A spectacular large-format chart of Iceland and the surrounding waters, prepared by the French hydrographic office expressly “for use in the whale fishery.”

Bellin’s chart appeared at a moment when the French government was attempting to rebuild its northern fisheries after the losses of the Seven Years’ War. France’s once-important Basque whale fishery was by then in steep decline, while a government-backed expedition from Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1765 failed to take a whale. At the same time French cod fishermen were increasingly active in Icelandic waters, directing official hydrographic and naval attention to the region. The chart’s stated purpose, “for use in the whale fishery,” thus seems to reflect a broader effort to restore French participation in the northern whale fishery and improve navigation through the seas between Iceland, Greenland and the traditional Arctic hunting grounds.

The chart also grew out of a major episode in the mapping of Iceland. Beginning in the 1720s, the Danish government sponsored the first major scientific survey of the island, eventually completed in 1734 by Norwegian military surveyor Thomas Hans Henrik Knoff. Knoff produced seven regional maps and a general map of the island. His work represented a radical advance over the cartography descended from the late-16th-century map of Bishop Guðbrandur Þorláksson, but for years the results remained largely inaccessible.

The survey finally reached a wider audience through the Danish scholar Niels Horrebow. After spending two years in Iceland, Horrebow published his Tilforladelige Efterretninger om Island in 1752, accompanied by a folding map based on Knoff’s survey and titled “Land-Kort over Island.” Bellin acknowledged the source explicitly in the cartouche: “For [our representation of] Iceland we are indebted to Mr. Horrebow, who was given access to the large map surveyed by engineers sent by the King of Denmark and completed in 1734 by Captain Knopf.”

Bellin’s chart
Bellin adopted much of Horrebow’s coastal outline and internal geography, but reconfigured the map for use at sea, transforming an essentially terrestrial representation of Iceland into a working navigation chart

Iceland dominates the sheet, set amid rhumb lines radiating from compass roses, with a portion of the Greenland coast to the west and the Faero and Shetland Islands to the southeast. Its deeply indented coastline is accompanied by settlements and other features; the bounds of the island’s districts are delineated; and rivers, lakes, glaciers and mountain ranges are shown, with Mount Hekla depicted in eruption. The coastal waters are marked with soundings and other navigational information, while insets at left and right provide enlarged treatment of stretches of the western and eastern coasts, the former based on French observations and the latter on a Dutch chart.

Greenland receives a markedly different treatment. Bellin shows only a portion of its southeast coast, with candid observations about the limits of contemporary knowledge. One note identifies the geography as “Greenland as described by the ancient authors, following Mr. Anderson’s map,” a reference to Johann Anderson’s Nova Gronlandiae Islandiae et Freti Davis tabula, published with his Nachrichten von Island, Grönland und der Strasse Davis in 1746. Further north and east Bellin warns that the coast is shown “only on the basis of conjecture,” while another inscription warns that the ice banks lining the south coast extend far offshore and render it inaccessible.

The chart was accompanied by an eight-page pamphlet[1] issued to accompany the chart (not included here).

The plate underwent substantial revision after its first appearance. The first state of 1767 lacked both soundings and insets. The present second state, probably issued c. 1773–74, adds the insets, extensive soundings, additional coastal nomenclature, the statement “Cette Carte est accompagnée d’un Memoire,” the engraved seal of the Dépôt de la Marine with fleurs-de-lis, and a price of “trente Sols.” Among the added place names on the northeast coast are “Langen Nis” and “Breukebeen.” Later states alter the seal and price: a 1792 state bears the Republican “R.F.” seal and a price of fifty sols, while a still later state bears an “E.F.” seal and a price of one franc and a half.

An imposing and informative chart, combining the best available 18th-century mapping of Iceland with the practical requirements of navigation and the North Atlantic whale fishery.

References
Sigurðsson, Kortasaga Íslands, Vol. 2, p. 165. R. V. Tooley, “Printed Charts of Scandinavia,” in Map Collectors’ Circle,no. 70 (1971), #23. “Maps of Iceland: The Schulte Collection,” #40.

[1] “Remarques sur la carte réduite de l’Islande et des mers qui en sont voisines, pour servir à la pêche de la baleine” (1767). For a high-resolution scan of the work, click this link and use the navigation bar to advance to p. 39.