault (no further information is available on these individuals), and published in Paris by the Imprimerie de la Republique in 1797 (Year 5 of the revolutionary regime). Due to variations in cataloging the map, it is difficult to precisely determine its distribution, but both the map and the entire atlas are known to be held by a handful of libraries in North America and Europe.