Map of Havana, Neu und verbessenter Plan der St. und Hafens Havana

1741

Homann, Johann Baptista (mapmaker; 1664-1724); Bowles, Thomas (mapmaker; 1694-1773); Chassereau, Pierre (engraver; active 1730-50)

Chicago, IL, USA, University of Chicago (current location)

This map depicts the city of Havana. The grid layout of the town and the fortified port are primary features—both of 18th-century Havana and European visions of the city.

The German inscription at upper left identifies this as a newly-made plan of Havana of 1739. By the time this map was created, Havana was one of the largest cities in the Americas, with more than 60,000 residents. The grid plan of Havana, seen in the tip of the peninsula, had been laid out in the 16th century. The key at upper right helps identify the city’s features. The main plaza of Havana, for instance, is marked with the number 1. Near to it, marked 8, is the customs house, adjacent to the port. A fortified wall protected Havana from attack by land. Parts of the wall still stand today. The insert at lower left offers a bare-bones panorama of the fortified port. In the early 18th century, it would have been a bustling center of trade. Visible in this view, but not the map, is the enormous chain that stretched across the entry to the harbor. It could be raised and lowered and was meant to prevent pirates or enemy war ships from entering.

This rare map of Havana was published by a leading German printing house in Nuremberg, established by Johann Baptist Homann and carried on after his death in 1724 by his heirs. Like many map publishers, the Homann firm made use of available published maps, re-engraving them and reprinting them. This map is the result of such a daisy-chain of images. It was originally created by Pierre Chassereau, a French map-maker active from 1730-1750, and the German map itself gives the date of this source as 1739. An English version of Chassereau’s map may have been first published by Thomas Bowles, whose family firm dominated the British print market.

The map is a copperplate engraving. The impression made by the plate, marked by a slight cast of residual ink, is visible around the borders of the image. It measures 11 ¾ x 9 ½ inches (30 x 24 cm). After the print was made, it was colored by hand. Below it, printed on the same sheet, is a map of Cartagena, another Spanish American port city.

The Spanish crown would have preferred that maps like this one did not exist, since it wanted to keep details of its fortifications out of the hands of potential enemies. But printing, and the easy circulation of images in Europe, meant that maps like this one, which shows both the location of fortifications and depth soundings in the harbor, could be quickly printed and disseminated.

To European visitors, Havana was an exotic and temperamental place, buffeted by hurricanes, protected by a fortified wall (parts of which can be seen in this map) and peopled by tens of thousands of black people and mulattos, both slave and free. Its landowners were rich from cattle, sugar and, increasingly, tobacco. Throughout the 18th century, Spain’s Caribbean port cities became increasingly involved in European hostilities. Not only did slaves escape from British colonies to Spanish American ports in the 1730s, the British seized Havana in the 1760s. The cultural complexities that characterized Havana’s history thus involved many European groups and well as those from Africa.

Reproduced courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, The Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Pérez Guzmán, Francisco. 1997. La Habana: clave de un imperio. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Woodward, David, ed. 1975. Five Centuries of Map Printing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.