Carte de la mer Meridional Contenant un partie des Costes de l´Afrique et de L´Amerique meridionale..

Title

Carte de la mer Meridional Contenant un partie des Costes de l´Afrique et de L´Amerique meridionale..

Description

Map shows the Atlantic with the coast of South America and the caost of the southern part of Africa.

ca. 1705

Artist

Mortier (1661-1711)

Pieter Mortier (1661–1711) was an 18th-century mapmaker and engraver from the Northern Netherlands. Mortier had a partnership with Johannes Covens I (1697-1774) and founded the map publishing company Covens & Mortier (1721-1866). Mortier, being French himself, had easy access to French cartographers such as De L'Isle, Sanson, Jaillot, de Fer and De Wit. Consequently, much of Mortier's business was built upon leveraging the sophisticated Dutch printing establishment to issue embellished high quality editions of previously contemporary French maps. In the greater context of global cartography, this was a significant advantage as most Dutch map publishes had, at this point, fallen into the miasma of reprinting their own outdated works. By contrast, the cartographers of France were producing the most accurate and up to date charts anywhere. Mortier's cartographic work culminated in the magnificent nautical atlas, Le Neptune Francois. Upon Pierre's death in 1711 this business was inherited by his widow. In 1721 his son Cornelius Mortier took over the day to day operation of the firm. Cornelius partnered with his brother-in-law Jean Covens to form one of history's great cartographic partnerships - Covens and Mortier - which continued to publish maps and atlases until about 1866.

Historical Description

For a long time in human history, the Atlantic was the great water that separated the "Old World" from the "New World". With an area of ​​about 106 million square kilometers, the Atlantic covers about a fifth of the earth's surface. The extent of the Atlantic Ocean is enormous, which is why a distinction is made between the North and South Atlantic. In the west it touches the two American continents and in the east Europe and Africa hold it back. After the first crossing of Christopher Columbus (1492), there were regular ocean crossings only in the 19th century. The people in Europe wanted to leave the poor conditions of that time behind and start over in the burgeoning America. There were real waves of emigration. Is Columbus the Discoverer of America? This view is controversial. The Vikings, who are said to have stranded on the coasts of Canada around the year 1000 after an odyssey across the Atlantic, keep coming up. Columbus may have known about it and could see their maps. The Chinese navigator Zheng He is often named as the discoverer of America. At the beginning of 2006, a Chinese collector found a map from 1413, on which America, Asia and Europe are already drawn. But whether this card is real and thus the Chinese are the true discoverers of the "New World", nobody really knows. The first transatlantic steamer set sail from Bremerhaven on July 2, 1847. His destination was the port of New York. The people took extreme hardship on such crossings, because the overcrowded decks were anything but comfortable.