Canada, Great Lakes & Northeast Map 1672 Regional Print - Quebec City, Lake Erie, Boston

Pierre Du Val, nephew and pupil of the great Nicolas Sanson and himself Geographe Ordinaire du Roi from 1650, engraved this map of Canada and the Great Lakes region for his Paris workshop, building directly on his uncle's earlier surveys of New France. Du Val issued the map in several states as new information reached Paris; this 1672 printing is the third state, distinguished by the addition of the "Mer de Canada" label near Hudson Bay and a wave of new place names not present on the two earlier states from the 1660s. The map still leaves the Great Lakes open-ended toward an unexplored west, an acknowledgment of how little of the continent's interior French cartographers could confirm at the time, even as it confidently draws a Northwest Passage running through Hudson's Bay, a persistent seventeenth-century hope rather than a surveyed fact. At this date New France remained a thinly settled royal colony still finding its footing under direct crown administration, its future far from assured against English and Dutch rivals to the south.

The map's coverage stretches far beyond the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence valley that gave New France its core, running south past Virginia and reaching all the way down to a labeled Florida, a reminder of how French, English and Spanish claims still overlapped across most of eastern North America in this period. Hudson's Bay dominates the map's northern reaches, its supposed passage through to the Pacific a claim Du Val, like most of his contemporaries, was happy to print without having verified it himself. Quebec, seat of the colonial government since Champlain's founding in 1608, and Montreal, established in 1642 as the fur trade's furthest outpost, anchor the settled portion of the map along the St. Lawrence, even though Du Val's engraving spends most of its attention on the vast, half-known territory surrounding them.

A fitting gift for a collector of early Canadiana, someone with French-Canadian family roots reaching back to the colonial era, or anyone building a set of seventeenth-century maps of New France. TheMapVault's wider Canada Map series spans an earlier 1611 edition through to 1719, 1872 and 1897 sheets, with several more from this same batch dated 1683, 1705 and 1713; this 1672 Du Val printing sits early in that run, the third of four known states of the engraving and one of the first to carry the newer place names its uncle Sanson's original lacked. It is offered unframed, in the same nine sizes as every print in the collection, from a compact accent piece to a large statement print for a study or office.