Author: Pinkerton

1818 Pinkerton Map of the Eastern Hemisphere (Asia , Africa , Europe , Australia)

A rare and important 1818 map of the Eastern Hemisphere by John Pinkerton. Depicts Asia, Europe, Africa and Australia. The routes of various important explores are noted, including Cook, Vancouver, Perouse, and the return route taken by Cook's ship, the Resolution, following his death in Hawaii. This map offers fairly accurate shorelines throughout. In Africa, the interior remains unexplored except for the Congo, the Cape Colony, the gold mining regions of Monomotapa, and Abyssinia. Similarly, the coasts of Australia are accurate but the interior is vague and unknown. In Asia there are several notations regarding unexplored territories in southwestern China and Central Asia. Far to the north, in the high Arctic, there is a partial land mass with the note Coast discovered by the Hunters employed by m. Liakhov. This land refers to the Lyakhov Islands, discovered in the 1770s by Russian Fur trader Ivan Lyakhov. These islands, part of New Siberia, were said to have such an abundance of fossilized mammoth ivory that many of the smaller islands were formed from it in their entirety. Lyakhov himself brought back 10,000 tons of Ivory on his first trip and subsequent traders are said to have brought back as much as 100,000 tons in the following 20 years. Drawn by L. Herbert and engraved by Samuel Neele under the direction of John Pinkerton. The map comes from the scarce American edition of Pinkerton’s Modern Atlas, published by Thomas Dobson & Co. of Philadelphia in 1818.

#19th_century, #africa, #asia, #australia, #europe, #oceania