A Biography of a Map in Motion

Before Chesapeake City at one end of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal was named in 1839, the plantation site had been known as Bohemia Manor for more than two centuries, under the ownership of Augustine Herrman, a Bohemian who worked for the Dutch West-Indische Compagnie (wic) in both Amsterdam and later New Amsterdam. Herrman marked its location on his magnificent map Virginia and Maryland as it is Planted and Inhabited this present year 1670. Koot explores the multiple intentions of the Herrman map from its origins as a manuscript initially commissioned by Philip Calvert in 1659 delimiting the boundary between Dutch New Netherlands and colonial Maryland to a far different map printed in London in 1673 as a piece of imperial propaganda celebrating possession of the broader Chesapeake.Koot first tells the story of this “map in motion” in three chapters that trace its journey through Herrman’s work as a merchant and then as a mapmaker and as a planter before shifting to England for two chapters. One chapter centers on Cecil Calvert (Lord Baltimore), the map’s patron, and William Faithorne, its engraver; the other chapter discusses map consumers, starting with map printer John Seller, who was associated with the network of bookstores and coffee houses around the Royal Exchange, and extending to Samuel Pepys, who owned a copy of the Herrman map.In 1612, John Smith made a map of Virginia Discouvered and Discribed that was printed with west at the top, thus permitting the riverine complexity of Chesapeake Bay to be read horizontally. Hermann used the same orientation, but his map (in four segments) has a navigational emphasis on soundings, typical of a cleaner Dutch cartographic tradition based on maritime trading routes—in contrast to the English bias for property and the identification of landed estates. Koot draws out these differences across an array of contemporary maps by other cartographers. Herrman spanned two worlds—as a Dutch trader who sailed to the Caribbean from his New Amsterdam base and especially to the tricky waters of the Chesapeake where he traveled for twenty years to acquire tobacco but also a planter in English Maryland. He cultivated and profited from what Koon terms the “interimperial” Anglo-Dutch trade, but in the end, his cartographical masterpiece was coopted by the English who were keen to stamp it as unambiguous evidence of their colonial space. One of the more interesting parts of the book is how, with the aid of absentee proprietor Lord Baltimore’s patronage and Faithorne’s engravings, the Chesapeake-originated Herrman map was reframed and re-annotated into a metropolitan London statement of ownership befitting the atlases of possession inventoried by the Lords of Trade and Plantations.Koot spins a wider web of comparison using secondary sources to compensate for the lack of precise details regarding Herrman’s efforts. However, his frequent resort to speculation about Herrman and others—marked by such qualifiers as “may have,” “most likely,” “perhaps,” “probably,” “might very well have,” etc.—become tiring, despite the support of his extensive and thorough secondary-source citations. In the end, the book is slighter than it might have been, notwithstanding its sixteen color plates and thirty-five smaller black and white images, in part because of the difficulty of deciphering them. Readers might need to view the map on an enlargeable digital version (https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3880.ct000766/) to get a proper sense of the map and to appreciate both Herrman’s talents and Koot’s scholarship

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biography · Cartography · Chesapeake bay · Colonialism · Geography · Possession (linguistics) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · Geology · Historical Geography and Cartography · History · Philosophy

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