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Carte de l‘Islande

YEAR 1768

Antoine François Prévost d’Exiles (1697–1763), was a French author. In the years 1746–1759 he had published fifteen volumes of travel accounts under the name Histoire générale des voyages. The work was continued by other writers, with the later volumes usually also attributed to Prévost. The Histoire is a summary of the accounts of other writers and contains various information on history, customs, geography, animals and other important features of a territory. In 1768 an account of Iceland was published in volume 69 of Prévost’s Histoire. It is accompanied by a map of Iceland, Carte de l’Islande, which is very much like the map that appeared in the French version of Horrebow. The main diference is that the title cartouche in the lower right corner has been replaced. It does, though, still have a dedication to Horrebow.

The map is usually credited to Jacques Nicolas Bellin and is called the Bellin map of Iceland.

The same map also appeared in a publication of voyage accounts published by Jean-François de La Harpe in Paris in 1780, Abrérgé de l’histoire générale des voyages. The map is not in the book itself, but in an atlas, that accompanied the series. It only differs from the one that appeared in Prévost in the addition of script in the lower right corner, which stated the volume and page to which it referred.

The atlas was likely published also separately or individual plates used again later. The map in the 1780 state is so common that it is unlikely that there was only one for each copy of the book.