The Londsdale copy of the most important printed atlas of the Americas of its time, containing foundation wall maps of the region by the greatest British cartographer of his generation. The atlas is accompanied by a lovely first edition set of the text of Thompson's translation and expansion of Alcedo's classic work on the Americas.
"Aaron Arrowsmith, Hydrographer to the King of England and Geographer to the Prince of Wales, was the most influential and espected map publisher of the first quarter of the nineteenth century.... His role in cartographic production was to gather the best information available from a wide variety of sources, weigh the relative merits of conflicting data, and compile from this the most accurate depiction possible of an area. Arrowsmith accomplished this synthesis better than any other commercial map maker of his day and, as a result, his maps were the most sought after and highly prized on three continents" (Martin and Martin).
Arrowsmith specialized in large multi-sheet maps. These were generally separately issued and are now very scarce. His five great wall maps of the Americas were particularly well received and became "foundation or prototype maps of the area and were extensively copied by other publishers" (Tooley). These five wall maps were of North America (first published in 1795), the United States (1796), the West Indies (1803), Mexico (1810), and South America (1810). They were generally republished many times, as new information became available. Thomas Jefferson considered the 1803 edition the best map of the continent in print at the time, and it was used extensively in planning Lewis and Clark's expedition (1805-06). Likewise, the 1814 edition of North America (offered here) was the first map to make use of Lewis and Clark's map of the same year, and the first to combine Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike's data onto one map.
The present atlas is an early version with the following maps:
1) A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America...A. Arrowsmith...January 1st 1795 Additions to 1811 Additions to June 1814.
2) A Map of the United States of America Drawn from a number of Critical Researches By A. Arrowsmith...Jan 1st 1796. Additions to 1815.
3) A New Map of Mexico and adjacent provinces compiled from original documents by A. Arrowsmith...5th October 1810. Additions to 1815.
4) Chart of the West Indies and Spanish Dominions in North America by A. Arrowsmith... 1803... Additions to 1815.
5) Outlines of the Physical and Political Divisions of South America: Delineated by A. Arrowsmith partly from scarce and original documents published before the year 1806 but principally from manuscript maps & surveys made between the years 1771 and 1806. Corrected from accurate astronomical observations to 1810...Published 4th January 1811... Additions to 1814.
Index to atlas mounted on front pastedown.