Sale features early maps of America

ALBANY, N.Y. — Artifacts from the 16th century that depict California as a huge island off the North American continent’s West Coast are going up for sale.

It would be another century before cartographers got the West Coast right, according to Alex Clausen, maps and atlases specialist at Swann Auction Galleries in Manhattan, where artifacts depicting the mapmaking mistake are heading to auction.

“It’s not the only thing they got wrong, but all told, it’s amazing what they got right,” Clausen said.

Several maps showing California as an island are among the scores of maps and atlases being sold in Tuesday’s “Mapping of America” auction. The oldest item for sale is a German map from the 1550s that was the earliest to show all of the Americas and to name the Pacific Ocean, marked on the document in its Latin name: “Mare pacificum.” Its estimated sale price is between $3,000 and $5,000.

The highlight is a rare Revolutionary War-era atlas published by William Faden, the geographer to England’s King George III. The atlas includes maps of British military campaigns and a 1777 plan of New York City showing much of the settlement clustered at Manhattan’s southern tip and farmland covering the rest of the island. Its estimated price is $300,000 to $500,000, the highest in the auction.

Other sale items include some of the earliest maps of Virginia and other Southern colonies, the first printed plan of Washington, D.C., and a map showing explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s route to the Pacific Northwest in 1804. The map is included in a history of the expedition published a decade later in a book, which has an estimated sale price of $60,000 to $90,000.