New England & Eastern Canada Map 1565 Regional Print - Newfoundland, Norumbega, Maine

Giacomo Gastaldi, the foremost Italian cartographer of his generation, designed this woodcut for Giovanni Battista Ramusio's monumental travel-narrative collection Navigationi et Viaggi, and this 1565 printing is the earliest state obtainable today, cut from a fresh replacement block after fire destroyed the Giunti printing house's original in 1557. Ramusio, a Venetian senator who spent decades gathering exploration accounts from across Europe, commissioned Gastaldi specifically to synthesize the coastal reconnaissance of Giovanni da Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier into a single coherent geography, and the result became the first printed map ever devoted specifically to New England and New France, and the very first to put the name "Nuova Francia" before a European public. It appeared at a genuine turning point in European perception of North America, the moment the continent stopped being treated merely as an obstacle blocking the sea route to Asia and started being drawn as a place worth claiming in its own right.

New York Harbor appears in the map's lower left as "Angoulesme," the name Verrazzano gave his 1524 discovery in honor of Francis I's title before he became king of France. To its east, "Port Real" marks Newport Bay and "Port du Refuge" marks Narragansett Bay, both drawn from Verrazzano's coastal log. Because Verrazzano sailed well offshore to avoid shoals near Cape Cod, Gastaldi's map omits the peninsula entirely, compressing the true distance between southern New England and the Canadian Maritimes. "Terra Nuova," or Newfoundland, is shown to the north as a scatter of separate islands rather than one landmass, reflecting Cartier's genuinely fragmented view of the coastline decades before more thorough inland surveys corrected it.

An exceptional gift for a serious collector of early Americana, or anyone drawn to maps that mark a genuine historical first rather than a later refinement, since this sheet predates every other New England or Atlantic Canada map in the collection by nearly two centuries. TheMapVault also carries Bowen's 1744 Atlantic coast map and Homann Heirs' 1755 New England and Eastern Canada sheet, both far more geographically accurate but drawing on two hundred additional years of survey work; this 1565 Gastaldi woodcut is valuable precisely for showing how little of the coastline had actually been charted when it was made. It's available unframed in the full range of nine sizes.