Map of the island of Cuba, 1820

Cuba stretches across this sheet like a long fish, its spine drawn in dense little hatch marks that stand in for mountains. Pierre Lapie, a French army geographer, engraved it in 1820, and the title block tells you exactly where his information came from: astronomical observations by Spanish navigators, plus those of Alexander von Humboldt, who had spent months in Cuba around 1800 measuring latitudes and counting sugar mills. Longitude here is measured west of Paris, not Greenwich, a reminder that the world had not yet agreed on where zero should be.

The detail worth finding is the inset in the lower left, a plan of Havana and its harbour with the narrow bottleneck entrance that made the city so easy to defend and so valuable to hold. Around the coastline you can trace the shoals and reefs, especially the Grand Banc de Bahama sprawling across the top, which sank a great many ships before charts like this one improved the odds. Lapie worked for the French war ministry and produced hundreds of maps in this style, precise, unshowy, made to be used rather than admired. The soft brown tone comes from age rather than design, and the pale washes marking the provinces have faded into something closer to a sepia photograph.