A fine example in an early state of a classic separately published wall map of North America by Emanuel Bowen and John Gibson. This is an example of the second issue of twelve according to Stevens and Tree. It is the first to record the results of the Treaty of Paris in 1763 which settled the French & Indian War but still refers to French Dominions in the title. British mainland possessions now extend from the tip of the Florida peninsula all the way into Canada and westwards to the Mississippi River where they now border Spanish Louisiana. The southern colonies of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia extend to the river. The west does not quite extend to the Pacific coast but is all claimed by Spain.

Three similar maps were published in Britain at the time. Bowen and Gibson’s map was the first and most important first published in 1755. It extends southwards to include the whole of the West Indies and the various colonial possessions. Two inset maps of the left side illustrate ‘Baffin and Hudson’s Bay’ in Canada, territory very much of interest to the Hudson Bay Company at the time and Father Kino’s seminal map which proved the California was not an island.

A remarkable amount of detail is included on the map with towns, villages, forts, trading places and paths, portages, Indian Tribes, and mines along with rivers, mountains, and lakes illustrated extensively. A baroque cartouche lower right provides no less that seven different scales of distance and an Explanation. The whole is finished with a superb ornate title cartouche which is designed to allow space to illustrate the Bermudas.

Most editions of this map were included in examples of atlases by Thomas Kitchen, Thomas Jefferys, and Robert Sayer. The early states being separately published are therefore considerably rarer exacerbated by their size. Cum (1972) p. 60; Pritchard & Taliaferro (2002) no. 36; Sellers & Van Ee (1981) 21; Stevens & Tree (1967) no. 49b; Worms & Baynton-Williams (2011).