Canada, Great Lakes & Northeast Map 1683 Regional Print - Montreal, Lake Erie, New York

Nicolas Sanson, the Abbeville-born cartographer credited with shifting the center of European mapmaking from Amsterdam to Paris and tutoring King Louis XIII himself in geography, first issued this map of Canada and the Great Lakes in 1657 as part of L'Amerique en Plusieurs Cartes Nouvelles, only the third atlas ever devoted entirely to the Americas. This example is the later 1683 Ribbius reissue, printed in Utrecht from Sanson's original engraving after it passed through several Parisian publishers following his death; the engraving carries the Dutch printer's own imprint alongside Sanson's original composition, a hybrid of French cartographic authorship and Dutch print-trade distribution typical of how popular French map engravings circulated decades after their creator's death. The sheet remained in active reissue for over fifty years precisely because it recorded several genuine cartographic firsts for the region.

The map marks the first printed appearance of Lake Erie, labeled "Lac Erie ou du Chat" after the panther-like reputation Sanson attributed to the Indigenous peoples along its shore. Long Island is introduced for the first time on a map of this scope, while New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlement that would become New York, is correctly positioned at its harbor mouth even though English rule had already renamed it. The Delaware River's course appears substantially improved over earlier Sanson maps, and the sheet notes the short-lived Swedish colony along its banks even though it had already been absorbed by the Dutch. New Netherland's territory is shown extending as far as Cape Cod, a generous Dutch-era claim Sanson's engraving never updated to reflect subsequent English control.

A strong choice for a collector of Dutch-French colonial cartography or a gift for anyone with Hudson Valley or Long Island roots, since this is one of the earliest printed maps to show either place by name. Alongside TheMapVault's wider Canada Map series, running from 1611 through 1719 and beyond, this batch also includes Du Val's 1672 map based on this same Sanson original, De Fer's 1705 sheet and Van der Aa's 1713 edition; this Sanson sheet predates all of them and is the map that actually introduced Lake Erie and Long Island to European print for the first time. It's available unframed in the same nine sizes as every print in the collection.