Florida in 1679 - St. Augustine, Pensacola, Apalachee

Joannes Zunners of Frankfurt published this rare variant edition of Nicolas Sanson's map of Florida in 1679, incorporating it into his geographical compendium Die Gantze Erd-Kugel. The map derives from Sanson's influential 1657 plate, La Floride, one of the earliest printed maps to focus specifically on the Florida region, and this German edition improves on Sanson's original projection of the southeast while correcting the Florida nomenclature, even as much of the rest of the map continues to rely on the older Chaves and Ortelius naming conventions inherited from sixteenth-century Spanish and Flemish cartography. This particular Frankfurt edition is distinguished from other states of the plate by the distinctive bifurcated placement of the word Septentrion at the map's top margin, and it carries Latin rather than French place names throughout.

Florida appears here still largely defined by its Spanish colonial footholds, with St. Augustine standing as the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in North America and Pensacola marking Spain's western outpost along the Gulf coast, while the broader Apalachee region, home to a substantial Native population under mission-era Spanish influence, dominates the panhandle's interior. The map's rendering of the Gulf of Mexico, labeled Golfo De Mexico, and its treatment of the poorly understood American Southwest as still largely blank territory, reflect the genuine limits of European geographic knowledge of Florida and its interior more than two centuries after Spanish contact. As one of the rarest states of this celebrated plate, the map represents an important record of seventeenth-century European cartographic understanding of Spanish Florida.

This map is a compelling gift for a family with deep Florida roots, for a collector of seventeenth-century Spanish colonial cartography, or for anyone drawn to the earliest printed maps of the American Southeast. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.