Cuba, Bahamas & Florida Keys Map 1746 Nautical Chart - Havana, Nassau, Key West

This working nautical chart of Cuba, the Straits of Bahama and the Windward Passage was published in London in 1746 by the firm of Mount & Page, longtime publishers of The English Pilot, one of the most important series of practical sailing directions produced in eighteenth-century Britain. This particular sheet appeared in the Pilot's Fourth Book, the volume devoted to American and Caribbean waters, and was made to be used aboard ship rather than displayed, a working chart covering the region between the southern tip of Florida and Jamaica, centered on the Bahamas and Cuba. Unlike the more decorative regional maps of the same waters produced later in the century, this chart is concerned above all with the practical business of getting a ship safely through some of the most hazardous shipping lanes in the Atlantic world.

The chart is dominated by coastal detail: soundings, shoals, bays, anchorages and currents are marked throughout, alongside a fine rendering of the Archipelago of Florida, the chain of small islands and reefs running along the Keys, and a detailed treatment of the Windward Passage and the wider Bahamas. A large inset of Havana Harbor gives sailors a close-up view of one of the most important ports in the Spanish Caribbean, while topographical detail is still worked into the land areas of Cuba and Florida despite the chart's maritime focus. The Cayman Islands and other minor islands are also carefully treated, rounding out a chart meant for practical use across these waters rather than just its most famous landmarks. This is a chart built for working navigators, its priorities different from the decorative atlas maps of the same region produced by later publishers.

This chart is an essential pick for any collector of maritime and nautical history, or for anyone drawn to the practical, working side of eighteenth-century cartography rather than its decorative atlas sheets. It offers a genuinely different character from the two Fielding Lucas editions of Cuba, the Bahamas and the Florida Keys found elsewhere in this collection, predating them by more than seventy-five years and trading their broader topographical ambitions for a navigator's working focus on soundings, currents and safe passage. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes to suit any wall.