Cuba, Hispaniola & Puerto Rico Map 1744 Regional Print - Havana, Santo Domingo, San Juan

This pair of highly detailed engraved maps of Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico was published together on a single sheet in London in 1744 by Emanuel Bowen, one of the most respected British engravers of his generation and mapmaker by royal appointment to both George II of England and Louis XV of France, a rare distinction for a cartographer working across the Channel from his subjects. Bowen, who died in poverty despite his professional standing, trained two apprentices who would go on to become prominent mapmakers in their own right, Thomas Kitchin and Thomas Jeffreys, and his own business was later carried on by his son Thomas. This sheet pairs the two maps in a single decorative composition, with English-language annotations throughout aimed at a general British readership rather than a specialist navigational audience.

Cuba occupies one half of the sheet, its coastline and interior rendered with Bowen's characteristic clarity, while the second map covers both Hispaniola, divided between French Saint-Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico to its east, along with portions of the surrounding Bahamas. The decorative, interesting style Bowen brought to the sheet reflects his broader reputation as an engraver equally comfortable producing county maps for English gentry and Caribbean charts for a wider commercial market. Placing all three major islands, Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, on a single sheet gave eighteenth-century British readers an efficient overview of Spain's most valuable Caribbean holdings at a glance, without requiring a full atlas volume to assemble the same picture. The pairing captures the Greater Antilles as contemporaries understood the region: a connected chain of Spanish and French colonial territory rather than a set of unrelated islands.

This sheet is a strong pick for a collector of eighteenth-century British Caribbean cartography or for anyone with family history spanning Cuba, Hispaniola or Puerto Rico. This collection carries a second example of this same 1744 Bowen edition, reflecting how more than one copy of the original engraving survives on the market today; the two are identical in content and date, so either makes an equally fine addition for a collector simply seeking a good copy of this classic Bowen composition. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.