1747 Bowen Map of Mexico, California, Florida and the West Indies

This is Emmanuel Bowen's c. 1747 map of Mexico and the southern part of what would become the United States, an area at this time contested between Spain and England. The whole is rife with interesting anti-Spanish propaganda.

A Closer Look

The map's scope reaches from Santa Fe south to the Isthmus of Panama and the Varagua region in Central America, embracing from southern California in the west to Florida in the east. The colonies of Georgia and Carolina are named. New Orleans appears at the mouth of the Mississippi. The names of Indigenous nations, dioceses, and royal jurisdictions are noted throughout Mexico. An inset in the lower left presents a detailed map of the Galapagos Islands, including notes derived from Captain Cowley's 1684 description of the islands. The map's cartouche depicts two natives brutally subjugated, chained, and held at swordpoint by a Spaniard. (One could tell by the hat, and besides, English anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda would have been immediately recognizable in the context of this map.)

California Not An Island

The map presents Baja California as a peninsula, and the Sea of California as a bay. Even as late as 1747, though, the notion of an insular California was still so prevalent that Bowen was required to include a gloss text disabusing readers of that notion:

California, which has been Described and Represented as an Island even by very modern Geographers, was discovered by Father Eusebius Francis Kino, a Jesuit, to be a Peninsula between the years 1698 and 1701...

Publication History and Census

This map was created and published by Emanuel Bowen for inclusion as plate no. 58 in the 1747 edition of A Complete System of Geography. While not dated, the present example is plate number 110 and thus must hail from a later edition. The census of state changes for this map is incomplete, and the dating of these maps in institutional collections is inconsistent.