Henry Briggs (mathematician)

The North part of America, in Purchas his Pilgrimes, London, 1625 The map that set off one of cartography's great mistakes. Briggs's map of North America, engraved by Reynold Elstracke, shows California as an island, an idea Briggs credited to a Spanish chart and one that suited his case for a Northwest Passage. It is widely described as the first map to show the island, and the notion took hold among even the most sophisticated mapmakers. Father Kino disproved it in 1698, yet a royal decree was still needed in 1747 to change how cartographers drew the coast. That makes Briggs the cornerstone of a California-as-an-island collection, a specialty in its own right. The picture is a 1906 reproduction of the 1625 map.