Greater Antilles & Florida Map 1844 Regional Print - Havana, Kingston, Santo Domingo

This detailed regional map of the Greater Antilles and Florida, titled Neueste Karte der Grossen Antillen, was published in 1844 in Hildburghausen by the German publisher Joseph Meyer, best known today for founding the long-running encyclopedia Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. Meyer was also responsible for the lavishly illustrated Meyers Universum, a seventeen-volume steel-engraved survey of the world that reached some eighty thousand subscribers across Europe in a dozen languages, a scale of publishing few of his contemporaries could match. He trained as a merchant in Frankfurt, traveled to London in 1816, and built his publishing empire from Gotha before relocating it to Hildburghausen in 1828, and this Caribbean sheet, drawn from his Hand Atlas, reflects the same fine, precise German engraving style that made his larger illustrated works so celebrated across the continent.

The map covers Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico together with the Florida peninsula, uniting the entire Greater Antilles chain and its immediate North American neighbor on a single detailed sheet, a genuinely ambitious scope for a hand-atlas map of this size. A dedicated inset of Havana gives readers a closer view of Cuba's capital and principal port, one of the most consequential cities in the entire Caribbean trading network by the 1840s. The precision of the German engraving tradition is evident throughout, with coastlines, place names and topographical detail rendered with a crispness that contemporary reviewers frequently praised in Meyer's atlases. Covering four major islands and a peninsula on one sheet, the map exemplifies the compact, information-dense style that made Meyer's Hand Atlas such an efficient reference tool for its mid-nineteenth-century German readers.

This map is a fine pick for a collector of German cartography or for anyone with ties spanning Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico or Florida. Its four-island, single-sheet scope sets it apart from every other Caribbean map in this collection, none of which attempt quite the same breadth of coverage in one sheet, making it a natural centerpiece for a themed grouping of nineteenth-century Antilles cartography. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes to suit any wall.