Quebec City Map 1744 City Plan - Quebec City, Upper Town, Lower Town

Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, hydrographer to the French Navy in Paris, prepared this plan of Quebec around 1744 for the Jesuit priest Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix's Histoire et description generale de la Nouvelle France, one of the eighteenth century's most consulted accounts of French North America, a book Thomas Jefferson himself owned and recommended. Bellin, who at eighteen had already been appointed the Navy's chief hydrographer and later ran its cartographic depot, brought a surveyor's precision rather than a decorator's flourish to the sheet, laying the fortified town out with a numbered key identifying its principal buildings instead of an elaborate cartouche. The plan captures Quebec, seat of government for New France, at a moment when the colony's fortunes still rode on the walled town's defenses, just as Anglo-French rivalry in North America was reigniting into open war.

Quebec's fortifications, laid out here in careful outline, were built to exploit the town's naturally defensible perch above the St. Lawrence: Cape Diamond's high promontory anchors the upper town and its citadel, while the lower town clusters at the water's edge around the old habitation site where Samuel de Champlain first settled the colony in 1608. The river narrows dramatically at this point, the feature that gave the town its Algonquin-derived name and made it the logical chokepoint for the St. Lawrence valley and the fur trade beyond it. Levis, across the river to the south, and the rural cotes running toward Sainte-Foy, filled out the settled landscape around the walls Bellin's key was designed to help a reader navigate. Together, the numbered references to churches and government buildings describe a garrison town built as much by geography as by masonry.

A handsome pick for anyone with Quebec City roots, a francophone-Canadian household assembling a New France collection, or a gift for someone who just crossed the ferry from Levis for the first time. TheMapVault carries several other Quebec City views, including City Plans from 1757 and 1798 and a later 1899 street-plan survey, along with this batch's own 1759 map of the Plains of Abraham siege; this 1744 Bellin plan is the earliest of that group, showing the fortified town at peace, more than a decade before war reached its walls. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.