Chapter IX: New England (5)

The map is without date. The topography corresponds in the main with that of the map which William Wood added to his _New England’s Prospect_ (London, 1634), so far as its smaller field corresponds, and suggests the common use of an earlier survey by the two map-makers,—if, indeed, Wood did not depend in part on this present survey. That its observations were the best then made would seem clear from the fact that Governor Winthrop explained it by a marginal key, and added in some places a further description to that given by the draughtsman (as a change in the handwriting would seem to show,—for instance, in the legend on the Merrimac River), if indeed all is not Winthrop’s. Who the draughtsman was is not known. There had been in the colony a man experienced in surveying,—Thomas Graves,—who laid out Charlestown, before Winthrop’s arrival; but he is not known to have remained till the period of the present survey, which, if there has been nothing added to the original draught, was seemingly made as early as that given by Wood. This last traveller left New England, Aug. 15, 1633; and his description of the plantations about Boston at that time, which he professes to make complete, is almost identical with the enumeration on this map, though he gives a few more local names. Wood’s map is dated 1634; but it seems certain that he carried it with him in August, 1633,—a date as late apparently as can be attached to the present draught.

The key added by Winthrop to the north corner of the map reads as follows:—

A: _an Iland cont[aining] 100 acres,
where the Gouven^r. hathe an orchard & a
vineyarde._

B: _M^r. Humfryes ferme [farm] house
at Sagus [Saugus]._

_Tenhills: the Gouern^{rs}. ferme [farm]
house._

_Meadford: M^r. Cradock ferme [farm]
house._

C: the Wyndmill}

D: the fforte } at Boston.

E: the Weere

_So far as the rivers are laid thus [shaded], they are navigable w^{th} the Tide._

[SCALE.]

_Scale of 10: Italian miles
320 pches [perches] to the mile,
not taken by Instrument, but by estimate._

In the north the Merrimac is shown to be navigable to _a fall_. The stream itself is marked _Merimack river; it runnes 100 miles up into the Country, and falles out of a ponde 10 miles broad_. It receives the _Musketaquit riuer_ [Concord] just south of the scale. The long island near its mouth is Plum Island, but it is not named. The village of _Agawam_ [Ipswich] is connected by roads [dotted lines] with _Sagus_ [Saugus], _Salem_, _Winesemett_, and _Meadford_, which is called “Misticke” in Wood’s text, but “Meadford” in his map. On _Cape Anne_ peninsula _Anasquom_ is marked. The bay between Marblehead and Marblehead Neck is called _Marble Harbour_, as by Wood in his map. _Nahant_ is marked, as are also _Pulln Point_, _Deere I._, _Hogg I._, _Nottles I._ Governor’s Island is marked _A._, referring to the key. Charlestown is called _Char:towne_. _Spott Ponde_ flows properly through Malden River, not named, into the Mystic; and _Mistick river_ takes the water of a number of ponds. The modern Horn Pond in Woburn is not shown. The three small ponds near a hill appear to be Wedge Pond and others in Winchester; the main water is _Mistick pond, 60 fathoms deepe; horn ponde_ is the modern Spy Pond; Fresh Pond is called 40 _fathom deepe_. Their watershed is separated by the Belmont hills, not named, from the valley of the Concord. The villages of _Waterton_ and _Newtowne_ [Cambridge] are marked on the _Charls River_. The peninsula of _Boston_ shows Beacon Hill, not named, while _C_ and _D_ are explained in the key. _Muddy river_ [Muddy Brook in Brookline] and _Stony river_ [Stony Brook in Roxbury] are correctly placed. _Rocksbury_ and _Dorchester_ appear as villages. Hills are shown on Dorchester Neck, or South Boston. _Naponsett river_ is placed with tolerable correctness. The islands in Boston Harbor are all represented as wooded. The _waye to Plimouth_, beginning at Dorchester, crosses the Weymouth rivers above _Wessaguscus_ [Wessagussett]. Trees and eminences are marked on _Nataskette_ [Hull], and Cohasset is called _Conyhassett_. The same sign stands for rocks in the Bay and for Indian villages on the land.

