The island that was not there
For more than a century, many printed maps showed California as a long island, cut off from North America by a narrow sea. Every map in this collection draws it that way: Hondius’s Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis of 1641; the world map of 1645 that labels it Californie Isle long 1700 lieues; Sanson’s sheets of 1651, 1652, 1680 and 1684, the last with the strait lettered Mare Vermiglio; John Seller’s world map of about 1675; Duval’s chart of commerce of 1677; Morden and Berry’s map of about 1690, with Nova Albion and Drake’s harbour on the island’s north; De la Feuille’s Mapemonde of 1708; Renard’s polar planisphere of 1715; and Seutter’s Diversi Globi Terr-Aquei of 1740.
Seutter’s is the late one: by 1740 the Jesuit Eusebio Kino had been dead for nearly thirty years, and he had spent his last years proving on foot that California is joined to the continent. For contrast, Sanson’s world map of about 1696 draws California as a peninsula, where Jaillot’s map of 1694 still shows an island.
What you get
Each map comes as six downloads — the full sheet, the sheet trimmed to its border and four standard crops — each a ZIP with a 300 dpi JPEG and the restoration passport. Every sheet is a scan of a real original in a named archive; nothing is redrawn.