Carte de L’Ocean Meridional

Title

Carte de L’Ocean Meridional

Description

Nautical chart of the southern Atlantic Ocean with the east coast of South America, the west coast of Africa, a compass rose and a title cartouche

c. 1746

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

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.