Plan de Kroonstad et la Passe pour aller a Petersburg

Title

Plan de Kroonstad et la Passe pour aller a Petersburg

Description

Map showing Kronstadt and its surroundings, with a title cartouche and mileage indicators.

ca. 1760

Artist

Bellin (1703-1772)

Jacques-Nicolas Bellin (1703 Paris -1772 Versailles) was a French cartographer, engineer-geographer, marine hydrographer. As a contributor to the Encyclopédie, he wrote more than a thousand articles on maritime topics. As a cartographer, Bellin distinguished himself primarily in the field of sea cartography. From 1721 he worked for the Dépot des Cartes et Plans de la Marine, from 1741 until his death as an engineer-hydrograph of the Navy. In 1753 his atlas Neptune français, which covered all the coasts of France, was published, and in 1756 the hydrography françoise covering all seas of the earth. In 1764 the five-volume Petit Atlas maritime was published, which Bellin prepared on the orders of the Minister of the Navy, Choiseul. In addition, he wrote a number of geographical works and with Nouvelle méthode pour apprendre la geographie (1769) a geographic textbook for teaching. His maps illustrated, among other things, Bougainville's work Voyage autour du monde, published in 1771. As a co-author of the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, Bellin wrote more than a thousand articles in the field of shipping and navy.

Historical Description

Kronstadt, a city and former fortress on the Baltic Sea island of Kotlin off Saint Petersburg in Russia. Tsar Peter I founded the city in 1703 as a naval base on the Baltic Sea. The first completed fortification was Kronschlot. Kronstadt defended the access to the then Russian capital from the Baltic Sea and was therefore equipped with fortifications and coastal batteries only in the north, west and south. In 1803 the first Russian circumnavigation of the world started from Kronstadt under Captain Adam Johann von Krusenstern. Until the First World War, the Kronstadt port was one of the main ports for timber export from the Russian Empire.