60 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
Among the most important mapmakers of the late
seventeenth century was a Franciscan friar in service
to the French Crown. Vincenzo Coronelli was best
known for his expertly constructed globes, the most
famous of which were a pair of enormous terrestrial
and celestial globes measuring over twelve feet in
diameter that he crafted for Louis XIV. Just after
that, he set to work on an equally ambitious atlas
of the world, which was published in the 1690s.
We close this chapter with the two-sheet map of
North America from that atlas: it combines cutting-
edge geographical knowledge with a more general
assertion of French power.
As shown earlier in this chapter, English colonial
efforts in North America largely focused on the
Atlantic coast. By contrast, the French sought to
explore rather than settle, and to press toward
the interior rather than restrict themselves to the
seaboard. French exploration of the Saint Lawrence
Seaway and the Great Lakes by Champlain was
extended to the Mississippi River and its tributaries
by Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette in the 1670s,
then Robert de La Salle in the 1680s. Though the
French occasionally established outposts and small
settlements, their primary goal was to develop
commercial trade networks by uncovering the
geography of the interior. That exploration is shown
in Coronelli’s confident depiction of the Great Lakes
and Hudson Bay. And while he noted the presence
of English settlements to the east, they remain
secondary to his focus on French exploration along
the Mississippi River.
These latest expeditions, however, still left much
to the imagination. As is shown on the next page,
Coronelli placed the mouth of the Mississippi River
hundreds of miles west of its actual location, and
only vaguely grasped the extent of its tributaries.
Guillaume de L’Isle’s’s subsequent “La Louisiane”
(page 66) indicates how much more of the Mississippi
River drainage system would be discovered over the
next three decades. To the west, Coronelli rendered
California as an island, as so many mapmakers had
done since Henry Briggs first made the claim more
than half a century earlier. His map also substantially
widened North America, revealing how much
Europeans had learned about the sheer size of the
continent over the course of the seventeenth century.
FRENCH EXPANSION IN AMERICA
Vincenzo Coronelli, “America
Settentrionale,” in Atlante Veneto,
circa 1688