Abstract
Map No. 7 at the end of Verne E. Chatelain’s The Defenses of Spanish Florida 1565-1763 is entitled Mapa de la Ysla de la Florida. It is of Spanish origin, but its printed legend admits the anonymity of the cartographer and the uncertainty of the date. Although Woodbury Lowery listed maps from the same repository, he was unaware of the existence of this one. It was Professor Louis C. Karpinski of the University of Michigan who discovered this paper representation of Florida in the war ministry in Madrid, while searching for American history materials in Spanish archives. His original typed entry of it does not show author or date, but an added handwritten notation in brackets indicates its date to be 1683. This marking is identical with that appearing in brackets on the northeast margin of the map itself, placed there possibly by ministry personnel. A second publication of the Mapa . . . attests that the date is indeed 1683 and that a Don Juan Marquez Cabrera remitted it to Spain. The mapmaker is still unknown, although strong circumstantial evidence points definitely to reformado 5 Adjutant Alonso Solana, the Younger, public and governmental notary of the presidio of St. Augustine in 1678-96, as the author of this Florida map of 1683.
Recommended Citation
Arana, Luis Rafael
(1963)
"The Alonso Solana Map of Florida, 1683,"
Florida Historical Quarterly: Vol. 42:
No.
3, Article 7.
Available at:
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol42/iss3/7
