KURIL ISLANDS RUSSIA 1758 JACQUES NICOLAS BELLIN ANTIQUE COPPER ENGRAVED MAP

Description

KURIL ISLANDS RUSSIA 1758 JACQUES NICOLAS BELLIN ANTIQUE COPPER ENGRAVED MAP
KURIL ISLANDS RUSSIA 1758 JACQUES NICOLAS BELLIN ANTIQUE COPPER ENGRAVED MAP
Description
Carte des Isles Kuriles d'après la Carte Russe Dreßée et Gravée par Laurent.
Description:
Striking and highly detailed
fine unusual 1758 Jacques-Nicolas Bellin's copper engraved map of the Kuril Islands, Russia
. Include also a bit of northern Japan. The map is filled with excellent detail on cities, towns, villages, rivers, lakes, reliefs and islands. The map is decorated by a landscape-style title cartouche.
The Kuril Islands or Kurile Islands is a Russian-controlled volcanic archipelago part of the country's far eastern Sakhalin Oblast. It stretches approximately 1,300 km (810 mi) northeast from Hokkaido of Japan to Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the north Pacific Ocean. There are 56 islands and many minor rocks. The Kuril Islands consist of the Greater Kuril Chain and the Lesser Kuril Chain. They cover an area of around 10,503.2 square kilometres (4,055.3 sq mi),
The name Kuril originates from the autonym of the aboriginal Ainu, the islands' original inhabitants: kur, meaning "man". It may also be related to names for other islands that have traditionally been inhabited by the Ainu people, such as Kuyi or Kuye for Sakhalin and Kai for Hokkaidō. In Japanese, the Kuril Islands are known as the Chishima Islands (Kanji:
千島列島
Chishima Rettō, literally: Thousand Islands Archipelago), also known as the Kuriru Islands (Katakana:
クリル列島
Kuriru Rettō, literally, Kuril Archipelago). Once the Russians reached the islands in the 18th century they found a pseudo-etymology from Russian kurit' (курить – "to smoke") due to the continual fumes and steam above the islands from volcanoes.
The Ainu people inhabited the Kuril Islands from early times, although few records predate the 17th century. The Japanese administration first took nominal control of the islands during the Edo period (1603-1868) in the form of claims by the Matsumae clan. It is claimed that the Japanese knew of the northern islands 370 years ago. The Shōhō Era Map of Japan (Shōhō kuni ezu (
正保国絵図
)), a map of Japan made by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1644, shows 39 large and small islands northeast of Hokkaido's Shiretoko Peninsula and Cape Nosappu. A Dutch expedition under Maarten Gerritsz Vries explored the islands in 1643. Russian popular legend has Fedot Alekseyevich Popov sailing into the area c.
1649. Russian Cossacks landed on Shumshu in 1711.
The Ainu people seem to have used the name Choka for Paramushir and its neighbouring islands. Then Rakkoshima ("sea-otter isles") extended from Onnekotan to Simushir. Urup, Iturup and Kunashir are the three southern islands.
In 1811 the Golovnin Incident occurred: retainers of the Nambu clan captured the Russian captain Vasily Golovnin and his crew - who had stopped at Kunashir during their hydrographic survey - and sent them to the Matsumae authorities. Because Petr Rikord, the captain of a Russian vessel, also captured a Japanese trader, Takadaya Kahei, near Kunashir in 1812, Japan and Russia entered into negotiations to establish the border between the two countries.
American whaleships caught right whales off the islands between 1847 and 1892. Three of the ships were wrecked on the islands: two on Urup in 1855 and one on Makanrushi in 1856. In September 1892, north of Kunashir Island, a Russian schooner seized the bark Cape Horn Pigeon, of New Bedford and escorted it to Vladivostok, where it was detained for nearly two week
.
This map has been published in the First French edition of Abbè Presvost’s “Histoire Générale des Voyages”, published by Didot at Paris, 1746-1758
.
Source:
The Histoire Géneral des Voyages was a monumental eighteenth century general history divided according to geographic region. The original volumes were written by Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles, a French author, novelist, theologian, natural historian, and a priest of the Jesuit and Benedictine orders, but continued by numerous other authors after Prévost's death. The earliest books mostly deal with the Far East and South-East Asia, providing a general history of their regions, kingdoms, customs, culture, costumes, natural phenomena and religious beliefs. Much of Prévost's information is derived from the reports of Jesuit missionaries, Portuguese merchants, and famous explorers, from Marco Polo to Sir Francis Drake. Although written in French, the popularity of the Histoire among Dutch audiences meant that many of the illustrative plates and maps published to accompany the work were either re-engraved or subtitled in Dutch by the engraver Jakob van der Schley. Prévost himself had travelled widely throughout the Netherlands, launching his literary career in Amsterdam and the Hague after fleeing the Benedictines in France. Prevost's work on China, and indeed many of van der Schley's plates, owe a great debt to Johan Nieuhoff (1618-1672) , a Dutch traveller who explored much of China, India, and Brazil while in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. Nieuhoff wrote extensively, with a particular focus on China, for his memoirs, and his numerous drawings of Chinese places and people were much copied by later engravers for numerous works of Chinese interest. Nieuhoff's own book became a major source of inspiration for eighteenth century chinoiserie, and are amongst the first western illustrations to depict the Chinese people in a manner which was based upon personal observation rather than the tradition of oriental fantasy
.
