In 1708 , a short-lived British magazine called 'Memoirs for the Curious' published what purported to be a newly discovered account of a voyage into the northern Pacific Ocean by a Spanish admiral named Bartholomew de Fonte in 1640. In sailing north along the caost, de Fonte was said to have entered a strait which led to a great inland sea and met a ship from Boston which had supposedely arrived through a Northwest Passage. Inconsistencies in this story plus modern geography show that this voyage was ficticious. Nevertheless, this account was widely read and was to have an effect on later explorers and mapmakers.
The chief culprit responsible for the introduction of the de Fonte account to the maps of the nortwest coast of North America was the French geographer Joseph-Nicolas de L'Isle, the yonger brother of the more famous French mapmaker Guillaume de L'Isle. Joseph-Nicolas spent twenty-one years at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, and when he retured to Paris to join his brother-in-law Phillipe Buache to produce maps, he brought with him some maps he had acquired from the Academy. In 1752 he published a map which showed previously unknown discoveries by the Russians. However, on the northwest coast of America he constructed an elaborate speculative map using the de Fonte account as its basis. Changed and futher elaborated upon by others, most notably and spectacularly by Robert de Vaugondy, who in 1755 published another elaboration (this map, shown above) in Denis Diderot's 'Enclyclopedié, ou Dictionnaire Raisonne de Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers'. Another map published in the Encyclopedié was Philippe Buache's Carte des Nouvelles Découvertes, a likewise fictitious and fantastic map of the northwest. (See Buache's map here).
These maps demonstrate the extent to which total fabrication can become imbedded in knowledge, for the Encyclopedié was perhaps the most massive gathering of knowledge attempted in the eighteenth century, and was its most succesful publishing venture. It had twenty-eight volumes, later expanded to thirty-five, with 8,000 articles and 3,000 plates, and represtend the work of the leading French thinkers of the day, including for example, Voltaire, Rousseau, Turgot, d'Holbach and Quesnay. It was not only a comprehensive view of the knowledge of the day but also a manifesto of the Enlightenment, so much so that in 1759 it was banned by the King and the Church.
The maps show the supposed discoveries of Admiral de Fonte in the myriad of archipelagos and channels striking east towards Hudson's Bay. They also show the Mer l'Ouest (Sea of the West) supposedly discovered by Juan de Fuca in 1592. Kamchatka and the eastern coast of Siberia are shown relatively accurately, as is the track of Alexei Chirikov, who, with VItus Bering, discovered the northwestern coast for Russia in 1741. The reason for this relatively accurate track is that de L'Isle's brother-in-law, Louis de L'Isle de la Croyère, sailed with Chirikov as astronomer. Their landfall, however, was only a point, clearly easy to misinterpret in the context of a whole coastline.
James Cook's maps still left gaps in the which the theoretical geographers coud run riot, and it took the surveys of George Vancouver finally to put an end to this cartographic nonsense.
Vaugondy made several versions of this map over several years and for the expanding number of volumes for the Encylcopedié. See a later version here where he mentions that the De Fonte story might not be true after all, and another here where he drops the De Fonte "discoveries" altogether. |
