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Cartes et cartographies dans le monde anglophone aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

Mapping Dispossession: the Social Worlds of Adlum’s 1792 Pennsylvania Map

Bertie Mandelblatt

Résumés

Dans les premières décennies d’existence de la Jeune République américaine, des Etats comme le Vermont, le Massachusetts et la Pennsylvanie ont produit des cartes de grand format sur plusieurs pages afin de préciser et de consolider leur identité en tant qu’Etat dans le cadre de l’Etat-nation étatsunien émergent. L’une des questions brûlantes, à la fois pour l’Etat fédéral et les Etats fédérés, était alors celle de l’expansion à l’Ouest, parce que remettant en question les frontières qui avaient été fixées et parce que promettant, en apparence, un agrandissement sans fin. Cet attrait de l’Ouest est omniprésent dans la carte de l’arpenteur, John Adlum, réalisée en 1792 et intitulée A Map Exhibiting a General View of the Roads and Inland Navigation of Pennsylvania. Commandée par la société récemment créée par la Pennsylvanie pour la promotion de tels travaux publics, cette carte met en évidence l’essor de la spéculation foncière reposant sur les « améliorations » telles que les routes et les canaux, ces infrastructures reposant elles-mêmes sur le déplacement des populations amérindiennes devant quitter les terres situées à l’Ouest des villes côtières, dont Philadelphie, immédiatement après la Guerre d’Indépendance. Cet essai révèle les antécédents coloniaux de la carte d’Adlum en mettant en lumière les similarités et les liens avec les cartes réalisées depuis les débuts de la cartographie de la colonie en 1681, et il étudie comment Adlum a prédit la future forme de l’Etat, ce qui situe Adlum et sa pratique de la cartographie dans le contexte colonial et dans celui de la jeune république.

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1In a proposal submitted in 1791 to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the newly formed Society for Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation included estimates of the costs to clear the land needed for the creation of a network of canals. These canals, the Society argued, would open up the interior of the state for internal trade by “facilitating every possible communication between the different parts of the state” (Morris 1). These estimates had been prepared over the previous two years by several men, one of whom was the surveyor John Adlum who projected that the costs of clearing a route from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna River, by way of the Schuylkill and Swatara Rivers would be in excess of £77,000 (Morris 15). Adlum was, in fact, intimately connected to the Society and the canal project that it was proposing in more ways than one: with John Wallis, he compiled and produced a map issued in 1792, the year following the Society’s proposal, a map based on surveying work he had done in previous years but intended to accompany the canal proposal and to provide views of the proposed canal networks (Kent and Deardorff; Gahn).

Fig. 1: John ADLUM and John WALLIS, A Map Exhibiting a General View of the Roads and Inland Navigation of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia: 1792.

Fig. 1: John ADLUM and John WALLIS, A Map Exhibiting a General View of the Roads and Inland Navigation of Pennsylvania… Philadelphia: 1792.

Image from the Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, courtesy of Stanford University Libraries. Permalink: http://purl.stanford.edu/​rg473wj5533

2In the conclusion to the Society’s proposal, Morris made clear how essential Adlum’s map was to the goals of the project. He wrote:

The Society have directed an accurate geographical and hydrographical map to be compiled from actual surveys; exhibiting a general and compleat view of the roads and water communications, which are proposed to be improved, connecting them with the roads and water communications of the neighbouring states; and they have promoted a liberal subscription for the immediate publication of the same; considering that such a map will not only be highly useful to all persons who wish to gain a general knowledge of the situation of the country, and the various improvements of which the state of Pennsylvania is susceptible, but it will likewise be useful to the public, by directing their attention to the different parts of the state which are the objects of improvement, and bringing forward individuals, as well as companies, to promote and undertake the execution of the same. (Morris 20-21)

Indeed, Morris observed, the map would be useful, not only in connection to the proposed canal project, but to all members of the public interested in any future ‘improvements’ of the state of Pennsylvania.

