The First Generally Accurate, English Map of the American Interior

SENEX, John. [London, c. 1719-21]

SENEX, John.  [London: c. 1719-21]  A MAP OF LOUISIANA AND OF THE RIVER MISSISSIPI By Iohn Senex.  19 x 22 inches.  Original outline color refreshed; mends in upper left and right margins, lightly age-toned, overall very good. 

                                       
The earliest, generally accurate glimpse to be found on an English map of the North American interior and of the Mississippi River and its watershed.  It was based on De l'Isle's foundational map of 1718 that was the first to accurately delineate the course of the Mississippi and some of its tributaries, to correctly position its mouth, and to name Texas (Tejas).  Also, the map’s delineation of large portion of the Missouri and other western rivers would suggest pathways for later explorations of the west.  The map’s extensive and fascinating notations are here all translated into English.  Also, importantly, Senex altered De l’Isle’s highly pro-French political geography, in which Florida and the Carolinas are shown as French possessions and those of the English are confined to slender coastal area.  In this regard, Senex’s and De l’Isle’s maps can be regarded as very early salvoes in the so-called War of Maps between England and France that would culminate in the French and Indian War. 

The Delisle and Senex maps were also the first to attempt to reconstruct the routes of early explorers: those of “De Soto in 1539-40 and his successor Moscoso in 1542, Cavelier in 1687, Tonty in 1702, and the then recent routes of Denis in 1713 and 1716" (Tooley).  Annotations on the map describe settlements and the Spanish trade with the Indians.  Many Indian villages are shown, along with the Promiscuous Nations and Nations Destroyed.  "Chicagou" appears on Lake Michigan. Many early mines and forts are noted.  Oddly, south Florida is depicted as an archipelago, indicative of the long regression in the mapping of that area.

John Senex (1678-1740) was one of the foremost mapmakers in England in the early eighteenth century. He was also a surveyor, globemaker, and geographer. As a young man, he was apprenticed to Robert Clavell, a bookseller. He worked with several mapmakers over the course of his career, including Jeremiah Seller and Charles Price. In 1728, Senex was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, a rarity for mapmakers, reflecting his career-long work as engraver for the Society and as the publisher of maps by Edmund Halley, among other Society luminaries. He is best known for his English Atlas (1714), which remained in print until the 1760s. After his death in 1740 his widow, Mary, carried on the business until 1755. Thereafter, his stock was acquired by William Herbert and Robert Sayer (maps) and James Ferguson (globes).

The map was dedicated to William Law, an odd choice, as he was a Christian mystic and author on ethics at Cambridge.  The dedication is framed by a large, ornamental cartouche illustrating a female angel blowing a horn, two putti with cornucopias (one with fruit, the other with money), an old man supporting a gushing urn (symbolizing the source of the Mississippi), and two putti laboring in mines.

Tooley, "French Mapping of the Americas" [MCS 33] 43); Cumming 182; Lowery 297; Martin & Martin 19 (citing the De'Isle's 1718 original); Phillips, Atlases 563; Schwartz & Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America p. 141; Wheat, Transmississippi West 100 (giving date 1719.

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