1784 Staehlin / Santini Speculative Map of the North Pacific

Refining the Map of America's Northwest Coast.

This is Paolo Santini's pirated 1784 edition of Jacob von Staehlin's update to Gerhard Muller's map of the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, the Arctic, and Siberia. It illustrated the findings of Vitus Bering's Great Northern Expedition and subsequent Russian explorations, and was among the most accurate maps of the northwest coast of America available outside Russia before the voyages of Cook, La Pérouse, and Vancouver.

A Closer Look

The map depicts from eastern Novaya Zemlya (Nowaja Semlja) to Hudson Bay and from the Arctic Ocean to California and Honshu, Japan. Considerable detail is included in the Russian Far East and the northeastern portion of the Qing Empire, including rivers, mountains, indigenous groups, and a small number of settlements, trading posts, and other outposts, such as Nizhnekolymsk (Нижнеколы́мск, here as 'Nischnoe Kolymskoe') and Okhotsk (Охотск, 'Ochozkoi'), the jumping-off point for several voyages of exploration. The tracks of explorers and expeditions from Bering onwards are traced and labeled.

Apart from Mount St. Elias (first sighted by Europeans when Bering discovered it on July 16, 1741) and a reference to New Albion, North America is mostly blank. The apocryphal Sea of the West is not present, but the 'Rivière de l'Ouest' is, which maintains the hope for the existence of a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Aleutians are depicted as a chain of islands extending from a larger island that, although not connected to North America, can be considered a proto-Alaska.

Bering's Great Northern Expedition

The original map upon which this is based, published in 1754, was the first official map to reflect the results of Vitus Bering's Great Northern Expedition. The Great Northern Expedition was one of the largest and best-organized voyages of exploration of the early modern era, the results of which completely remapped most of the Arctic coast of Siberia and some parts of the Northwest coast of America, filling in vast amounts of previously unknown coastal details, which had previously been the subject of myth and speculation. Originally conceived by Russian Emperor Peter I the Great, the exploration was undertaken under the auspices of Russian Empresses Anna and Elizabeth. Lasting from 1733 - 1743, the expedition was intended to map the eastern reaches of Siberia and the Northwest Coast of America. Its many accomplishments include the European discovery of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, the Commander Islands, and Bering Island, as well as a detailed mapping of the northern and northeastern coast of Russia and the Kuril Islands. The expedition formally ended the myth of a massive landmass (Lumaria) in the North Pacific.

This Map's Complicated History - Muller's Map and its Derivatives

Following the Bering expedition, Joseph Nicholas de L'Isle, younger brother of the major French cartographer Guillaume de L'Isle, privately published (along with Nicholas Buache) his interpretation of the Great Northern Expedition's discoveries. J. N. de L'Isle was employed by the Royal Academy in St. Petersburg at the time, but upon his brother's death, he resigned and returned to Paris. There, he partnered with Nicholas Buache to publish a wildly speculative map of the Pacific Northwest that did much to popularize the myth of the Sea of the West.

The Russians believed that de L'Isle had improperly used the information he had gathered while serving in St. Petersburg at the Royal Academy. Moreover, they were aware of his incorrect delineation of the Northwest Coast of America and were offended that this referenced and demeaned their excellent academic reputation. Irritated by the publication, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (Императорская академия наук) ordered Gerhard Muller to compile a more accurate map from the complete official accounts of the Great Northern Expedition. That resulted in a 1754 map that is the first to speculate a large peninsula extending westward from the American Pacific Northwest. That peninsula, a kind of Proto-Alaska, became known as Muller's Peninsula.

The map went through several issues, each with updates. The 1758 edition adds a route across the Sea of Okhotsk (Mer d'Ochozk), but is otherwise largely unchanged from the 1754 edition. The first major revision appeared in 1773, when Jacob van Staehlin revisited the Muller map in light of new discoveries from 1764 onwards by Russian explorers and fur merchants (Promyshlenniki, промышленники) navigating the region. Von Staehlin removed Muller's peninsula, replacing it with a series of small islands surrounding a larger island. Although still inaccurate, the archipelago here is far closer to the Aleutians and the Alaskan mainland than on any previous map. The map was subsequently pirated by the Italian cartographers Santini and Remondini, who issued versions in 1774 and 1784; the example seen here is from the latter.

