Mapa geográfico de América Meridional (Madrid, 1775) — the Spanish line that the world's atlases went on printing
In 1775 the royal geographer Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla issued at Madrid a large map of South America compiled, its own title says, from original maps and reports adjusted to astronomical observations. Its London reissue of 1799 called the original "un Mapa español mui raro", and the boundary engraved on it was still copied by Philadelphia and Paris publishers sixty years later as "the Cruz Cano line". The sources read are papers of a party to the dispute, and the claims say so.
Why this wins its question: English-language writing reaches Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, when it reaches him at all, as a footnote in the Essequibo dispute, and popular accounts repeat that his map was suppressed and later decided South American boundaries without citing a page for either statement. This object goes the other way: it quotes the engraved title that says how the map was compiled, the London reissue's own advertisement that the Madrid original was very rare, the river-by-river course of the engraved line, and three catalogue entries in which Philadelphia and Paris publishers of the 1830s are recorded as printing "the Cruz Cano line" — while stating in its own claims that no suppression order was read, that a rival British line ran in the facing plate of the same atlas, and that every source used belongs to one party in the dispute.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The map's standing among Spanish maps of the Guayana frontier is stated by George Lincoln Burr in the 1897 Report on Maps: "The earliest published Spanish map to treat this region with any minuteness of detail is the great map of South America by the royal geographer, Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, issued at Madrid in 1775." Burr adds his own limit in the next sentence — "What official sanction, if any, this map may have had I have not learned; but there can be no doubt that its information must have been drawn largely from official sources" — so the claim registered here is that the map was made by a royal geographer out of official material, not that it was promulgated as an act of state.
The sheet says how it was made. Marcus Baker's catalogue transcribes the title as it stands engraved: "Mapa | Geografico | de | America Meridional, | Dispuesto y Gravado | Por D. Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, Geogfo pensdo de S. M. | Individuo de la Rl Academia de Sn Fernando, y de la Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del Pais; | teniendo presentes Varios Mapas y noticias originales | con arreglo á Observaciones astronómicas, | Año de 1775." A pensioned geographer of the King, a member of the Academy of San Fernando and of the Basque Sociedad de Amigos del País, compiling from original maps and reports and correcting them against astronomical observations: the method is printed on the map, in the order the compiler thought it mattered.
Twenty-four years later the map was a rarity, and the evidence for that is the advertisement of the man who reissued it. Baker's catalogue records under Faden (William) a London publication of 1 January 1799, in six sheets each 24.5 by 26 inches, carrying this Nota: "Este Mapa de los Dominios Españoles y Portugueses en America Meridional, es una copia literal y exacta de un Mapa español mui raro; compuesto y grabado en Madrid, año 1775, de orden del Rey de España, por Dn. Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olemdilla, Geogfo Pensdo de S. M. C." Two things are on the record together: that the Madrid map was made by order of the King of Spain, and that by 1799 a London geographer to the King and to the Prince of Wales could describe it to buyers as very rare. What is not on the record in anything read for this object is a withdrawal order, a seizure of plates or any other act of suppression; the scarcity is evidence of restricted circulation and this object claims no more than that.
What Cruz Cano drew was not only geography but a frontier. Severo Mallet-Prevost describes it: "In 1775 this geographer published a large and detailed map of South America whereon he engraved a boundary, which, beginning at the mouth of the River Moruga, followed that river to its source, ran thence westerly to the source of the Pomeroon, thence southeasterly along the water parting separating the Pomeroon basin from the heads of small streams flowing southward to the Cuyuni River; continuing thence, the line ran to the junction of the Cuyuni and Mazaruni rivers; and from that point followed the west bank of the Essequibo River to the south." A line described river by river on a printed sheet is a different object from a claim in a chancery: it can be copied.
The same writer is careful about what the line meant, and the caution belongs beside the achievement. "Cruz Cano has left no written works to throw light upon his intentions", he writes; the boundary drawn around the Dutch posts "would seem to indicate that his intention was to mark the limits of actual Dutch possession"; and, in the reading of a Spaniard's mind that closes the section, "as a Spaniard, he looked upon Spain as the original discoverer of Guiana, and hence regarded the Dutch as intruders in that region. Any rights, therefore, which the Dutch might have acquired would, in Cruz Cano's eyes, have been in derogation of Spain's paramount title." This is the strongest counterpoint the sources supply — a royal geographer's line was drawn from a position of interest — and it is printed here with the reciprocal caution that its author was secretary to a commission with an interest of its own.
The line outlived the map. Mallet-Prevost passes from "Cruz Cano, who was followed by a host of map makers" to the next group of geographers, and Baker's catalogue shows what that meant in the trade: under Tanner (Henry S.), of Philadelphia, a South America "with improvements to 1829", entered under the Act of Congress in 1818 and reissued with improvements to 1833, is noted "Shows a modified form of the Cruz Cano line"; Tanner's "Venezuela, New Grenada & Equador", plate 32 of his New universal atlas, Philadelphia 1836, is noted "Shows the Cruz Cano line"; and Pierre Tardieu's Carte d'Amerique, Paris 1833, is noted "Shows the Cruz Cano line." A boundary engraved at Madrid in 1775 was still the drawn frontier in American and French commercial atlases nearly sixty years later.
It did not sweep the field, and the counter-evidence is on the same catalogue page. Tanner's own "South America" sheet, plate 31 of the same 1836 atlas whose plate 32 follows Cruz Cano, is noted "Shows the Arrowsmith-Schomburgk line" — the British-derived alternative. One publisher printed both lines in one atlas. Any account that has the Spanish line simply conquering nineteenth-century cartography is contradicted by two consecutive plates.
There is an irony in the afterlife that the 1897 report records without dwelling on it. Burr judges that the official map of Guayana prepared in 1796 by Lieutenant-General Francisco Requena, by royal order, showed "little information beyond that to be gained from Cruz Cano and Surville"; and he quotes the Dutch envoy Ruysch, writing from Amiens in December 1801 of "the maps which are now being engraved in London and will be ready next May", from which "the Spaniards would for the first time learn the nature and worth of the rivers lying just east of the Orinoco". Burr hedges the identification — "It was perhaps the belated sheets of this map" — and the confidence here is set accordingly; but on his reading the Spanish crown's own knowledge of its eastern frontier was coming back to it through a London engraving shop.
What this object does not claim, said plainly. Nothing read here dates or documents an order suppressing the map, and no claim above asserts one. Nothing read here measures the map's accuracy, in the interior or on the coast, against modern positions. Nothing read here concerns the use of the 1775 map in the boundary arbitrations between the American republics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a use often asserted in popular accounts, and no claim is made about it. And all three texts read — Burr's report, Mallet-Prevost's paper and Baker's catalogue — are papers of a commission appointed by the United States to establish a line claimed against Great Britain, so every judgement quoted above is a judgement made inside a live dispute. The Spanish archival record that would settle the printing history sits on hosts that do not answer from this container.