AMERICÆ SEPTENTRIONALIS PARS (Jacobsz, 1621).
BRIGGS IN PURCHAS, 1625.
It will be observed that Champlain had reached, in his plotting of the country east of the Penobscot, something more than tolerable accuracy. Farther west, proportions and relations were all wrong. The country between the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine is much too narrow. The Penobscot is made almost to unite with the more northern river; and this error is perpetuated in the Dutch maps published by Blaeu, and Covens and Mortier many years later. The placing of Lake Champlain within a short distance of Casco Bay was another error that the later Dutch cartographers adopted in one form or another. Lake Ontario is not greatly misshapen; but Erie is stretched into a strait, while beyond a distorted Huron a “grand lac” is so placed as to leave a doubt if Superior or Michigan was intended.
SPEED, 1626.
Notwithstanding this pronounced belief in large inland seas, and the publication of the belief, the notion did not make converts in every direction. Two years later (1634) a map of Petrus Kærius, and even his other map, which appeared in Speed’s Prospect of the most famous Parts of the World, published in London, gave no intimation of Champlain’s results. The same backwardness of knowledge or apprehension is apparent in the map which accompanies the Amsterdam edition of Linschoten in 1644; in that of the world, dated 1651, which appeared in Speed’s 1676 edition; in the map in Petavius’s History of the World, London, 1659; and in two maps of N. I. Visscher, both dated 1652, which make the St. Lawrence River rise in the neighborhood of the Colorado. We might not expect the Zee-Atlas of Van Loon to give signs of the inland lakes; but it is strange that the map “Americæ nova descriptio,” ignoring the great interior waters, was used in editions of Heylin’s Cosmographie, in London, from 1669 to 1677.
NOVA FRANCIA ET REGIONES ADJACENTES
(De Laet).