An engaging composite map devoted to Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, juxtaposing recent firsthand information with cartographic models already more than a century old.

The map was prepared for Emanuel Bowen’s Complete System of Geography, issued in parts beginning in the mid-1740s and completed in two folio volumes in 1747, with two later editions appearing in 1752. Its title page advertised seventy newly drawn maps forming “of themselves, a complete atlas,” though the present plate is numbered 71.

Greenland according to Hans Egede
The upper half is occupied by Bowen’s map of “Old Greenland,” derived closely from the folding map in the first English edition of Hans Egede’s A Description of Greenland, published in London in 1745.

Hans Poulsen Egede (1686–1758), a Norwegian-born Lutheran pastor, believed that descendants of Greenland’s medieval Norse colonists might still survive. Sailing from Bergen in 1721 under Danish royal authority, he found no surviving Norse community, but established a mission among the Kalaallit and helped initiate the renewed Danish-Norwegian colonial presence in Greenland.

Bowen’s map reflects Egede’s mixture of observation, inherited history, and conjecture. The comparatively well-known west coast is densely annotated with islands, fjords, anchorages, and settlements, while the interior and eastern coast remain much less certain. A broad waterway apparently crosses southern Greenland and bears the note: “It is said that these Streights were formerly passable, but now they are shut up with Ice.”

The title invokes Østerbygd and Vesterbygd—the Eastern and Western Norse Settlements. Their names led some early modern geographers to place the Eastern Settlement on Greenland’s east coast, though both are now known to have lain on the southwest side of the island. Bowen’s map thus preserves the geographical confusion that persisted before the Norse sites were securely identified. Engraved notes also emphasize the barriers to exploration, warning that parts of the coast were dangerous or inaccessible because of “floating and fixed mountains of Ice.”

The Faroe Islands and the Sumbo whirlpool
The lower-left panel depicts the Faroe Islands “according to Jacobson Debes.” Its source was the map accompanying Lucas Jacobson Debes’s Færoæ et Færoa Reserata, first published in Danish in 1673 and translated into English in 1676. Debes, a Danish clergyman long resident in the islands, produced the first extensive printed account of Faroese geography, natural history, inhabitants, and antiquities. Bowen’s adaptation identifies the principal islands, settlements, channels, rocks, and anchorages, though their forms and relative positions remain imperfect.

Immediately to the right is an enlarged “Draught of the Whirlpool” southeast of Sumbo, at the southern end of Suðuroy. Concentric soundings spiral inward toward “Monck Rock,” while the adjoining map marks both the rock and whirlpool south of the island group. Debes described exceptionally dangerous currents and tidal disturbances in the area, but Bowen’s nearly circular diagram should not be read as a literal hydrographic survey. Rather, it translates a seventeenth-century mariner’s account into the conventional image of a maelstrom.

An “Improved” map of Iceland
The lower-right panel is titled An Improved Map of Iceland, though its geography derives substantially from a tradition established more than a century earlier. Its prototype was the map prepared by the Dutch navigator and cartographer Joris Carolus and first published in 1629, then widely disseminated through the atlases of Willem Janszoon Blaeu and his successors.

Carolus’s map itself drew upon the late-sixteenth-century delineation of Iceland by Bishop Guðbrandur Þorláksson, supplemented through Dutch maritime experience. Bowen retained the familiar division into West, North, East, and South Provinces, the exaggerated coastal indentations, Mount Hekla, and the established pattern of settlements, capes, bays, and offshore islands.

Taken together, the four maps reflect the uneven development of eighteenth-century North Atlantic cartography, during a period in which observation, textual authority, and conjecture continued to coexist on the same engraved plate.

Reference
David Rumsey Map Collection, #3733.070. Maps of Iceland: The Schulte Collection, #38. Sigurðsson, Kortasaga Íslands (Reykjavik: Bókaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs og Þjóðvinafélagsins, 1981 & 1978), vol. 2, p. 66.