Quebec City Map 1757 City Plan - Quebec City, Basse-Ville, Haute-Ville

Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Official Hydrographer to the French King, engraved this plan of the city of Quebec, published in Paris in 1757, focusing closely on the fortifications that made Quebec the most heavily defended city in New France. The plan first appeared in Bellin's Petit Atlas Maritime, but its origins trace back to material originally prepared for Pierre Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix's Histoire et Description Generale de la Nouvelle France, an account the Jesuit scholar produced after the Duke of Orleans sent him to America in 1720 to record events in New France and Louisiana and scout a route to the Pacific. Charlevoix gathered his geographic information directly from fur traders in Quebec before travelling the Great Lakes and Mississippi himself, and Bellin's engraving translated that first-hand colonial knowledge into a standard published reference on the city. Extensively detailed around the Basse-Ville district, the plan includes a numbered key to major buildings and gardens, issued at the outset of the French and Indian War that would, within two years, bring a British siege to the walls it depicts.

Basse-Ville, the Lower Town clustered along the narrow riverbank below Quebec's great cliff, receives the plan's closest attention, its buildings and gardens individually keyed and numbered. Haute-Ville, the Upper Town atop Cape Diamond where the city's main fortifications and government buildings stood, forms the natural counterpart the plan's fortification focus is built around, even where the key concentrates more heavily on the lower district. The St. Lawrence River fronts the whole plan, the waterway whose defence the entire fortified city existed to secure. Together these features capture a capital whose entire layout, split between a working lower harbour and a fortified upper town, was organized around military necessity as much as commerce.

This fortification plan suits a collector of French colonial military cartography specifically, or anyone with an interest in Charlevoix's original exploration of New France that first supplied the geographic detail Bellin later engraved. The store also carries Quebec City mapped again in 1798 by Stockdale, after the British conquest had reshaped the city's administration, and once more around 1899 by Cram in a plain commercial street plan; this 1757 Bellin edition is the earliest of the three and the only one drawn while Quebec was still the fortified capital of New France rather than a British colonial city. It's offered unframed and available across a full range of sizes, from a compact print to a large-format statement piece.