All Muller maps, and their derivatives, do not include N. de L'Isle's mythical 'Sea of the West,' although they do continue to hold out hope for a water route from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean via tentatively located 'R. de l'Ouest' connecting the northern California coast to Hudson's Bay. Streeter notes that Muller's map confirmed the existence of a body of water between Asia and America, the subject of much dispute during the previous two hundred years. It also showed the Kuril Islands correctly and, as mentioned above, suggested the outline of Alaska and the Aleutian Archipelago.

Tschuktschi or Witsen's Peninsula

Another feature of extreme interest is the ghosted bulbous peninsula identified as Tschuktschi in northeastern Siberia. Earlier versions of this were known as Witsen's Peninsula. This oddity appears in various forms on numerous maps dating from the late 17th and early 19th centuries. It is a legacy of Peter the Great's obsession with a Northeast Passage. Around 1648, the Cossack Semen Ivanovich Dezhnyov (1605 - 1673) put together a rough-and-ready expedition to explore the region. His company consisted of Fedot Alekseyev, traveling with the merchants Andreev and Afstaf'iev (representing the Guselnikov merchant house), who provided their own ship, and Gerasim Ankudinov, an experienced sea captain with his own ship and some 30 men. Dezhnev, along with Mikhail Stadukhin, recruited some 19 men of their own and procured a traditional kocha ship. Including escort vessels, a total of seven ships sailed from the mouth of the Kolyma River, along the Siberian Arctic, to the Anadyr River north of Kamchatka, and in doing so became the first Europeans to sail through the Bering Strait some 80 years before Vitus Bering. Dezhnyov described rounding a large mountainous promontory identified as the Chukchi, Tschuktschi, or Chukotka Peninsula. Of the seven vessels and multiple leaders, only three ships, including Dezhnev’s, survived the passage.

Dezhnyov ultimately proved that there was indeed a nautical route from Russia to East Asia, but at the same time confirmed that it was exceedingly impractical for trade. Nonetheless, his promontory was subsequently embraced by European cartographers who, lacking serious scientific data from the Dezhnyov expedition, surmised the form. The first of these was Dutchman Nicholaas Witsen, who prepared a map in 1687 based on Dezhnyov's records, which he discovered during a 1665 trip to Moscow - hence the term 'Witsen's Peninsula'. Many cartographers followed suit, and some even went so far as to suggest that this landmass may actually be connected to America. Dezhnyov's actual reports were rediscovered by Gerhardt Friedrich Muller, who published them in 1758 and incorporated them into his own influential map of the Siberian Arctic.

Staehlin's depiction of Alaska

Technically, from the Russian perspective, Alaska (Аляска), which was derived from the Aleut 'alaxsxaq' meant 'object toward which the action of the sea is directed,' 'great continent,' or 'the mainland.' The notion that it might have been an island seems to extend from reports by Russian traders and military officers. Specifically, in 1768, Krenitsyn and Levashev, Russian naval officers, wrote of a large island called 'Alaxa' northeast of Unimak Island, which Alaskan natives referred to as the 'Island of Alaschka.' Staehlin applied these reports to reconcile anomalies on a Japanese map acquired by the German naturalist, physician, and orientalist Engelbert Kaempfer. This Japanese map shows an unnamed island near Alaska, which Staehlin enlarges and reorients to correspond to lands discovered by Gvozdef in the wake of the Bering-Chirikov expedition. The other islands, some of which are named and some of which are not, are derived from the reports of Captain Ivan Sindt (or Sindo). Sindt sailed with Bering and later, in 1768, led his own expedition to the region. As some have suggested, he seems to have greatly exaggerated both the size and quantity of the islands he encountered. Staehlin used this to fill in the blanks between the Kaempfer and Bering maps.

Publication History and Census

As explained above, this map has a complex history of publication, with the present map being a pirated example published in Venice in 1784 (in the Atlas universel dressé sur les meillures cartes modernes), based on Jacob von Staehlin's 1773 update to Muller's original 1754 map. The present edition is readily distinguishable by the plate number at top-right, as well as by a close examination of details which indicate a different plate than that of Staehlin. It is independently cataloged by the Newberry Library, the University of British Columbia, the University of Michigan, and the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

Cartographers

Jacob von Staehlin (May 9, 1709 - June 25, 1785) was a German-Russian polymath known as an engraver, cartographer, memoirist, full state councilor, and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Born in Memmingen, Upper Swwabia, von Staehlin attended the University of Leipzig and, in 1735, was called to St. Petersburg to work for the St. Petersburg Academy. He became a member of the Academy and a professor of 'eloquence and poetry' in 1738 and in 1741 took over the Department of Art at the Academy. He was appointed teacher to the heir to the Russian throne, Peter Fedorovich, in 1742, and after his wedding was named his personal librarian. Staehlin helped with the creation of the First Atlas of the Russian Empire, which was published in 1745. The art department was changed into the Academy of Fine Arts in 1747, and Staehlin was was entrusted with its management, and even developed drawing and engraving programs. Staehlin died in St. Petersburg in 1785.   Further Details...

