Carte nouvelle des terres de Cucan, de Canara, de Malabar, de Madura, et de Coromandel : avec des remarques, & une table tant des principales villes du pay, que des comptoirs que les Hollandois y possedent

1719, first edition

Copper engraving on paper

Print size: 14.75 x 17 in (37.5 x 43 cm)
Sheet size: 17.25 x 20.5 in (44 x 52 cm)

A richly engraved early-eighteenth-century map of Southern India—from the Konkan to Cape Comorin—combining geography, ethnography, colonial rivalries and textual scholarship, published in Chatelain’s magnificent Atlas Historique

Henri Chatelain’s Atlas Historique (1705–1720) endures as one of the most ambitious publishing enterprises of the Enlightenment, bringing together geography, genealogy, ethnography and universal history across seven monumental volumes. Within this vast intellectual project, his 1719 map of Southern India ranks among the most intricate and visually sophisticated representations of the region produced in Northern Europe before the middle of the eighteenth century. Issued here in the first edition, appearing on page 129 of Volume IV of the Atlas Historique, the map was conceived not merely as a geographical document but as a historical and cultural synthesis, reflecting Chatelain’s broader encyclopaedic ambition to interpret the world through image, text and scholarship.

The sheet encompasses an expansive geographical sweep, extending from the Konkan and Canara coasts in the west across the interior polities of Visapour, the Carnatic and Golconda, and continuing southwards to Malabar and Madura, before following the Coromandel littoral to its terminus at Cape Comorin (Kanyakumari). This extensive coverage brings together coastal zones, inland kingdoms and maritime corridors within a single unified composition. The engraving synthesises contemporary European cartographic sources with the profound intellectual influence of Hadrian Reland, the eminent Utrecht Orientalist whose pioneering work on Asian languages, religions and historical geography played a foundational role in shaping early eighteenth-century European knowledge of India.

A defining feature of the map is its richly articulated coastal detail, particularly along the western and eastern seaboards, where key ports and European trading centres are carefully identified. Goa, Calicut, Cochin, Tranquebar, Nagapattinam, Pondicherry, Pulicat and Fort St George appear as fortified enclaves marked by national flags, visually signalling Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Danish presences. These emblems function as a cartographic index of the intensely competitive maritime and commercial world of the Indian Ocean between roughly 1650 and 1720, when European powers vied for control of trade routes, ports and political influence.

Equally significant are the extensive French textual panels incorporated within the map, which provide detailed commentary on the region. These texts describe the principal lands, provinces and capitals of southern India, outline political divisions, religious customs and trade commodities and situate the peninsula within a broader framework of historical geography. Such sustained narrative passages exemplify Chatelain’s distinctive approach to cartography, in which the map becomes an interpretive instrument as much as a representational one, offering readers a structured understanding of place, history and culture.

The engraving is further animated by animal figures and ethnographic motifs, with elephants, camels, lions and other creatures distributed across the landscape. These vignettes reflect contemporary European fascination with the subcontinent’s natural world and draw upon a wide corpus of sources, including travel narratives, Jesuit correspondence and navigators’ accounts. In this way, the map participates in a long tradition of visual storytelling, where natural history and ethnography are interwoven with geographic description.

From a cartographic and intellectual perspective, the map occupies a pivotal position within early eighteenth-century European mapping of India. It draws in part on the scientific cartography of Guillaume Delisle, whose emphasis on critical evaluation of sources contributed to greater geographical accuracy, while also incorporating Reland’s synthesis of indigenous, Arabic and Persianate geographic traditions. The result is a hybrid work that bridges earlier imaginative conceptions of Asia with the emerging empirical and scholarly currents of the Enlightenment.

Published in Amsterdam, one of the foremost centres of global cartographic production, Chatelain’s map exemplifies the high point of encyclopaedic cartography immediately before the more rigorously scientific era associated with d’Anville and Rennell. For the history of South India, it remains a seminal visual document, capturing the political, cultural and mercantile landscape of the region in the decades just prior to the Anglo-French conflicts and the subsequent consolidation of European power on the subcontinent.

Henri Abraham Chatelain (1684–1743)
A Huguenot pastor of Parisian origins, Chatelain worked across London, The Hague and Amsterdam, producing one of the early eighteenth century’s most important publishing undertakings: the Atlas Historique. Created in partnership with his family and with substantial textual contributions by Nicolas Gueudeville, Chatelain’s atlas combined geographic, genealogical and historical knowledge in a groundbreaking encyclopaedic format. His maps—many drawn after Delisle—became widely admired for their clarity, annotation and intellectual breadth.

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