It may be well further to notice that since the printing of this volume _A Briefe Discription of New England_, 1660, by Samuel Maverick, has likewise been discovered in the British Museum by Mr. Waters, and is printed in the _Proceedings_ of the Massachusetts Historical Society, October, 1884, and in the _New England Historical and Genealogical Register_, January, 1885.—ED.

EDITORIAL NOTES.

=A.= BIBLIOGRAPHICAL.—Rhode Island has been fortunate in its bibliographer. Mr. John Russell Bartlett, the editor of the State’s early _Records_, issued at Providence, in 1864, his _Bibliography of Rhode Island, with Notes, Historical, Biographical, and Critical_ (150 copies printed). Mr. Bartlett began a “Naval History of Rhode Island” in the _Historical Magazine_, January, 1870. As the adviser of the late Mr. John Carter Brown in the forming of what is now so widely known as the Carter-Brown Library, and as the cataloguer of its almost unexampled treasures, not only of Rhode Island, but of all American history, Mr. Bartlett has also conferred upon the student of American history benefits equalled in the labors of few other scholars in this department. Mr. Brown erected for himself in his Library a splendid monument. There may exist in the Lenox Library a rival in some departments of Americana, but Mr. Bartlett’s Catalogue of the Providence Collection makes its richness better known. Mr. Brown began his collections early, and was enabled to buy from the catalogues of Rich and Ternaux. The Library is now so complete, and its _desiderata_ are so few and so scarce, that it grows at present but slowly. Mr. Brown, a son of Nicholas Brown, from whom the university in Providence received its name, was born in 1797, and died June 10, 1874. But fifty copies of the two sumptuous volumes (1482-1700) constituting the revised edition of the catalogue (there is a third volume, 1700-1800, in a first edition) have been distributed, and they are the Library’s best history; but those not fortunate enough to have access to them will find accounts of it in the _Bibliotheca Sacra_, April, 1876; Rogers’s _Libraries of Providence; N.E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg._, April, 1876; _American Journal of Education_, xxvii. 237; _American Bibliopolist_, vi. 77, vii. 91, 228.

The several volumes of the Rhode Island Historical Society, so far as they relate to the period under examination, are noted in the preceding text; but the Society has also issued a volume of _Proceedings_ for the years 1872-1879. Two supplemental publications of the Rhode Island antiquaries have been begun lately,—the _Newport Historical Magazine_, July, 1880, and the _Narragansett Historical Register_, July, 1882, James N. Arnold, editor, both devoted to southern Rhode Island.

=B.= EARLY MAPS OF NEW ENGLAND.—The cartography of New England in the seventeenth century began with the map of Captain John Smith in 1614 (given in chap. vi.), for we must discard as of little value the earlier maps of Lescarbot and Champlain. The Dutch were on the coast at about the same time, and the best development of their work is what is known as the “Figurative Map” of 1614, which was first made known in the _Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York_, i. 13, and in O’Callaghan’s _New Netherland_. The part showing New England is figured in the _Memorial History of Boston_, i. 57. It had certain features which long remained on the maps, and its names became in later maps curiously mixed with those derived from Smith’s map. It gave the Cape Cod peninsula (here, however, made an island) a peculiar triangular shape; it exaggerated Plymouth’s harbor; it ran Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket into one, and divided Long Island into several parts. The marked feature of the interior was the bringing of the Iroquois (Champlain) Lake close down to the salt water, as Champlain had done in his map of 1612, and as he continued to do in his larger map of 1632. Blaeu, in his _Atlas_ of 1635, while he copied the Figurative Map pretty closely, closed the channel which made Cape Cod an island, and gave the “Lacus Irocociensis” a prolongation in the direction of Narragansett Bay. De Laet, in 1630, had worked on much better information in several respects. Cape Cod is much more nearly its proper shape; and he had got such information from the Dutch settlements up the Hudson as enabled him to place Lake Champlain with fair accuracy. A fac-simile of De Laet’s map is given in Vol. IV. chap. ix. Meanwhile the English had enlarged Smith’s plot, as the map given on an earlier page from Alexander and Purchas (_Pilgrimes_, iii. 853) shows. Champlain’s plotting in 1632 of the great river of Canada could not, of course, have been known to this map-maker of 1624, while Lescarbot’s was.

