Historic Map : Samuel Dunn Wall Map of The World in Hemispheres , 1794, Vintage Wall Art

An absolutely stunning and monumental double hemisphere wall map of the world by Samuel Dunn dating to 1794. This extraordinary map is so large and so rich in detail that it is exceptionally challenging to do it full justice in either photographic or textual descriptions. Covers the entire world in a double hemisphere projection. The primary map is surrounded on all sides but detailed scientific calculations and descriptions as well as northern and southern hemisphere star charts, a map of the Moon, a Latitude and Longitude Analemma chart, a map of the Solar System, a Mercator projection of the world, an Analemma projection, a seasonal chart, a universal scale chart, and numerous smaller diagrams depicting planets and mathematical systems. All text is in English. We will start our survey of this map in North America, much of which was, even in 1794, largely unknown. This map follows shortly after the explorations of Captain Cook in the Arctic and Pacific Northwest, so the general outline of the continent is known. However, when this map was made, few inland expeditions had extended westward beyond the Mississippi. This map notes two separate speculative courses for the apocryphal River of the West, a northern route extending from Lake Winnipeg and a southern route passing south of Winnepeg through Pike's lake. . The Xaraiés, meaning Masters of the River were an indigenous people occupying what are today parts of Brazil's Matte Grosso and the Pantanal. When Spanish and Portuguese explorers first navigated up the Paraguay River, as always in search of El Dorado, they encountered the vast Pantanal flood plain at the height of its annual inundation. Understandably misinterpreting the flood plain as a gigantic inland sea, they named it after the local inhabitants, the Xaraies.