Maps in Colonial America: An introduction

S. Max Edelson (University of Virginia)

Colonial America includes a number of digitised maps, plans, and charts in the collections of The National Archives (TNA), consisting of a selection of American images in the MPG 1 and MR 1 record series that have been extracted from material now in the CO 5 series. The larger of the two, MPG 1, was created for flat maps extracted from the bundles of manuscript records in which they were originally included in the Colonial Office; those stored as rolled maps received the MR 1 designation. The map collection in Colonial America only includes those extracted from CO 5, and so is by no means a comprehensive representation of the cartographic materials available at TNA to researchers of the period. Also available (and invaluable) is the CO 700 series, which contains a voluminous collection of cartographic materials organized by colony, as well as several other records series featuring maps, plans, and charts. This collection also perforce excludes many original manuscript and published maps produced or obtained by the state that can be found in other repositories both in Britain and abroad, such as the British Library (particularly in “K. Top,” the King’s Topographic Collection), the Library of Congress, the UK Admiralty Library in Portsmouth, and the UK Hydrographic Office in Taunton. Nevertheless, this collection has unique value for historical research because it allows students and scholars to view the maps alongside the parent texts with which they were originally associated.

 

American maps in MPG 1 and MR 1

The temporal spread of the maps in this collection reflects the timing of the English state’s more general turn toward information-gathering as it oversaw the expanding geographic range of its strategic and commercial interests. This collection includes 144 distinct images from MPG 1 and MR 1, only three of which date from before 1700. The earliest, a 1681 manuscript chart of the Chesapeake Bay (MPG 1/375), was drafted in the style of the “Thames School,” makers of hand-drawn navigational charts on vellum that codified the geographic knowledge of seafarers. A close copy of this chart can also be found in the “Blathwayt Atlas,” a compilation of overseas maps gathered together by William Blathwayt, the clerk of the Council on Trade and Plantations, currently in the possession of the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1672, the King had charged the Lords of Trade to “procure exact Mapps, Platts or Charts of all and Every of our said Plantations abroad.” Along with a number of other published and manuscript maps, Blathwayt collected and compiled this hand-drawn chart of the Chesapeake Bay as one of a number of images that provided the Lords of Trade with a bound reference volume they might consult as they considered incoming correspondence from American officials. How these two similar charts became parts of two official English archives is unclear, but the images both speak to the haphazard system of map collection in place before 1750, when the British government relied on independently produced maps that it gathered rather than commissioning its own surveys. Early on, independent mapmakers generated images of England’s overseas territories and agencies of the state, particularly the Lords of Trade, collected them into a working archive.

In 1699, Virginia governor Francis Nicholson dispatched two images to London: a map of the Louisiana country (MPG 1/1221), to illustrate his scheme to increase English commerce with North American Indians, and an outline map of Williamsburg, the Virginian capital, showing the location of the recently established College of William and Mary (MR 1/2067). Together, these three manuscript images--a coastal chart, a terrestrial map, and a town plan--are the only record of English colonization in seventeenth-century America in these archive series, despite the fact that English colonizers and mapmakers had been active in North America and the West Indies since the 1580s. This scarcity of early maps in MPG 1 and MR 1 does not mean that English surveyors and cartographers had been idle. A number of comprehensive carto-bibliographies show that, although they initially lagged behind their counterparts in Antwerp, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Paris, commercial English map-publishers gained access to new surveys, reports, and manuscripts that described American lands and waters and produced hundreds of important maps that traced the progress of English expansion in the western hemisphere.