1688 / 1697 Coronelli Gore Map: Eastern North America, Caribbean, Terra Firma

This is the 1688 / 1697 Vincenzo Coronelli globe gore map of the American northeast, the West Indies, and northern South America. It was initially engraved for Coronelli's 42-inch (3 1/2 foot) terrestrial globe, here in the 1697 printing prepared for the Libro dei Globi and Isolario.

A Closer Looks

The map spans from the Equator in the south to Newfoundland in the north, centered on the Tropic of Cancer. It includes Canada in the vicinity of the Saint Lawrence River and Acadia, New England and New York, and part of the coastline around the Chesapeake Bay. The West Indies are shown from the Bahamas to Trinidad, stretching from the eastern part of Cuba to Barbados, including the imaginary island of Fonseca. The gore's southern extents show the northern parts of South America, from modern day Venezuela to the Orinoco Delta and the Guianas, and the fabled city of El Dorado.

Canada

Coronelli's connections in Paris meant that he could rely on superb data for those places where the French were foremost in exploration, particularly French Jesuits. Hence, the mapping of Canada is remarkably detailed. The course of the Saint John River in the lands of the Etchemin people (modern day New Brunswick) is quite recognizable. The Isle Saint Jean and the Magdalen Islands are also shown. Oddly, Lake Champlain still appears somewhat to the East as in the Dutch maps, but it is shown more correctly in relation to the Hudson River than in most maps of the period. The Saguenay River is shown prominently.

Those Other Colonies

Coronelli's sources being French, it is not surprising to see the territories claimed by other European nations given short shrift. (Indeed, the part of the Atlantic off the North American coast is labeled Mare di Canada, ò Della Nuova Francia. New England is confined to the coast, with its limits just beyond Fort Pentagouët. This, at the mouth of the Penobscot, was the oldest permanent settlement in New England, and had been the capital of Acadia, but changed hands between the English, French, and even the Dutch occasionally throughout the seventeenth century: here it is shown within the English sphere of influence, as matters had stood as late as 1670. At the time the gore was engraved it was held again by the French. New York is named (Il Nuovo Iorck,) indicating its passage from the Dutch to the English. Fort Orange is shown (Albany, now.) Long Island is shown, named 'Gunstable,' 'Long Island' and erroneously, 'Isola Degli Stati' (Staten Island, which is shown but unnamed.) New Sweden is shown on the west coast of the Delaware River, despite its having been conquered by the Dutch in 1655.

The Islands

Coronelli shows the Caribbean in detail, largely following Dutch cartographic models. He divides the islands into specific regions - the Windward Islands, the Lucayes, the Leeward Islands - and also provides a key and legend indicating which colonial power held which islands. The engraving also includes the typical sailing tracks used by ships coming to the West Indies from Europe (via the Windward Islands) and that used by ships sailing from the Indies back to Europe (via the passage between Florida and the Bahamas, and up the coast.)

The Imaginary Island of Fonseca

Due east of Tobago is shown the 'believed to be fabulous' island of Fonseca. We first see this referred to in a 1682 travelogue entitled 'A discovery of Fonseca in a voyage to Surranam,' written by a 'J. S.' who may have been John Shirley and published in Ireland. It told of an island inhabited entirely by women - specifically of Welsh origin - who allowed no men on the island at all except for specified visits. The male children resulting from said visits were said to be banished in early youth, and male visitors could stay no longer than a month.

Lake Parima and El Dorado

At the equator in South America appears a lake with the following Italian text:

Here most of the geographers place, on the west of the Lake of Parime, the ruins of the City of the Manoa del Dorado, which the Monsieur de Villermont writes are fabulous.

During the 1680s, Esprit Cabart de Villermont was one of Louis XIV's court scholars and correspondents, particularly interested in the geography of the American continent. He most closely followed the progress of French exploration in Mississippi but maintained connections with officials in Saint-Domingue and Canada. His best sources being pertinent to North America, mainly, he can perhaps be forgiven for falling back on older sources for his South American reports: the Parima/Parime lake began to appear on maps following the explorations of Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 - 1618) - who claimed to have discovered El Dorado, what he called 'Manoa' on the shores of a great inland sea in the Guyana Shield. Subsequently, most Europeans believed the most likely site of El Dorado to be located somewhere in Guyana, Venezuela, or northern Brazil. Raleigh never claimed to have seen the city of Manoa himself, but one of his underlings, Lawrence Kemys (15?? - 1618) was sent in search of it. Kemys pushed east from Orinoco near modern day Ciudad Bolivar (Angnostura), into Guyana, where he encountered the Essequibo River. It was there that he picked up the trail of Lake Parima, described by indigenous peoples as resting on a great lake over 200 leagues wide.

This lake, although no longer mapped as such, does have some basis in fact. Recent geological studies suggest that in the 16th and as late as the 17th centuries, a large lake did occupy this region. Its remains, known as Lake Amaku, still rises and falls with the rainy season. During exceptionally rainy or El Nino years, Amaku can grow enough to inundate much of the Parima Flood Plain, creating the appearance of a vast inland sea. To underscore this, we have personally seen the remains of cargo ships that navigated down the Essequibo and onto the Parima / Rupununi before the water receded, leaving the ships beached hundreds of miles from navigable waters.

Parts of the Amazon were, at the time, dominated by a large and powerful Indigenous trading nation known as the Manoa - a name that appears on some early maps of the Amazon Basin. The Manoa traded the length and breadth of the Amazon. The onset of the rainy season inundated the great savannahs of the Rupununi, Takutu, and Rio Branco or Parima Rivers. This inundation briefly connected the Amazon, Orinoco, and Esseuqibo systems, opening an annual and well used trade route. The Manoa who traded with the Incans in the western Amazon, had access to gold mines, and so, when Raleigh saw gold rich Indian traders arriving in Guyana, he made the natural assumption for a gold hungry European in search of El Dorado. When he asked the Orinocans where the traders were from, they could only answer, 'Manoa.' Thus, did Lake Parima and the city of Manoa begin to appear on maps in the early 17th century. The city of Manoa and Lake Parima would continue to be mapped in this area until about 1800.

Although much of the detail of this map can be seen to be substantially the same as that which appears on Coronelli's two-sheet America Settentrionale, the finer elements - such as the colonial notation in the Caribbean, and the ships' tracks - appear to be unique to the globe. The globe engraving predates that of the map, which was not actually published any earlier than 1690.

Coronelli's Most Beautifully Engraved Plate of the Region

The gore is of superb workmanship, visible in its well-placed, contrasting text, its bold lines, and beautiful pictorial mountains. The general delineation is the same as would appear on Coronelli's two-sheet America Settentrionale, but close comparison reveals the engravings for the globe gore to be superior in detail and execution. Clearly Coronelli applied higher standards to his globes than on his conventional printed maps, as beautiful as they were.

Publication History and Census

This engraving was executed in 1688, as part of Coronelli's 3 1/2 foot terrestrial globe, and was masked off for inclusion in one of Coronelli's bound volumes: this sheet can be found in both the Libro Dei Globi and the Isolario. Scianna has catalogued only thirteen copies of the full Libro dei Globi in institutional and private collections; perhaps a dozen examples of the Isolario are catalogued in institutional collections. We see only one example of the separate gore in OCLC, in the Lanman collection at Yale.