North America & South America; Antique Map by Mannert; 1796

A museum-grade reproduction of a 1796 map of the North and South America by C. Mannert. Depicts the Americas shortly following the close of the American Revolutionary War in 1783. The whole is color coded according to political conventions, with British controlled territories in Red, Spanish dominions in yellow, French in green, and the fledgling United States in blue-green. Mountains and other topographical features are rendered by hachure, making Mannert's 1796 map one of the first to employ this mapping convention. Throughout, Mannert has dedicated significant attention to the naming of various American Indian nations including the Sioux, Otter, Sack, Creek (Crik), Miami, Paducah, Arkansas, and others. This map's most interesting element is most likely it's treatment of the western parts of North America.At the extreme west the discoveries of Captain Cook are evident in the well defined coastlines as far north as Alaska. Here the Bering Strait has been renamed Cook's Strasse. Drakes harbor, the mysterious location where Sir Frances Drake repaired his ships (and claimed New Albion for England) on his historic circumnavigation, is here identified with San Francisco Bay. Further inland the cartography becomes increasingly vague with places like Teguayo, Quivara, and Cenis appearing throughout. Teguayo, a semi-mythical kingdom of gold and wealth imagined by the nefarious Spanish count and governor of New Mexico Pansilo de Navarez, is attached to an embryonic Great Salt Lake - no doubt drawn and adapted from Escalante's journals. Further north, near today's U.S.this one much larger and labeled.At the opposite extreme of this map South America appears well mapped with significant inland detail throughout.