Alaska in 1858 - Sitka, Kodiak, Unalaska

The Italian geographer Francesco Costantino Marmocchi published this map of Russian Alaska, titled America Russa, in Genoa in 1858, nearly a decade before the territory passed to the United States. It appeared in Marmocchi's Geografia Commerciale, an ambitious commercial-geography reference that aimed to bring European readers up to date on the trading regions of the world. The engraving carries an ornate, finely worked style typical of Italian cartography of the period, quite distinct from the plainer, more utilitarian maps being produced by American and British publishers at the same moment. At the time this plate was cut, Russian America remained a sparsely governed fur-trading colony administered from Sitka, its future sale to the United States still nine years away.

The map extends well beyond present-day Alaska's borders, reaching into contiguous Canadian and American territory as far as the Upper Missouri and Fraser rivers, and it records a number of early place names rarely seen on maps from other national traditions. Its treatment of the Arctic Sea, labeled Mar Gelato Artico, is especially detailed for a mid-nineteenth-century commercial map. Sitka, seat of the Russian-American Company, Kodiak, an older Russian post on the Gulf of Alaska, and Unalaska, a key stop in the Aleutian chain, all figure among the coastal settlements a European reader of the period would have recognized as the outposts of Russian America.

This is a striking gift for a collector of Russian-American history, for a family with Alaska ties, or for anyone drawn to the decorative continental cartography of the 1850s. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.