Pure local work came in with the map which accompanied Wood’s _New England’s Prospect_, which is called “The south part of New England as it is planted this yeare, 1634.” It only shows the coast from Narragansett Bay to “Acomenticus,” on the Maine shore, with a corresponding inland delineation. Buzzard’s Bay is greatly misshapen; Cape Cod has something of the contemporary Dutch drawing; and, in a rude way, the watercourses lie like huge snakes in contortions upon the land. There are fac-similes of the map in Palfrey, i. 360; Young’s _Chronicles of Massachusetts_, p. 389, and in other places noted in the _Memorial History of Boston_, i. 524. Two years later (1636), in Saltonstall’s English version of the atlas of Mercator and Hondius, the English public practically got De Laet’s map; and indeed so late as 1670, the map “Novi Belgii et Novæ Angliæ Delineatio,” which is given alike in Montanus’s _De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld_ and in Ogilby’s _America_, hardly embodied more exact information. The Hexham English version of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas, intended for the English market, but published in Amsterdam by Hondius and Jannson in 1636 (of which there is a fine copy in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society), in its map of “Nova Anglia,” etc., kept up the commingling of Smith’s plot and names with the present Dutch ones. Blaeu’s of 1635 was the prototype of the chart in Dudley’s _Arcano del Mare_ (1646), of which a fac-simile is given in the preceding chapter.

This is a reduction of a sketch of a part of a manuscript Map of North America, dated 1650, of which a drawing is given in the _Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France_, ii. 61. The key is as follows:—

1. Sauvages Hurons.
2. Lac des Iroquois [Lake Champlain].
3. Sauvages Iroquois.
4. Sauvages Malectites.
5. Sauvages Etechemins.
6. Pemicuit [Pemaquid].
7. Pentagouet.
8. Isle des Monts Deserts.
9. Baye de Kinibequi.
10. Sauvages Kanibas.
11. Caskobé [Casco Bay].
12. Pescadoué [Piscataqua].
13. Selem [Salem].
14. Baston [Boston].
15. NOVA ANGLIA.
16. Sauvages Pequatis [Pequods].
17. Plymuth.
18. Cap Malabar.
19. Sauvages Narhicans [Narragansetts].
20. Isle de Bloque [Block Island].
21. Isle de Nantochyte [Nantucket].]

For the next twenty years the Dutch plotting was the one in vogue. Visscher, in 1652, disjoined the two principal islands south of Cape Cod, and gave a better shape to that peninsula; but Crane Bay (Plymouth) continued to be more prominent than Boston. The French map of Sanson (1656) so far followed the Dutch as to recognize the claims of “Nouveau Pays Bas” to stretch through Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Plymouth Colony, as shown in the sketch in chap. xi. The old Dutch mistakes and the Dutch names characterize Hendrick Doncker’s _Paskaert_, in 1659, and other of the Hollanders’ sea-charts of this time. In 1660, François du Creux’s (Creuxius) _Historia Canadensis_ converts into a Latin nomenclature, in a curious jumble, the names of the English, Dutch, and French. This map is given in fac-simile in Shea’s _Mississippi_, p. 50, and also in Vol. IV. of the present work. The next year (1661) Van Loon’s _Pascaerte_ was based on Blaeu and De Laet, and his _Zee-Atlas_, though not recognized by Asher, represents the best knowledge of the time. There is a copy in Harvard College Library. There are other maps of Visscher of about this same time, in which Cape Cod becomes as excessively attenuated as it had been too large before.

This follows a manuscript French map preserved in the Depot des Cartes et Plans at Paris, as shown in a sketch by Mr. Poore in the _Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France_, iii. 11.]

