Hispaniola, Puerto Rico & Virgin Isles Map 1817 Print - San Juan, Santo Domingo, St. Croix

This twin-map sheet of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Hispaniola was published in Edinburgh in 1817 by John Thomson, a commercial map publisher who specialized in guidebooks and atlases and would later become best known for his pioneering Atlas of Scotland, the first large-scale atlas of that country organized by county. The map appeared in Thomson's New General Atlas, first issued this same year and successful enough to be reissued for the following quarter century in editions published in Dublin and London as well as Edinburgh, compiling existing geographic knowledge for a broad commercial audience rather than a specialist one. Thomson's Caribbean maps, this one included, drew on recent British Admiralty charts combined with hydrographic data from Spanish naval surveys, giving them a level of up-to-date accuracy that set them apart from older, recycled atlas work still common in the period.

The sheet is divided into two panels: the upper records Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, naming coastal anchorages and cays including Vieques, labeled here as Bequa or Crab Island, and St. Croix, while the lower panel maps Hispaniola in full, showing both Haiti and Spanish Santo Domingo with dense hachuring tracing the interior mountain ranges. Named coastal settlements run from Le Cap Francais in the north down to Port-au-Prince, giving the lower panel a detailed record of Haiti's principal towns barely thirteen years after independence. The map is engraved on a generous scale with clear typography and distinct outline color separating the island groups, qualities that made Thomson's Caribbean maps stand out from cluttered contemporary atlas work. Combining two island groups on one sheet let Thomson cover the eastern Caribbean without devoting a full page to each.

This map is a strong choice for a collector interested in the eastern Caribbean as a connected whole, or for anyone with family history spanning Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands or Haiti. Its two-panel format sets it apart from the single-region Puerto Rico and Hispaniola maps found elsewhere in this collection, and its 1817 date places it firmly in the years just after Haiti's independence, a full generation before the more comprehensive Bowen and Meyer regional maps of the Antilles that appear alongside it here. It is offered unframed in a full range of sizes to suit any wall.