1719 John Senex Map of America With California as an Island

This elegant English map of the Western Hemisphere, produced by John Senex in 1721, presents a fascinating glimpse of early Colonial America - increasingly detailed in the east, whilst retaining great misconceptions with regard to the western part of the continent.

A Closer Look

This large, attractively engraved work presents the Americas centrally, spanning as far west as the Cocos Islands in the Pacific, and the coasts of France and Spain in the east; glimpses of Africa can be seen in Capo Blanco and Cape Verde. The map reaches from Tierra del Fuego in the south, to Greenland and Baffin's Bay in the north. The cartouche in the upper left is framed with portrayals of Native Americans, together with snakes, turtles, and parrots. In the background, indigenous warriors fight. Nearby is a cannibal scene derived from the long-lived imagery first appearing in De Bry's 16th-century compilation of voyage accounts.) Among the prominent features of North America are its well-realized Great Lakes. The Mississippi, roughly following Hennepin, empties into the Gulf of Mexico in the vicinity of Galveston Bay. An expansive, enigmatic lake dominates the Pacific Northwest. This lake predates by more than 30 years the French 'Sea of the West' apocrypha. California is presented as an island after the Sanson model. In the southeast, Florida is bisected by a unique, unnamed river flowing from the vicinity of Virginia.

Insular California

Senex preserves one of the most tenacious 17th-century cartographic tropes: the island of California. The concept of an insular California first appeared as a work of fiction in Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo's c. 1510 romance Las Sergas de Esplandian, but the mythical island would not be detailed in a map until the English 1625 Briggs map of North America. The notion dominated 17th-century maps of the Americas, persevering even after Eusebio Kino's 1705 map proved the falsity of the idea.

One distinct difference between Senex's Pacific Coast and its Dutch precursors is its depiction of the coast north of California. By the end of the 17th century, most mapmakers simply omitted this coastline, encouraging hopes that the Pacific might communicate easily with the Atlantic via Hudson's Bay or some more northerly Northwest Passage. Senex's map includes (and names) several conjectural islands and portrays three large lakes dominating the northwest: L. Aquinanbock, L. of Isles, and a huge lake labeled The Great Lake of Thongo or Thoya. All are spurious, but Thongo or Thoya seems to be a precursor to the equally vaporous Sea of the West, which dominated French maps of the later 18th century.

Publication History and Census

The map is cartographically derived from Peter Heylyn's 1703 Cosmography. Although McLaughlin dates this map to 1719, it first appears in Senex's 1721 New General Atlas. It was engraved by John Harris. A handful of examples of the separate map appear in institutional collections.