Date:
1758 ( undated )
Dimension:
Paper size approx.:
cm
32,4 x 28,2
Condition:
Very strong and dark impression on good paper. Paper with chains. Map uncolored. Wide margin to the top. Good lower margin. Wide right lateral margin. Quite left lateral margin, partially missing to the lower side. Corners partially missing. Small foxing and browning. Map folded. Conditions are as you can see in the images
.
Mapmaker:
Jacques-Nicolas Bellin (1703 - March 21, 1772) was one of the most important cartographers of the 18th century. With a career spanning some 50 years, Bellin is best understood as geographe de cabinet and transitional mapmaker spanning the gap between 18th and early-19th century cartographic styles. His long career as Hydrographer and Ingénieur Hydrographe at the French Dépôt des cartes et plans de la Marine resulted in hundreds of high quality nautical charts of practically everywhere in the world. A true child of the Enlightenment Era, Bellin's work focuses on function and accuracy tending in the process to be less decorative than the earlier 17th and 18th century cartographic work. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bellin was always careful to cite his references and his scholarly corpus consists of over 1400 articles on geography prepared for Diderot's Encyclopedie. Bellin, despite his extraordinary success, may not have enjoyed his work, which is described as "long, unpleasant, and hard." In addition to numerous maps and charts published during his lifetime, many of Bellin's maps were updated (or not) and published posthumously. He was succeeded as Ingénieur Hydrographe by his student, also a prolific and influential cartographer, Rigobert Bonne.
Writer:
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles (1 April 1697 – 25 November 1763), usually known simply as the Abbé Prévost, was a French author and novelist.
He was born at Hesdin, Artois, and first appears with the full name of Prévost d'Exiles, in a letter to the booksellers of Amsterdam in 1731. His father, Lievin Prévost, was a lawyer, and several members of the family had embraced the ecclesiastical estate. Prévost was educated at the Jesuit school of Hesdin, and in 1713 became a novice of the order in Paris, pursuing his studies at the same time at the college in La Flèche.
At the end of 1716 he left the Jesuits to join the army, but soon tired of military life, and returned to Paris in 1719, apparently with the idea of resuming his novitiate. He is said to have travelled in the Netherlands about this time; in any case he returned to the army, this time with a commission. Some biographers have assumed that he suffered some of the misfortunes assigned to his hero Des Grieux. Whatever the truth, he joined the learned community of the Benedictines of St Maur, with whom he found refuge, he himself says, after the unlucky termination of a love affair. He took his vows at Jumièges in 1721 after a year's novitiate, and in 1726 took priest's orders at St Germer de Flaix. He spent seven years in various houses of the order, teaching, preaching and studying. In 1728 he was sent to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, where he contributed to the Gallia Christiana, a work of historiographic documentation undertaken communally by the monks in continuation of the works of Denys de Sainte-Marthe, who had been a member of their order. His restless spirit made him seek from the Pope a transfer to the easier rule of Cluny; but he left the abbey without leave (1728), and, learning that his superiors had obtained a lettre de cachet against him, fled to England.
In London he acquired a wide knowledge of English history and literature, as can be seen in his writings. Before leaving the Benedictines Prévost had begun perhaps his most famous novel, Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité qui s’est retiré du monde, the first four volumes of which were published in Paris in 1728, and two years later at Amsterdam. In 1729 he left England for the Netherlands, where he began to publish (Utrecht, 1731) a novel, the material of which, at least, had been gathered in London Le Philosophe anglais, ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland, fils naturel de Cromwell, écrite par lui-même, et traduite de l'anglais (Paris 1731-1739, 8 vols., but most of the existing sets are partly Paris and partly Utrecht). A spurious fifth volume (Utrecht, 1734) contained attacks on the Jesuits, and an English translation of the whole appeared in 1734.
Meanwhile, during his residence at the Hague, he engaged on a translation of De Thou's Historia, and, relying on the popularity of his first book, published at Amsterdam a Suite in three volumes, forming volumes v, vi, and vii of the original Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité. The seventh volume contained the famous Manon Lescaut, separately published in Paris in 1731 as Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut. The book was eagerly read, chiefly in pirated copies, being forbidden in France. In 1733 he left the Hague for London in company of a lady whose character, according to Prévost's enemies, was doubtful. In London he edited a weekly gazette on the model of Joseph Addison's Spectator, Le Pour et contre, which h
e continued to produce in collaboration with the playwright Charles-Hugues Le Febvre de Saint-Marc, with short intervals, until 1740.
In the autumn of 1734 Prévost was reconciled with the Benedictines, and, returning to France, was received in the Benedictine monastery of La Croix-Saint-Leufroy in the diocese of Évreux to pass through a new, though brief, novitiate. In 1735 he was dispensed from residence in a monastery by becoming almoner to the Prince de Conti, and in 1754 obtained the priory of St Georges de Gesnes. He continued to produce novels and translations from the English, and, with the exception of a brief exile (1741–1742) spent in Brussels and Frankfurt, he resided for the most part at Chantilly until his death, which took place suddenly while he was walking in the neighbouring woods. The cause of his death, the rupture of an aneurysm, is all that is definitely known. Stories of crime and disaster were related of Prévost by his enemies, and diligently repeated, but appear to be apocryphal.
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