West Indies & Bermuda Map 1871 Regional Print - Havana, Hamilton, Nassau

This map of the West Indies, with separate insets of Bermuda and Havana, was published in New York by the firm of G. W. & C. B. Colton, sons of the pioneering publisher Joseph Hutchins Colton, who had taken over and renamed the family business after their father built it into one of the largest American map houses of the century. The map was one of Colton's steadiest sellers, reissued nearly every year between 1855 and 1865 and more occasionally through at least 1874, following the same wall-map lineage the firm had developed with the Johnson family a decade earlier. The map covers the full sweep of the Caribbean islands together with Florida and large parts of Central America, annotated throughout with details drawn from the era's growing American commercial interest in the region.

Territorial allegiance across the Caribbean is color-coded throughout the sheet: red marks British possessions, including Belize on the Central American mainland, yellow marks Spanish territory, and blue identifies islands under French control, among them Haiti, despite the fact that Haiti had already been independent for decades by the time this map was drawn. Dominica is shown in yellow, likely intended to represent its own independent standing within the region rather than any particular colonial allegiance. The map specifically labels San Salvador, also known as Cat Island, as the site of Columbus's first landing in the New World, a historical annotation Colton included among the sheet's many place names and settlement markers. The Havana inset is especially detailed, tracing the city's neighborhoods, fortifications and rail lines, while the separate Bermuda inset extends the sheet's reach well out into the Atlantic beyond the Caribbean basin proper.

It is a strong choice for a collector tracking mid-nineteenth-century Caribbean colonial politics through its color-coding, or for anyone with ties to Bermuda or the wider West Indies. Three other broad West Indies maps sit elsewhere in this collection, dated 1842, 1882 and 1967; this Colton sheet is distinguished from all of them by its Bermuda inset and its explicit color-by-allegiance system, a feature none of the other editions share. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.