Of the later Dutch charts or maps, the chief place must be given to that in Roggeveen’s Sea-Atlas, which is called in the English version _The Burning Fen_, and which still insists in calling the Cape Cod peninsula in 1675 a part of “Nieuw Holland,” as does one of Jannson’s of about the same date, in which Smith’s names survive marvellously when those of other towns had long taken their places. A map, _La Nouvelle Belgique_, covering also New England, and fashioned on one of Jannson’s, is annexed to an article, “Une Colonie Néerlandaise,” by Colonel H. Wauwermans, in the _Bulletin de la Société Géographique d’Anvers_, iv. 173. The Blaeu map, “Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova,” found in the Atlas of 1685, still preserves most of the older Dutch falsities; and that geographer made no one of these errors so conspicuous as he did in making still nearer than before the approach of “Lacus Irocociensis” to Narragansett Bay. A short dotted boundary-line is made to connect them, and he dispelled the old Dutch claim to southeastern New England, by putting “Nieu Engelland” east of this line, and “Nieu Nederlandt” west of it. This map was substantially followed in Allard’s _Minor Atlas_, of a few years later. A new English cartography sprang up when there came a demand for geographical knowledge, as the events of Philip’s War engaged general attention. The royal geographer Speed issued in 1676 a map of New England and New York in his _Prospect_; but he seems to have followed Visscher and the other Dutch authorities implicitly, as did Coronelli and Tillemon in the New England parts of their map of Canada issued in 1688. Stevens, in his _Bibliotheca Geographica_, p. 229, notes an English map of New England and New York, which he supposes to belong to 1690, “sold by T. Bassett, in Fleet Street,” which is seemingly enlarged from so early a Dutch map as De Laet’s of 1625. The text of Josselyn’s _Voyages_ was used as the basis of _A Description of New England_, which accompanied in folio a folded plate, entitled “Mapp of New England, by John Seller, Hydrographer to the King.” It is without date, but is mentioned in the _London Gazette_ in 1676, and could not have appeared earlier than 1674, when Josselyn’s book was printed. There is a copy in Harvard College Library; and it shows the coast from Casco Bay to New York, with a corresponding interior. These are precisely the bounds in the map which is given in Mather’s _Magnalia_ in 1702, and which seems, in parts at least, to have been drawn from Seller’s. Sabin (_Dictionary_, vol. xiii. no. 52,629) gives _A Description of New England in general, with a Description of the Town of Boston in particular_, London, John Seller, 1682, 4º. Seller is also known to have issued a small sketch map in his _New England Almanac_, 1685 (copy in Harvard College Library); and still another, of which a fac-simile is given in Palfrey’s _New England_, iii. 489. There is a map (5 x 4½ inches) of New England by Robert Morden in R. Blome’s _Present State of his Majesty’s Isles and Territories in America_, 1687, p. 210, which is based on Seller’s, and which has been reproduced by the Bradford Club in their _Papers concerning the Attack on Hatfield and Deerfield_, New York, 1859. A different map, extending to New France and Greenland, is given in the Amsterdam editions of Blome, 1688 and 1715. Hubbard’s map, accompanying his _Narrative of the Troubles in New England_, 1677, a rude woodcut,—the first attempt at such work in the colony,—extends only to the Connecticut westerly; but northerly it goes far enough to take in the White Hills, which in the London reissue of the map are called “Wine Hills.” This is also given by Palfrey, iii. 155, after the London plate, and further notes upon it will be found in the _Memorial History of Boston_, i. 328. There is also a detailed delineation of the New England coast in John Thornton’s _Atlas Maritimus_, 1701-21.

In this enumeration of the maps or charts which give New England, or any considerable part of it, on a scale sufficient for detail, it is thought that every significant draft is mentioned, though some repetitions, particularly by the Dutch, have been purposely omitted.

Modern maps of New England, which indicate the condition of this period, will be found in Palfrey’s _New England_, vol. i., showing the geography of 1644, and in vol. iii. that of 1689; and in Uhden’s _Geschichte der Congregationalisten, Leipsic_, 1840.