Afrique

Large, steel-engraved atlas map of the African Continent detailing recently mapped areas, specifically around the Zambesi, Niger and Nile Rivers, and the European-colonised regions and trading ports - for example along the Ivory Coast in West Africa and Cape Colony in South Africa. Central Africa shows wide open spaces of unexplored and unmapped territory, left without annotation.




The incredibly detailed parts of the map show the developing road/overland route network (dashed lines), commercial trading ports along the coast, river systems and the topography is skillfully etched, which can be seen in areas such as the Atlas Mountains and the Drakensberg Range. The names of settlements are given sometimes with alternate spellings and there is the occasional annotation about the terrain, the deserts, the mountains and the river systems, and even the time it would take to traverse between two distances.



A small legend in the lower right corner of the map explains the colouring of the map illustrates the areas under colonial control: pink for England, yellow for Spain, blue for France, orange for Holland, dark green for Turkey, and light green for Portuguese.




In the east, confidently marked from Alexandria, Egypt running south into modern day Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, is the full course of the River Nile, whose source had only just been discovered in 1858 by John Hanning Speke. To the south of this, the unfinished coastline and hachuring to show the curious Sea of Uniamesi, an entirely hypothetical and short-lived amalgamation of the African Great Lakes proposed by German missionaries in the 1840s and 1850s. This area was traversed and mapped shortly after the publication of this map by European explorers such as Livingstone (in 1866), Burton (between 1856-60), Speke (between 1856-1859) and Stanley (during his search for the missing Dr. Livingstone in 1869-72).




The map has been engraved by Charles Dyonnet and the geography mapped by French geographer Auguste-Henri Dufour (1795-1865). Features original outline colour. (SL) [AFR5111]