1787 Tardieu Map of the Russian Empire

An intricate large-scale c. 1787 French-language map of the Russian Empire engraved by Pierre-François Tardieu. It represents a significant improvement on earlier maps of the empire, especially its eastern portions and the northern Pacific, as both Russian and western European voyages of exploration proliferated in the late 18th century.

A Closer Look

Coverage stretches from what is now Poland, Ukraine, and Estonia in the west to Alaska and the Kuril Islands in the east, including recent acquisitions made under Catherine the Great, most notably Crimea, which was conquered from the Ottomans in 1783. Roads, waterways, mountains, settlements, and administrative borders are indicated throughout. Descriptive notes on recent voyages and discoveries are included along Russia's northern coast and in the bottom-right. Although an important advance on earlier maps, the geography of some areas, such as Sakhalin (Sahalien-Ouha) and Hokkaido (Yeso), is still 'under development,' as Tardieu freely admits. Nearby, the tracks of Russian expeditions to the Kuril Islands are recorded. Seven scales are provided, in part to account for the modified conic projection employed.

This map was produced at a time when Russia's empire was near the peak of its expansion and interest in Siberia, the Pacific, and Alaska at its apex. In 1799, Tsar Paul I provided a charter for the Russian-American Company and established territorial claims to much of today's Alaska. In the following decades, Russian traders would range as far south as Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay Area. But the rapid depletion of fur stocks and more pressing concerns closer to the imperial center of Moscow-St. Petersburg, namely the Napoleonic Wars (1803 - 1815), caused Russian interest in the northern Pacific to wane in the early 19th century, allowing Britain and the United States to become preeminent in the region.

Early Revelation of Perouse's Discoveries

This map was engraved by Pierre-François Tardieu and is dated 1787, though the note at bottom-right mentions subsequent updates, including the incorporation of information from the voyage of La Perouse ('Peyrouse' here), which was not openly published until 1797. The map appeared in Vol. 6 of Peter Simon Pallas' Voyages en différentes provinces de l'Empire de Russie, et dans l'Asie septentrionale, published in 1793, a date consistent with the empire's borders, just on the eve of the Second Partition of Poland-Lithuania. These facts suggest that Tardieu had advanced knowledge of Perouse's discoveries, which is plausible as the expedition's journals were sent overland from Kamchatka across Russia with a stopover in St. Petersburg in 1788, where they were delivered to the French ambassador and then sent on to Paris. Either by way of interlocutors in St. Petersburg or through his proximity to the French crown, Tardieu's inclusion of said information was an early publication of Perouse's discoveries.

Publication History and Census

More generally, Tardieu's map is based on a Russian original ('Генеральная карта Российской империи') first published in 1776 by the Imperial Academy of Sciences (Императорская академия наук) in St. Petersburg by a team including the prolific cartographer Ivan Treskot. It was revised and reissued several times thereafter as Russian geographical knowledge of the further reaches of Siberia and the Pacific, and of scientific cartography more generally, was developing rapidly at this time, and Tardieu looks to have used the 1787 edition of the Russian map as his basis.

This map is only independently cataloged with the Newberry Library, Harvard University, and the National Library of Scotland, while Pallas' entire Voyages is more widely distributed. Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library holds a slightly different 1785 edition also attributed to Tardieu.