Background:
With the exception of the Arctic region of North America, which shows a land bridge connecting Greenland with Alaska and an inland polar sea, the landmasses are drawn with contemporary accuracy. Politically the world was a very different place. North America was still divided by the Old World major powers, Britain, France & Spain. As already noted northern Canada was still to be fully mapped, the interior of Africa was still largely unexplored by Europeans. The European settlement of Australia & New Zealand was still in its infancy Australia and the Antarctic region was still only known by the voyage of Cook some 40 years earlier. The explorers noted below were some of the 18th century adventurers responsible for filling in the cartographically unknown

Captain James Cook FRS 1728 – 1779 was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the Royal Navy. Cook made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean, during which he achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.
Cook joined the British merchant navy as a teenager and joined the Royal Navy in 1755. He saw action in the Seven Years\' War, and subsequently surveyed and mapped much of the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River during the siege of Quebec. This helped bring Cook to the attention of the Admiralty and Royal Society. This notice came at a crucial moment in both Cook\'s career and the direction of British overseas exploration, and led to his commission in 1766 as commander of HM Bark Endeavour for the first of three Pacific voyages.
In three voyages Cook sailed thousands of miles across largely uncharted areas of the globe. He mapped lands from New Zealand to Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean in greater detail and on a scale not previously achieved. As he progressed on his voyages of discovery he surveyed and named features, and recorded islands and coastlines on European maps for the first time. He displayed a combination of seamanship, superior surveying and cartographic skills, physical courage and an ability to lead men in adverse conditions.
Cook was attacked and killed while attempting to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, a Hawaiian chief, during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific in 1779. He left a legacy of scientific and geographical knowledge which was to influence his successors well into the 20th century, and numerous memorials worldwide have been dedicated to him.

Captain George Vancouver 1757 – 1798 was a British officer of the Royal Navy, best known for his 1791–95 expedition, which explored and charted North America\'s north-western Pacific Coast regions, including the coasts of contemporary Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. He also explored the Hawaiian Islands and the southwest coast of Australia.
In Canada, Vancouver Island and the city of Vancouver are named after him, as are Vancouver, Washington, in the United States, Mount Vancouver on the Yukon/Alaska border, and New Zealand\'s sixth highest mountain

Jean François de Galaup, comte de La Perouse 1741 – 1788 was a French Naval officer and explorer whose expedition vanished in Oceania after the French government decided to complete the work of Captain james Cook.

Alexander Humboldt 1769 – 1859 was a Prussian geographer, naturalist, explorer, and influential proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt\'s quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. Humboldt\'s advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time from a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years. Humboldt was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular). Humboldt resurrected the use of the word cosmos from the ancient Greek and assigned it to his multi-volume treatise, Kosmos, in which he sought to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture. This important work also motivated a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity. He was the first person to describe the phenomenon and cause of human-induced climate change, in 1800 and again in 1831, based on observations generated during his travels.

Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin 1786 –1847 was an English Royal Navy officer and explorer of the Arctic. Franklin also served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen\'s Land (now Tasmania) from 1837 to 1843. He disappeared on his last expedition, attempting to chart and navigate a section of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. The icebound ships were abandoned and the entire crew perished from starvation, hypothermia, tuberculosis, lead poisoning and scurvy.

Rear Admiral Sir William Edward Parry, RN, FRS 1790 - 1855 was an English rear-admiral and Arctic explorer. His 1819 voyage through the Parry Channel was probably the most successful in the long quest for the Northwest Passage. In 1827 he attempted one of the earliest expeditions to the North Pole. He reached 82°45′ North latitude, setting the record for human exploration farthest North that stood for nearly five decades before being surpassed at 83°20′26″ by Albert Hastings Markham in 1875–1876.

Herisson, Eustache b.1759
Herisson was a Hydrographical engineer, geographer and pupil of Rigobert Bonne prolific during the late 18th and early 19th century.