Puerto Rico Map 1842 Survey Print - San Juan, Ponce, Mayaguez

This chart of Puerto Rico was published in 1842 by the Direccion Hidrografica de Madrid, the Spanish government's official hydrographic office, which traced its institutional roots back to the Casa de Contratacion, founded in Seville in 1503 to house the charts of the Spanish Empire and maintain the crown's official master chart, the padron real. The Casa closed in 1790 after relocating to Cadiz, and Spain established the Direccion in 1797 to take over its surveying and publishing responsibilities, with one of its first major projects being the publication of charts from the Malaspina Expedition of 1789 to 1794. This Puerto Rico sheet represents the kind of official government hydrography the Direccion was created to produce, a scarce, separately issued chart rather than a commercial atlas map, made for the practical use of Spanish naval and merchant shipping around the island.

The chart provides a fine depiction of Puerto Rico's interior topography alongside genuinely excellent coastal detail, the two halves of the sheet reflecting the Direccion's dual mandate to serve both navigators at sea and administrators on land. Offshore shoals are carefully plotted, together with soundings, anchorages and other sailing details essential to any vessel approaching the island's coastline, the kind of technical content that distinguishes an official hydrographic chart from a decorative commercial map. The chart appears only infrequently on the market, a reflection of how few copies of official Spanish government hydrography from this period survive outside institutional collections. Its combination of careful coastal survey work and interior topographic detail makes it a genuinely useful working document as much as a historical artifact.

This chart is a strong choice for a collector of Spanish colonial hydrography or for anyone with family roots in Puerto Rico reaching back to the island's period under Spanish rule. It is the earliest and most technically oriented of several Puerto Rico maps in this collection, distinguished from the later, more decorative Cram and Lucas editions by its official government pedigree and its emphasis on soundings and coastal navigation over administrative or scenic detail. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.