At Paris, in November, 1720, De Beauvilliers took the observations of La Harpe and drafted a Carte nouvelle de la parte de l’ouest de la province de la Louisiane.[138]
The map of Coxe’s Carolana, 1722, is given in fac-simile on an earlier page (ante, p. 70).
The Memoirs of John Ker of Kersland (London, 1726) contain a “new map of Louisiana, and the river Mississipi.”[139]
The map in La Potherie’s Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris, 1722, vol. ii.), called “Carte généralle de la Nouvelle France,” retains the misplacement of the mouths of the Mississippi, as La Salle had conceived them to be on the western shore of the gulf, giving the name “Baye de Spiritu Sancto” to an inlet more nearly in the true position of its mouths.
Thomassy[140] points out that William Darby, in his Geographical Description of Louisiana (2d ed. 1817), in reproducing Jean Baptiste Homann’s map of Louisiana, published at Nuremberg as the earliest of the country which he could find, was unfortunate in accepting for such purpose a mere perversion of the earlier and original French maps. Homann, moreover, was one of those geographers of easy conscience, who never or seldom date a map, and the German cartographer seems in this instance to have done little more than reëngrave the map which accompanied the Paris publication of Joutel’s Journal historique, in 1713. Homann’s map, called Amplisimæ regionis Mississipi seu Provinciæ Ludovicianæ a Hennepin detectæ anno 1687, was published not far from 1730, and extending so as to include Acadia, Lake Superior, and Texas, defines the respective bounds of the English, French, and Spanish possessions.[141]
When Moll published his New Survey of the Globe, in 1729, he included in it (no. 27) a map of New France and Louisiana, showing how they hemmed in the English colonies.
Henry Popple’s Map of the British Empire in America, with the French and Spanish Settlements adjacent thereto, was issued in London in twenty sheets, under the patronage of the Lords of Trade, in 1732; and reissued in 1733 and 1740.[142] A reproduction was published at Amsterdam, about 1737, by Covens and Mortier. Popple’s map was for the Mississippi valley, in large part based on Delisle’s map of 1718.
Jean Baptiste D’Anville was in the early prime of his activity when the Delisles passed off the stage, having been born in 1697, and a long life was before him, for he did not die till 1782, having gained the name of being the first to raise geography to the dignity of an exact science.[143] He had an instinct for physical geography, and gained credit for his critical discrimination between conflicting reports, which final surveys verified. His principal Carte de la Louisiane was issued as “Dressée en 1732; publiée en 1752.”[144] His map of Amérique Septentrionale usually bears date 1746-48; and a new draft of it, with improvements, was published at Nuremberg in 1756.
A map made by Dumont de Montigny about 1740, Carte de la province de la Louisiane, autrefois le Mississipi, preserved in the Dépôt de la Marine at Paris, is said by Thomassy (p. 217) to be more valuable for its historical legends than for its geography.
In 1744 the maps of Nicolas Bellin were attached to the Nouvelle France of Charlevoix, and they include, beside the map of North America, a Carte de la Louisiane, Cours du Mississipi, et pais voisins.[145] Bellin’s Carte des embouchures du fleuve Saint-Louis (1744) is based on a draft by Buache (1732), following an original manuscript (1731) preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine, in Paris.