Exceptional four-sheet map of the British Empire in America,
with elaborate title cartouche and hand-coloured outline.

Spanning from southern Canada to northern South America,
this map portrays the contested colonial landscape of the New World in the
early 18th century, when Britain, France, and Spain vied for control
and no single power dominated the continent. Maritime regions are mapped with
notable precision, while the interior reflects the incomplete geographical
knowledge and colonial limitations of the time. Place names appear in English,
French, or Spanish depending on their current colonial overseer, reflecting the
mosaic of European influence.

An engraved endorsement writes that Henry Popple, a clerk to
the Board of Trade and Plantations, compiled the map from official records and
surveys. It was reviewed by Edmond Halley, Savilian Professor of Astronomy at
Oxford, who praised it as more accurate than any previous map of North America.
The title cartouche depicts Indigenous figures in conflict with European
traders, symbolising contemporary European views of the New World as a source
of both abundant commerce and extreme conflict.

The map details the Great Lakes and Mississippi basin, the
Atlantic seaboard colonies, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean, Central
America, and the northern coast of South America (“Terra Firma”). British
claims along the eastern seaboard are emphasised, alongside imperial French
claims across Louisiana, and the Viceroyalty of New Spain in Mexico and Central
America. Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, ceded under the Treaty of Utrecht
(1713), appear as “New Britain.” As evidence of this map’s British authorship,
Jamaica (a British colony) is shown in considerable detail in comparison to the
Spanish territories on Hispaniola and Cuba.

This map was widely regarded as one of the two most
important large-scale 18th-century maps of North America, alongside
John Mitchell’s A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America (1755).
Intended for display in public offices, it emerged amid escalating colonial
boundary disputes. Begun in 1727 and completed in 1733 with the assistance of
Clement Lempriere, Bernard Baron, and W. H. Toms, this map was the first
large-scale and most accurate printed map of the continent at the time of
publication. Whilst it initially sold, it but gained popularity after 1739,
particularly during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Publication continued under
successive proprietors until 1750.

Our version of this map is the reduced Dutch version, published
in Amsterdam in c.1733 by John Covens and Cornelius Mortier.

Original hand-colour. [USA6936].