An exceptionally stunning example of Antonio Zatta's 1776 map of the northwestern parts of America and the northeastern parts of Asia.  This map is one of the most sought after and decorative 18th century pre-Cook maps of the Pacific Northwest ever issued.  Covers the region from the Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes westward as far as Siberia and Japan, north well into the Arctic, and southwards as far as Cabo San Lucas in Baja California.  In this stunning map, Zatta, combining almost every 17th and 18th century myth and fact of the American west into a single map, offers up a veritable smorgasbord of speculative geography.   The idea of a Northwest Passage linking the Hudson Bay to the Pacific is central to this map.  In this Zatta embraces the speculative geography advocated by Nicholas De L'Isle and Phillipe Bauche.  De L'Isle and Bauche were supporters of the  Northwest Passage theory associated with the apocryphal voyage of the 17th century Admiral de Fonte.   The De Fonte legend first appeared in a 1706 English publication entitled “Memoirs of the Curious”.  This short-lived magazine published a previously unknown account by a supposed Spanish Admiral named Bartholomew de Fonte.   De Fonte is said to have sailed up the Pacific coast of North America in 1640.   On this voyage he apparently discovered a series of gigantic lakes, seas, and rivers heading eastward from the Pacific towards Hudson Bay. The De Fonte story relates how, on one of these great inland lakes, he met with a westward bound ship from Boston that must to have come through the Northwest Passage.  Today, based upon inaccuracies and falsities, we know the entire De Fonte article to have been a fabrication, however, it set 18th century afire with speculation that a Northwest Passage must indeed exist.  Even such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin wrote long defenses of De Fonte.  Our map details De Fonte's route from the Straight of Anian eastward past Lake Velasco, Lake Bello and the Lac de Fonte into another great lake, the Michinipi and hence the Hudson Bay.   On the way, De Fonte passes both the Straights of Anian, presumably a misinterpretation of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and further on,  the Kingdom of Anian.  Anian or Anian Regnum appeared on maps from the 16th through the early 19th centuries.  The idea of Anian was derived from Rasmusio's 1559 edition of Marco Polo's travels which describes Ania or Anan as a Chinese province accessed via a watery straight.  Some speculate that this may have referred to the New World, though Polo himself places it somewhere near India.  Anian's, first cartographic appearance was only a few years later in a 1562 map by Giacomo Gastaldi.  Gastaldi seems to be the man responsible for Anian's presence in the New World.  The idea was embraced by other cartographers and intellectuals of the period.     John Donne sums the idea up in a poem, “Anyan if I go west by the North-West passage.”  Both the Kingdom of Anian and the Straight of Anian on our Zatta map.   Just south of the Strait of Anian, Zatta includes Fou-Sang which he describes as a Chinese Colony.   Fusang of Fousang is a region first documented by the Chinese Buddhist missionary Hui  Shen in the 5th century.  Hui  Shen describes a land some 20,000 Chinese Li (c. 8000 km) east  of the China coast.  Fousang is described in considerable detail in the 7th century  Book of Liang  by Yao Silian.  There are also accounts that the land was settled c. 220 BC by a  Chinese Emperor of the Han Dynasty.   In later days Fusang was commonly used in Chinese poetry to designate Japan, however earlier references keep it distinct.  In any case, Hui Shen's description of Fusang with regard to distance and geography, corresponds more with the coastlands of North America than with Japan. The French historian Joseph de Guignes in  his 1761article Le Fou-Sang des Chinois est-il l'Amérique?  promoted this idea.
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1776 (dated)
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