{"product_id":"great-lakes-map-1745-regional-print-detroit-lake-superior-lake-michigan","title":"Great Lakes Map 1745 Regional Print - Detroit, Lake Superior, Lake Michigan","description":"\u003cp\u003eJacques-Nicolas Bellin, chief hydrographer to the French Navy in Paris, engraved this large-format map of the Great Lakes in 1745, expanding on the smaller version he had produced just a year earlier for Charlevoix's Histoire et description generale de la Nouvelle France. Drawing on the surveys of Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Lery, New France's preeminent military engineer, and fresh intelligence from Sieur de La Verendrye's expeditions into the western interior, Bellin produced what became the definitive French depiction of the Great Lakes for a generation, a map so influential that later cartographers kept copying its errors, including a set of spurious islands in Lake Superior, for nearly a century afterward. This first-state example is genuinely scarce, offered only once before in memory and absent from auction and dealer records for the past quarter-century. Its scale is itself a political statement: the Great Lakes sprawl so large across the sheet that New Jersey could fit inside Lake Erie ten times over, while the English colonies are squeezed into a narrow sliver at the map's eastern edge.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLake Erie anchors the map's southern Great Lakes, drawn at a scale so generous it dwarfs the neighbouring English colonies squeezed onto the map's eastern margin. Lake Superior appears further north and west, marked with the spurious islands Bellin introduced here that persisted on maps for the next century, a detail unique to this and later editions of his Great Lakes work. New York, rendered on the map as \"Nouve Yorc,\" barely clings to the sheet's eastern edge, reduced to a narrow strip that visually reinforces how thoroughly French cartography subordinated English territorial claims to its own. The Delaware and Chesapeake Bays fare little better, compressed and foreshortened along that same crowded margin, leaving the vast bulk of the engraving for French river systems, forts and Indigenous settlements across the interior.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn excellent gift for a collector of French colonial cartography or anyone drawn to maps that double as political statements, given how deliberately this one shrinks the English colonies. TheMapVault also carries Bellin's earlier, smaller 1744 Great Lakes map made specifically for Charlevoix's history; this 1745 sheet is the larger, later and far rarer first-state expansion of that same project, incorporating La Verendrye's western survey data the 1744 map lacked and covering considerably more ground east to west. It ships unframed, available in the full range of nine sizes from a compact print to a large-format wall piece.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"TheMapVault","offers":[{"title":"16x20 inch - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58587825176907,"sku":"SKU2116-16x20","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"A2 (42x60cm) - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58587825209675,"sku":"SKU2116-A2","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"18x24 inch - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58587825242443,"sku":"SKU2116-18x24","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"50x70 cm - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58587825275211,"sku":"SKU2116-50x70","price":41.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"A1 (60x84cm) - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58587825307979,"sku":"SKU2116-A1","price":55.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"24x32 inch - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58587825340747,"sku":"SKU2116-24x32","price":55.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"70x100 cm - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58587825373515,"sku":"SKU2116-70x100","price":68.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"75x100 cm - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58587825406283,"sku":"SKU2116-75x100","price":68.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"A0 (84x119cm) - UNFRAMED","offer_id":58587825439051,"sku":"SKU2116-A0","price":75.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0907\/2456\/5323\/files\/SKU2116.jpg?v=1790250170","url":"https:\/\/www.themapvault.com\/en-us\/products\/great-lakes-map-1745-regional-print-detroit-lake-superior-lake-michigan","provider":"TheMapVault","version":"1.0","type":"link"}