Canada & Great Lakes Map 1713 Regional Print - Montreal, Lake Superior, Mississippi River

Pieter van der Aa, the prolific Leiden publisher known equally for pirated bestsellers and his own vast catalogue of maps and atlases, engraved this map of Canada and the Great Lakes for his 1713 Le Nouveau Theatre du Monde, later reissuing it in his sixty-six-volume La Galerie Agreable du Monde of 1729. Van der Aa built the map's geographic framework directly on Guillaume de L'Isle's landmark 1703 Carte du Canada, then layered on his own bold typography and heavy decorative borders, producing one of the most visually distinctive Dutch renditions of French colonial territory to come out of the early eighteenth century. The map appeared the same year the Treaty of Utrecht closed the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict whose settlement redrew colonial boundaries even as this sheet's western reaches remained pure speculation. Its most striking feature is its confident inclusion of Baron de Lahontan's supposed western explorations, printed alongside a marginal note candidly wondering whether Lahontan had simply invented the whole account.

Hudson Bay anchors the map's northern edge, rendered with the reasonable accuracy that two centuries of English and French fur-trading voyages had by then established. The Great Lakes are drawn with similar care, reflecting the rapid absorption of Jesuit missionary reports into French and Dutch cartography alike, complete with named Indigenous nations, mission stations and trading posts. Further west and south, the map turns speculative: the Mississippi and Missouri rivers are traced back to sources the engraving itself admits are based only on secondhand accounts "according to the report of the natives," while Lahontan's fictitious "Long River" dominates the western third of the sheet. It is a map that is scrupulously accurate where French knowledge was solid and openly uncertain everywhere it was not.

An engaging gift for a collector interested in the myths and misconceptions of early American cartography as much as its accuracy, since this sheet is unusually candid about the line between the two. TheMapVault's Canada Map series includes a closely dated 1719 edition just six years later, as well as this batch's own 1672 Du Val, 1683 Sanson and 1705 De Fer sheets; this 1713 Van der Aa map is the only one of the group to feature Lahontan's speculative western "Long River" geography, making it a distinctive, slightly stranger companion even to its near-contemporary 1719 neighbor. It ships unframed, available in the full range of nine sizes.