A Map of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands

The story

Mark Catesby was his own cartographer as well as his own naturalist — this hand-colored map, bound into The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, charts the entire coastal region he explored across roughly a decade of fieldwork, from the Chesapeake down through Florida and out through the Bahamas and Cuba. Rivers, colonial settlements, and the treacherous shoal-strewn passage of the Bahama Channel are rendered with a practical sailor's-eye precision quite different from the allegorical grandeur of contemporary European atlas maps, an ornate cartouche of shells and coral the only real decorative flourish. What to notice: this map is less a work of art than a field record — the same coastline Catesby walked, sailed, and sketched specimens along, making it a genuine companion piece to every bird and plant plate elsewhere in his book, not a separately commissioned decoration.