Cuba, Jamaica & Puerto Rico Map 1860 Regional Print - Havana, Kingston, San Juan

This map of Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico was published in 1860 by Johnson & Browning of New York, as sheet number 51 in the first issue of Johnson's New Illustrated Family Atlas, an ambitious project compiled under the joint supervision of J.H. Colton and A.J. Johnson. Many of the atlas's maps, including much of its Caribbean content, were drawn from Colton's own 1859 General Atlas, reflecting the close working relationship between the two publishing houses in these years just before Johnson struck out fully on its own. The map is finished as a hand-colored lithograph within Johnson's characteristically ornate scrollwork border, a decorative style popular across mid-nineteenth-century American atlas publishing and typical of the firm's early work.

Two detailed insets accompany the main map, one of Puerto Rico and a second of the city and harbor of Havana, giving readers a closer look at two of the region's most significant Spanish colonial centers alongside the broader island geography. Jamaica's administrative divisions are marked by parish, the traditional British colonial unit of local government the island still used at the time, a level of detail the map's own notes specifically call out as worth the reader's attention. Color is used throughout to distinguish the political boundaries and internal divisions of all three islands, letting a single sheet compare Spanish Cuba, Spanish Puerto Rico and British Jamaica at a glance. Published at the close of the 1850s, the map captures the Caribbean's three largest islands each still firmly under European colonial rule, a decade or more before independence movements began to reshape the region.

This map is a fitting choice for a collector interested in mid-nineteenth-century Caribbean cartography or for anyone with roots in Cuba, Jamaica or Puerto Rico. A later, closely related 1871 map covering Cuba and Jamaica sits elsewhere in this collection; this 1860 Johnson sheet predates it by over a decade and is distinguished by its additional Puerto Rico coverage and its parish-level detail for Jamaica, features the later map does not share. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes to suit any wall.