3I argue in this essay that, exactly as Morris predicted, Adlum’s map, entitled A Map Exhibiting a General View of the Roads and Inland Navigation of Pennsylvania, and part of the adjacent states… (Figure 1) performed a rather more expansive set of functions than simply illustrating the proposed canal project, functions that included reinforcing the longstanding cartographic myth that Pennsylvania was empty except for European settlers and open for agricultural and industrial development. In so doing, the map appealed to a certain set of social worlds, reflecting back to their members the early republican geographical vision of the state that was built on industry and westward expansion, a vision they sought to shape and to profit from. Historians of cartography reaching back to the founding fathers of critical cartography, John Brian Harley and David Woodward, have long argued that maps are not simply objectively true representations of geographic reality, representations that become increasingly truer and more accurate with historical advances in cartographic technique in the Western tradition (Harley, “Deconstructing the Map”; Harley The New Nature of Maps; Edney “The origins and development of J. B. Harley’s cartographic theories”; Edney, Cartography 1-8). However, if scholars in the school of critical cartography more or less agree on what maps are not, there is a fair divergence in ideas of what maps are and what maps do. In what follows, I wish to highlight a specific aspect of the complexity of cartographic representation in the example of Adlum’s 1792 map of Pennsylvania: the ways maps actively bring into being the social worlds with which they dynamically engage.h

4To undertake this analysis, I will use a conceptual framework recently elaborated by Martin Brückner, who, drawing from theories developed by cultural anthropologist Arjun Apparduai (Appadurai), published an influential work in historical cartography arguing for the centrality of the social lives of maps. Put simply, with this expression – “the social lives of maps” – Brückner refers to the social worlds in which maps were produced, exchanged, and read, from the sixteenth century forward. In the eighteenth century and in the early republic of the United States of America, specifically, Brückner argues, the increasingly commercial aspects of maps embedded them in layers of social relationships that must be studied and understood if we wish to understand the true value of maps (Brückner, The Social Lives of Maps in America 1-24). According to this analysis, considering how these social relationships establish maps’ meanings is an effective route to understanding not only how maps made claims about space, but also the nature of these spatial claims themselves. Increasingly large, but far from universal, audiences actively constructed, acquired, exchanged, and read maps as new professions of land surveyors, engineers, urban planners, city and state officials, architects, map-engravers, map printers, and map sellers emerged and grew.

5Following this line of thought, I argue that Adlum’s 1792 map of Pennsylvania performed two distinct and seemingly countervailing functions. While the map looks forward to early nineteenth century industrial transformations of landscape such as the Erie Canal (constructed between 1797-1825), which were expressly engineered to accelerate westward expansion and to amplify the industrial potential of the early Republic, it also looks back to more than a century of colonial and early republican Pennsylvania mapmaking, in which maps had been compiled and published by surveyors and landowners for the purpose of promoting a colony in which they had a personal financial stake. In these endeavours, we can observe an emerging amalgamation of the rising technical professions of surveyors, cartographers, and engineers, and the social class of landowners. After briefly describing the fraught and contradictory social worlds included and excluded in Adlum’s cartographic project, and then describing the map itself, this essay will outline the colonial antecedents to Adlum’s map, highlighting similarities and connections across a span that dates from the cartographic beginnings of the colony in 1681. I will conclude with a brief comparison to another European map of the region depicted in Adlum’s map in order to consider a dramatically contrasting example of cartographic practice that invoked the social relationships embedded in geographic knowledge production in a very different way.

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6As Brückner states, “the recovery of a map’s social life and meanings hinges on the people who generated a map’s geodetic archive, on the surveying methods, and on the institutional practices surrounding the transfer of data to map sheets, including the choice of scale and projection. In this type of analysis, the value of a map emerges through the lens of knowledge production” (Brückner, The Social Lives of Maps in America 20-21). Elsewhere, Brückner has explored in depth the emergence of surveying in early America in the context of colonial identity and the production of geographic knowledge, including maps; other scholars have also examined the rise of surveying and its connections to new conceptions of land use (Brückner, The Geographic Revolution 16-50; Greer, Property and Dispossession 311-54; de Vorsey 191-93; Love 1-139). However, a pivotal means by which maps were able to reflect and create new colonial and republican social worlds also involves the processes of destruction and dispossession. Indeed, Brückner gestures, if only briefly, at this dual structure inherent in British American mapmaking: “Charting coastal waters and rivers, plotting town and land grants, erasing as well as inscribing ethnic communities, … American maps answered state and local demands for measuring the physical and social world, establishing order for some while disenfranchising many others” (Brückner, The Geographic Revolution 4, author’s emphasis), a feature that easily crossed the political divide between colony and nation-state created by the War of Independence. That is, Adlum’s map documents the growth of land speculation dependent on “improvements” such as roads and canals in the decades preceding the US War of Independence which were, themselves, dependent on the drawn-out process of displacement of indigenous people from land to the west of coastal cities, including Philadelphia. Recent scholarship reflects the pressing concern to understand both colonial and republican mapmaking and geographic knowledge production in this light. In his comparative study of land ownership in early North America, for example, Allan Greer considers the expansion to the Americas of European surveying practices and its consequences for the dispossession of indigenous peoples (Greer, Property and Dispossession 311-54). In Adlum’s case, the Susquehannock, Lenape, Delaware and Tuscarora peoples who made up the Iroquois and Algonkian-speaking residents of the regions stretching from south of Lake Erie to the Atlantic coast south of the Chesapeake Bay had and acted upon their own longstanding ideas regarding the geographies in which they lived and moved, ideas regarding geographic boundaries and borders, land ownership and land use (Greer, Property and Dispossession 271-310; Hämäläinen).

