Carte reduite de…Mer du Sud…

Title

Carte reduite de…Mer du Sud…

Description

Decorative map of the Pacific ocean with North-,Middle- and Southamerica, Japan, Southeast Asia and Australia. The eastern coast of Australia still not explored.

dated 1742

Artist

Maurepas, Comte de (1701-1781)

Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas ( 1701 – 1781) was a French statesman and Count of Maurepas. Skilled in military and naval strategy, Maurepas enabled the French navy to regain previously lost prestige and France was once again recognized as a maritime power. One way that he improved the French reputation was by focusing on the defense of France's sprawling empire in the New World, especially in the 1730s and 1740s

Historical Description

The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceanic divisions. Though the peoples of Asia and Oceania have traveled the Pacific Ocean since prehistoric times, the eastern Pacific was first sighted by Europeans in the early 16th century when Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and discovered the great "southern sea" which he named Mar del Sur (in Spanish). In 1519, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed the Pacific East to West on a Spanish expedition to the Spice Islands that would eventually result in the first world circumnavigation. Magellan called the ocean Pacífico (or "Pacific" meaning, "peaceful") because, after sailing through the stormy seas off Cape Horn, the expedition found calm waters. The ocean was often called the Sea of Magellan in his honor until the eighteenth century.