1626/ 1676 John Speed 'carte à figures' Map of Africa: Superb Old Color

This is John Speed's 1626 map of Africa, the first English map of the continent. This beautiful map is one of the most desirable early maps of Africa, combining superb engraving, attractive Dutch styling, and entertaining and abundant English text. Moreover, the present example sports old color of unusually high quality.

A CloserLook

Speed was an accomplished historian and compiler, drawing his maps from state-of-the-art sources. In this case, the cartography for this map is drawn from the maps of Jodocus Hondius (whose student Goos actually engraved the map). Hondius' source was ultimately Willem Blaeu's 1608 wall map of Africa. As is the case with all of these maps, the map demonstrates 17th century European geography's detailed knowledge of Africa's coasts wedded to a deep mystification of the interior. The course of the Nile, for example, is shown in substantially the same configuration as was supposed in the second century by Claudius Ptolemy. Speed adds descriptive text - for example, noting areas in western and central Africa where gold is said to be found, and indicating areas said to be occupied by Amazons.

Presenting the Idea of Africa

Visually, the map shares with Blaeu the decorative elements associated with the carte á figures as a form: key city views along the top border, along with figures to the left and right depicting the denizens of the lands. The cities are North African, with the exception of Canaria and Mozambique, and all reflect the coastal limitations of European penetration into Africa. In addition to the borders, the body of the map is richly decorated with sailing ships, sea monsters, flying fish, elephants, ostriches, lions, and a zebra.

The Engraver

Speed's adoption of the Dutch carte á figures map style (and indeed, the entirety of the Dutch state-of-the-art for the mapping of Africa) becomes unsurprising when one considers the degree to which Speed was dependent on Dutch engravers. Virtually all of the maps produced for Speed during his lifetime were executed by Jodocus Hondius and (as is the case here) his protégé and student Abraham Goos: it would appear that, until well into the 17th century, the art of engraving in the British Isles was unequal to the challenge posed by the production of maps. Not until this 1676 Bassett and Chiswell edition of Speed's work would maps be included that were actually executed by an Englishman, Francis Lamb.

Color on Speed Maps

Whereas the Dutch and Flemish mapmakers systematically colored a significant portion of their atlases, Speed's various publishers very seldom colored these maps at the time of their publication. While Speed maps with attractive color can be easily found, these were by and large colored later and even recently. The coloring on the present example, however, displays evidence of oxidation consistent with age; since the palette conforms to 17th century fashion, we do not think it likely that this was colored very long after the map's 1676 printing. (Original color of the late seventeenth and into the eighteenth century did not resemble this.)

Publication History and Census

Although Speed died in 1629, his atlas was kept active long afterwards as its plates passed from George Humble to William Garrett to Roger Rea and ultimately to Basset and Chiswell, whose final edition of 1676 is the most easily found. This 1676 edition of the separate map is only listed four times in OCLC: at Stanford, the Bibliothèque National, the University of Witwatersrand, and the University of Kwazulu, Natal. Basset and Chiswell's Theatre of the Empire of Great-Britain is well represented in institutional collections.