Sea chart of the world on Mercator's Projection based on Emanuel Bowen's chart of 1744. It is particularly distinguished by the portrayal of the Northwest Passage.

Through various iterations and breaks throughout its publishing history, The London Magazine has been in print from 1732 to the present. In its initial version, it was a gazetteer devoted to a wide range of subjects, from court gossip including a feature entitled "Court Beauties" profiling the virtues of famous aristocratic ladies of the time, to articles dealing with geography and exploration. It was heavily illustrated, with a substantial amount of cartographic material.



By its very nature the maps within it were derivative, but the magazine contracted engravers to supply it with maps which focused on specific subjects or articles.



This map of the world is a case in point. Its geographical basis and format is taken from a map of the world issued by Emanuel Bowen in 1744, while the magnetic curves are sourced from a map published by William Mount and Thomas Page as stated on the map. Its emphasis is on marine exploration, discoveries and commerce, with geographical detail concentrated almost exclusively on the coast. A prominent feature is the presence of prevalent wind directions on the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. This was based on the pioneering work calculated by Sir Edmund Halley and was a feature that began to appear on world maps by Hermann Moll in the early 18th century and became common on English maps of the time. George Anson's circumnavigation of the world of 1737-44 is also clearly marked.

However, the most extraordinary feature of this map is on the Pacific Northwest coast, where a multitude of new discoveries are featured. These were not present on either the Mount and Page or the Bowen map of 1744 and are a recent addition by Thomas Kitchin, the engraver and an important cartographer in his own right. They feature an extraordinary collection of theories and speculation of channels, lakes, inlets and rivers based on previous reports about the exploration of the mythical Admiral de Fonte and the real Juan de Fuca together with the modern discoveries of Vitus Behring and his lieutenant Martin Spangberg. A further addition is the famous "Bay of the West", here called the "West Sea" a famous mythical body of water which became prevalent on maps throughout the mid to late 18th century; while not on this map, on others it often acted as a mouth for major rivers leading into the North American interior. The final conclusion is that according to the most recent reports, there is not one Northwest Passage but in fact a collection of water ways through northern Canada, all contributing to the Northwest Passage.



This conclusion is based on Joseph Nicholas de L'Isle's famous map of the North Pacific first issued in 1750 which presented this concept to a wide European audience. However, unlike this map, de L'Isle, never committed himself wholly to a waterway completely bisecting North America. Despite the Russian Academy of Sciences publishing a rebuttal of de L'Isle's map in 1754 and a total lack of evidence, thanks to maps like these, the myth of the Northwest Passage was re-invigorated and important geographers such as Robert de Vaugondy and Antonio Zatta later issued their own maps recording this extraordinary mythical configuration of northern Canada although again they rarely committed themselves to a full bisection of the continent and it was known that Vaugondy was a sceptic of the theory. Even by the standards of the day, the portrayal shown on this map is extreme.



Despite the fantastical element of the 'discoveries' this is an early English attempt to integrate Nicholas de L'Isle's map into current geographical thought. [WLD4276]