| Summary: | Single sheet (ca. 25 x 18 inches). Fine engraved map of the northern Pacific Ocean with original hand-colour in outline and in part, the title within an elaborate cartouche top centre with text panels on either side. First edition. This is a landmark map in the history of northwestern cartography, charting the common boundaries of North America, Asia and the fictitious "Mer ou Baye de l'Ouest." French cartographer Philippe Buache's map illustrated the recent findings of explorers Aleksey Chirikov and Vitus Bering, a legendary pair of adventurers who led a Russian-sponsored expedition to Northwest America. (Chirikov is recognized as the first European to land on the northwestern coast of North America.) The map identifies the Russian discoveries in 1723, 1732 and 1741, Behring's tracks from his first and second voyages and the De L'Isle de la Croyere with Captain Tchirikow in 1741. The map also shows the track of de Frondt's voyage of 1709 and the route of the Manilla Galleons in 1743 and Water of Wager, discovered in 1746 and 1747. While the map integrates the latest Russian explorations, it also re-invigorates the mythical Sea of the West, which had first appeared on charts published by Johann Baptiste Nolin in circa 1700, but which had quickly disappeared and had not been integrated into modern maps until Philippe Buache began to add the information again in the middle of the 18th Century. Though both De Fuca's and De Fonte's reports turned out to be nothing more than over-imaginative speculation, several members of the French cartographical school long supported the explorers' theoretical claims. Such cartographers included, most notably, Buache himself and his second brother-in-law, Guillame Delisle. Thus, this map constitutes an extraordinarily important document in the history of Northwestern geography in general and Alaska in particular. It also provides false evidence of a passage that only ever existed in legend. Seymour I. Schwartz & Ralph E. Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America (New York, 1980), ...
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