JOHN SMITH AND HIS MAP OF VIRGINIA
One of the most significant historical pieces from the colonial period is map simply titled “Virginia”. It was a magnificent map, full of information about the terrain and Indian tribes and embellished with two images captured by John White in his trip to nearby Roanoke Island in 1597. Those and other images provide beautiful examples of the art of cartography.
Its author (cartographer) was Captain John Smith, a 27 year old soldier-adventurer who had departed England in 1606 among a group of colonists to establish a new life in Virginia. They arrived in 1607, and within a few days Smith set out to comply with their instructions to survey the waterway on which they settled in hopes of finding gold and a link to the Pacific Ocean. (Note the specious lake or ocean near the upper right on the map.) Great Britain had not yet given up hope in finding a North-West Passage to the Pacific Ocean. But Smith did not find such a link with the Powhatan Flumen (later James River) along which they had established James Town. Undaunted by this disappointment, he and his crew spent three months travelling by boat up the local rivers from the James in the south to the Potomac in the north to the extent possible and charted them and the Chesapeake Bay. They traveled by foot into the interior and located some 150 Indian tribes. In 1609 Smith was injured and returned to England where he prepared his map of Virginia. Some scholars doubt that Smith made the final map because he did not appear to have the necessary skills, but he certainly would have supervised the preparation of the manuscript map from which the copper plate was engraved by William Hole. But that is all academic now since early historians and catalogers ascribed the map to Smith.
Smith’s map, first published in 1612, was enormously popular in its day and is still consulted by historians. During the next dozen years the copper plate was altered by the additions of such elements as longitude and latitude, the date 1606, page numbers, Smith’s coat of arms, additions of place names and corrections to geography. All together, 12 states of the original copper plate have been identified and catalogued. And in 1819, a new engraving was made in Richmond, Virginia and published in a reprint of Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia. The new engraving can be easily distinguished from the original. I’ll tell you how in a later blog.
Tales from the Rare Map Cabinet by Luke A. Vavra
Stock Number UV018
Leave a Reply