The British Cartography of Eighteenth-Century North America

Abstract

On four April evenings in the Fellows' Lounge of The Newberry Library, William P. Cumming, Professor Emeritus of English at Davidson College, North Carolina, delivered the second series of the Kenneth Nebenzahl Jr. Lectures. At the beginning, Dr Cumming explained his interpretation of the general title of the series: 'The British Cartography ofEighteenth-Century North America'. While the overwhelming majority of cartographers Dr Cumming included were 'British', he did not neglect such men as the Swiss Captain Collet and the German De Brahm who were employed on British government service. Neither did he neglect those colonial settlers in America who regarded themselves as British subjects. The 'eighteenthcentury' of the title was likewise neither intended to exclude the important seventeenth-century precursors of maps produced in the following century, nor to include the years after the Treaty of Peace in 1783 when British mapping in North America, south of the St. Lawrence, came almost to a standstill. Again, the geographical bounds of Dr Cumming's lectures, rather than being the entire continent of North America, centered on the British colonies with some reference to the Trans-Allegheny region. The first lecture, 'Mapping the Southern British colonies', was a masterly summary of the development of the cartographic representation of North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, with the great improvements in geographical knowledge demonstrated in the contrast of the Lords Proprietors' map of Carolina (1672) with the sophisticated cartographic achievements of Joseph Purcell a century later. In the· second lecture, the area of concentration changed to the northern British colonies, New England, Canada, and the Trans-Allegheny region (although it was pointed out that the last two areas were primarily in French possession until after the middle of the century). The themes of the third and fourth lectures, coastal charting and military mapping respectively, departed from the regional approach of the first two: they provided a new angle on the material in the former lectures as well as contributing subject-matter of their own. The theme of the third lecture was the tremendous improvement in the quality of coastal surveying and cartography from the English Pilot (Fourth Book) 1689, to the work of J. F. W. Des Barres in the Atlantic Neptune. The final lecture, 'The Cartography of Conflict' described the specialised cartography demanded by Britain's involvement in two wars in an unfamiliar continent far from her own shores: the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Of particular interest was Dr Cumming's description of several recently examined caches of manuscript maps in England, especially the Alnwick Castle and the Royal United Services Institution collections, not previously known or available to historians. Plans for publishing the lectures are now in progress. This will make available to a wider audience the wealth of information Dr Cumming has gathered on the British cartography of eighteenth-century North America, together with some of the important problems and topics which he has identified.