Guillaume Delisle

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• published: 10 May 2016
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Guillaume Delisle, also spelled Guillaume de l'Isle, was a French cartographer known for his popular and accurate maps of Europe and the newly explored Americas and Africa. Deslile was the son of Marie Malaine and Claude Delisle, who later remarried Charlotte Millet de la Croyère after his first wife died following childbirth. It is possible that the couple had as many as 12 children, but many of them died at a young age. Although Claude Delisle had studied law, he also taught history and geography. Claude had such a good reputation in Paris’ intellectual circles that he educated lords, among them was the duke Philippe d’Orléans who later became regent for the crown of France, and collaborated with well-known cartographer Nicolas Sanson. Guillaume and his two of half-brothers, Joseph Nicolas and Louis, ended up pursuing similar careers in science. Dutch cartographer Jan Barend Elwe reissued maps by Delisle in the late 18th century. Historian David Buisseret has traced the roots of the flourishing of cartography in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe and noted it was due to five distinct reasons: admiration of antiquity, especially the rediscovery of Ptolemy, considered to be the first geographer; increasing reliance on measurement and quantification as a result of the Scientific revolution; refinements in the visual arts such as the discovery of perspective, that allowed for better representation of spatial entities; development of estate property; and the importance of mapping to nation-building. In 1663–1664 Colbert made an inquiry into the provinces in an effort to accurately assess the income within the kingdom, necessary information for economic and tax reform. Colbert asked for the provincial representatives of the king, the intendants, to gather existing maps of territory within the provinces and check them for accuracy. If they were found not to be accurate, the Royal Geographer, Nicolas Sanson, was to edit them, basing his source of information on the reports that the intendants prepared. The operation was largely failure due to the scrutinizing examination of cartographic methodology with the Académie des Sciences.:45 The importance of cartography to the mechanisms of the state, however, continued to grow. For the Carolina region, extending into present-day Tennessee and Kentucky, the map lacks detail and accuracy; for example, there is a flawed conception of the Appalachians as reaching into the Michigan peninsula, an error potentially borrowed from earlier maps by Morden Brown or Sanson. The largest area of the map by far was 'La Louisiane', or Louisiana, proposing a pro-French version of the continent and conveying the message that it had become an enormous and firmly established colony by 1718; in reality, this colony was really made up of between four hundred to seven hundred men, women, and children clustered around the mouth of the Mississippi.:41 As a message to the French king, the map clearly labeled major waterways and copper mines which would serve to boost the nation’s commerce.:41 In this way it was considered to be a politically charged document also depicting explorer’s routes and controversial territorial claims in the New World. Video Empire produces videos read aloud. Use the information in this video at your own risk. We cannot always guarantee accuracy. This video uses material from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Delisle, licensed with CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. This video is licensed with CC Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ In order to adapt this content it is required to comply with the license terms. Image licensing information is available via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Delisle