Wilbrecht SUPERLATIVELY RARE 1802 RUSSIAN MAP OF THE BERING STRAIT

A SUPERLATIVELY RARE 1802 RUSSIAN MAP OF THE BERING STRAIT - THE HECKROTTE EXAMPLE, ex coll. SIR WILLIAM STUART WILBRECHT, Alexander Mikhailovitch (1757–1823). Karta morskikh" otkrytíy rossíyskimi moreplavatelyami na tikhom" i ledovitom" moryakh" v" raznykh" godakh" uchinennykh. . . (Map of maritime discoveries made by Russian navigators in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans in various years. . .). St. Petersburg:] Map depot (ДЕПО КАРТЪ), 1802. Here is what AI says it’s worth: $28,000. Cost: Warren Heckrotte Sale, 29 October, 2015 - Lot 198 - $25,000. КАРТА МОРСКИХЪ ОТКРЫТІЙ РОССІЙСКИМИ МОРЕПЛАВАТЕЛЯМИ НА ТИХОМЪ И ЛЕДОВИТОМЪ МОРЯХЪ ВЪ РАЗНЫХЪ ГОДАХЪ УЧИНЕННЫХЪ. ПРИ СОБСТВЕННОМЪ ЕГО ИМПЕРАТОРСКАГО ВЕЛИЧЕСТВА ДЕПО КАРТЪ СОЧИНЕНА И ПО НОВѢЙШИМЪ НАБЛЮДЕНІЯМЪ ИНОСПІРАННЫХЪ МОРЕХОДЦОВЪ ВЫПРАВЛЕНА И ГРАВНРОВАНА 1802РО ГОДА.[1] Engraved map. Four sheets joined, dissected into 40 panels and mounted on pale rose linen (30 ¼” x 50 ¾”, 765mm x 1285mm). On the verso of the upper-left panel, the octagonal label of Charles Picquet in Paris. Presented in a red straight-grained morocco gilt slipcase with the supralibros gilt of Sir William Stuart (motto above the crest: NOBILIS IRA, below the arms: AVITO VIRET HONORE), with a marbled-paper chemise backed in red straight-grained morocco. On the “spine,” “NOUVELLE DÉCOUVERTE EN AMÉRIQUE SEPTENTRIO[N]” gilt to black morocco. A fine example of the map proper, with some wear and blanching at the corners of the linen. Slip-case and chemise rubbed, worn and splitting. A seam (split?) to the morocco running right round the slip-case toward the bottom. Spine sunned, with some loss to the lower-right of the label. Alexander Wilbrecht (Александр Михайлович Вильбрехт, Vilbrecht, Vilbreht; 1757–1823) was the great Russian cartographer of his day, rising to be chief cartographer to the Imperial Cabinet. From the late 1780’s he superintended many of the landmarks of Imperial Russian mapmaking, including the Российский атлас (Rossiyskiy atlas or Russian atlas) of 1792 that cemented the provincial reforms of Catherine the Great and the ca. 1796 update reflecting the changes of her son Paul I. His magnum opus was the 1801–1805 Подробной карты Российской империи и близлежащих заграничных владений (Podrobnoy karty Rossiyskoy imperii i blizlezhashchikh zagranichnykh vladeniy or Detailed map of the Russian Empire and of nearby overseas territories), a single map on 114 sheets at a scale of 1:840,000. The present map does not appear to have been part of any of those book projects, but instead a stand-alone map of the northeasternmost part of Russia, across the Bering Strait and into what is now Alaska. The 1790’s saw growth — led principally by Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov — in Russian interest in “Russkaya Amerika,” culminating in the foundation of the Russian-American Company in 1799; their primary trade was fur. Competing claims from Spain, as well as the explorations of Billings, La Perouse, Mackenzie and Vancouver, led to a Russian impulse to map and thereby control the region, no small feat given that the Bering Strait is some 3,600 miles from St. Petersburg. With the proviso that Russian institutional collections are not reliably reflected in Western bibliographic resources, only two other examples of the map are recorded: at the Library of Congress and at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The BnF map is part of a larger collection — from disparate sources — of 172 maps from the Dépôt de la Marine. (Stanford has digitized the Heckrotte Collection, such that the present map is photographed and described on their site despite its not being in their possession or under their ownership.) Despite its rarity the map is vitally important; Humboldt in his Essai Politique of 1811 refers to it several times, and it was used in the resolution of the 1903 Alaska boundary dispute (pl. 6 in the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal atlas of 1904). The map was sold at the epochal 2015 cartographic sale of Warren Heckrotte (1922–2019; part I, 29 October, lot 198), who, as a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory selected to represent the United States in negotiations with the Soviet Union in reaching a treaty to ban nuclear tests, made his first purchase of maps in 1963. He continued to collect well into his eighties, contributing scholarly articles to journals and curating exhibitions of maps. Heckrotte — a careful note-keeper — records having bought the map from Martayan Lan in April 1992. He then points back to a Francis Edwards catalogue (711, from 1951) in which item 287 “is a large folio atlas, made up of Russian published maps. One of these is ‘chart of the Siberian and North American coast, 1802’. This is, I presume, this map. The price for the atlas was £20” (from the PBA lot description). In brief, the present map must have been broken out of its collected (“made up of Russian published maps”) volume sometime between 1951 and 1992. Heckrotte then goes on to identify — with due respect, incorrectly — the arms as those of Sir Charles Stuart, Baron Stuart de Rothesay. Baron Stuart was ambassador to St. Petersburg 1841–1844, whence doubtless the identification, but the supralibros are in fact those of his first cousin Sir William Stuart (1798–1874; Baron Stuart’s arms bear for a difference a mullet gules (viz. a red star at the top)), well-attested in the University of Toronto database of British armorial bindings (as his stamp 1). The owner note for Sir William does, however, note that the “latter [Sir William] bought many books at the sale of the former [Baron Stuart] and often added his arms to books that had belonged to him, but were without his arms.” Baron Stuart’s library was disbursed by Sotheby’s in a multi-part sale 31 May through 14 June 1855. Sir William’s library was sold at Sotheby’s 17 June 1875 and at Christie’s 6 March 1895. [1] Transliterated: Karta morskikh" otkrytíy rossíyskimi moreplavatelyami na tikhom" i ledovitom" moryakh" v" raznykh" godakh" uchinennykh…; rendered into English: Map of maritime discoveries made by Russian navigators in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans in various years. Under His Imperial Majesty’s own Map Depot, the chart was composed and, according to the latest observations of foreign sailors, corrected and engraved in 1802.

Estimate:£22,421.25

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