Gerhard Friedrich Müller (Фёдор Ива́нович Ми́ллер; October 29, 1705 - October 22, 1783), also known as Fyodor Ivanovich Miller, was a Russian-German historian, ethnologist and cartographer. He was born in Herford and educated at Leipzig. In 1725, he was among the European scholars invited to St. Petersburg to co-found the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Müller took part in the Academy's Great Northern Expedition (Second Kamchatka Expedition; 1733 - 1743), he and eighteen scientists and artists traveled the area to perform ethnological and botanical studies, as well as collecting data for the creation of maps. Müller's descriptions and categorizations of clothing, religions and rituals of the Siberian ethnic groups earned him the title 'father of ethnography.' He produced an essential map of the arctic and sub-arctic regions of the Pacific in 1754, motivated to counter the geographic frauds perpetrated by Joseph Nicholas De l’Isle (1688 - 1768) and Phillippe Buache (1700 - 1773). He knew both Vitus Bering (1733 - 1743) and Aleksei Chirikov (1703 - 1748), and was as close to his subject matter as any cartographer of his age.   Further Details...

Paolo Santini (1729 - June 1793) and his brother Francois [Francesco] Santini (fl. 1776 - 1784) were Italian engravers and map publishers based in Venice. The brothers were born in Venice. They are best known for their Atlas Universel dressé sur les meilleures cartes modernes, a grand atlas presenting state-of-the-art French cartography to a Venetian audience. They drew on the cream of 18th Century French cartographers such as Robert de Vaugondy, Jaillot, De L'Isle, and D'Anville. Their atlas was published by the Remondini house in Venice, who purchased the plates and publishing rights from the Santinis in 1781. Paolo was a priest of the Church of Santa Maria Formosa and a professor of architecture in the public schools of Venice. Moreover, he was an ingenious mechanic and invented a large drill used in the Venetian Arsenal for boring cannons, as well as a cutting instrument designed to verify reliably, under any circumstances, the authenticity of licenses issued to merchant captains. With a zigzag cut made in a single movement of the handle, the original document was divided from its matching counterpart. He appears to have been the primary engraver of the two brothers as well. In addition to maps, he also illustrated and engraved architectural plates. He died in Belluno in June 1793, having traveled there to attend the wedding of a close relative. Francesco is believed to have traveled more broadly, including maintaining an office in Paris, where he purchased many of the maps that would inform the brothers' work. He is known to have associated with several French cartographers of the late 18th century, including Rigobert Bonne. His offices in Paris were located at Rue St. Justine pres de L'Eglise.   Further Details...

Remondini (fl. c. 1657 - 1861) were a family of printers who worked originally based in Bassano del Grappa, near Venice. Giovanni Antonio Remondini (1634-1711), the family patriarch, was born in Padua in 1634. In 1657, he took a home the main square of Bassano where he opened a shop drapes, wool, silk and iron tools. He also sold woodcuts of saints which proved popular with local farmers who believed they bought spiritual protection. When Giovanni died in 1711 his printing business fell into the hands of his son, Joseph Remondini. In 1750 Joseph expended the family business into Venice proper. Having several paper factories established by Giovanni Antonio, the Remondini were in a position to undercut competitors in Venice. The Remondini employed a number of talented engravers, including Paolo Santini, an Abbot who specialized in sacred images as well as cartography. Their corpus includes several beautifully produced atlases, though, cartographically speaking, little in the way of original work. The family fell into decline following the Napoleonic invasions, finally closing their doors in 1861. Most of the Remondini family's work is today preserved in the Museum of Bassano del Grappa and the Piccolo Remondini Museum of Vicenza.   Further Details...

Source

Santini, P., Atlas universel dressé sur les meillures cartes modernes, (Venice: Remondini) 1784.    

Condition

Excellent.

References

Rumsey 12039.067. OCLC 1240240686, 606368264, 945089346.