7Adlum’s map was published in Philadelphia, the most important centre of mapmaking in the US in the 1790s because of the city’s importance on the national stage (Short 144-46), and “Respectfully inscribed” bottom right to “Thomas Mifflin, Governor, and General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania”, blazoning the power and authority of the new state government. It is a four-sheet map measuring 38.5 x 35.5 inches, and in many ways fits the pattern of large format, multi-sheet maps made by states of the early republic, such as those of Vermont and Massachusetts, in efforts to sharpen and consolidate their state identity within the emerging nation state. Although the map centres on the state of Pennsylvania, it includes considerable details of its neighbouring states: New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, even including Virginia’s borders with Maryland and New York’s borders with Connecticut and Massachusetts along the top right edge. As discussed, the map’s focus is on depicting existing, planned and proposed roads and canals on the one hand and the intricacies of the region’s waterways, on the other. It includes several inset figures, including a detailed technical engraving of a canal and two cross-sections of a lock, and there is substantial narrative text printed in blocks in the map’s bottom left quadrant describing the inset figures.

8A pressing issue for both the Republic and individual states, one that posed a challenge to the question of fixed borders but also seemingly promised limitless gain, was that of westward expansion. The lure of the west is everywhere evident in this map, whose almost singular focus is on the network of waterways extending far inland (or westward) from the Chesapeake and Atlantic coastlines, providing a tremendous level of detail of the tributaries that feed the major river systems. Unsurprisingly given this focus, two of the Great Lakes (Ontario and Erie) form the map’s northern frame, with New York’s Finger Lakes and Lake Oneida extending below Lake Ontario, and the river system that connects these lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

9Essentially, the overarching intent of the map is to depict in detail the potential of these river systems to provide transport to merchants and farmers located not only in western Pennsylvania but also in western Maryland and northwestern Virginia and upstate New York, imagining a future role for Philadelphia in facilitating the trade of goods produced inland. Although wagons were the chief mode of transport in early Pennsylvania, riverboats and the waterways on which they travelled were considered an essential supplement that had the potential to improve the limited options provided by road networks (Lemon 27-31, 185-86). Indeed, the presence of navigable inland waterways that could bring goods to the port of Philadelphia was a clear signal to land speculators that western Pennsylvania was open for settlement and for sale. Indeed, Adlum’s map of Pennsylvania creates links between political sovereignty, westward expansion, indigenous displacement, and land value, on the one hand, and the creation of state infrastructure and cartographic practice, including surveying, map printing and map engraving, on the other. This dual structure is as indicative of social relationships and an emerging social order as it is of the evolution of map-making in the early republic, and the dramatic shifts underway in the regional infrastructure surrounding the nation’s first capital. Roads, but even more importantly, water was the means to accomplish the goal of improvement, not only through the proposed canals that would facilitate transit across the Chesapeake Peninsula and joining the Delaware and the Susquehanna Rivers but also inland waterways.

10Adlum’s 1792 map follows in a long line of British American maps of the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, the river systems that drain into them and the regions stretching westwards from them, and shares with these maps a telling multitude of features. An analysis of this lineage reveals both to what extent Adlum drew on his predecessors and the evolution of the cartographic depiction of Pennsylvania as evacuated of its indigenous residents. To begin, the first separate map of the colony was drafted by an anonymous cartographer and is often called “the Penn Map,” although its full title is A Map of Some of the South and eastbounds of Pennsylvania in America. being partly Inhabited…. (Anon 1681) (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: ANONYMOUS. A Map of some of the South and eastbounds Pennsylvania in America being partly inhabited. London: John Thornton, [1681.]

Fig. 2: ANONYMOUS. A Map of some of the South and eastbounds Pennsylvania in America being partly inhabited. London: John Thornton, [1681.]

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library. Permalink: https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/​luna/​servlet/​s/​7z2se7

11It was published in 1681 by John Thornton to accompany one of a number of pamphlets written by William Penn in the same year, the most likely being A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania lately granted by the King (Penn 1682). All the pamphlets were published to promote the colonization of the large tract of land Penn had recently been granted by King Charles II, although the ambiguity about the exact boundaries of this tract of land laid the foundation of centuries of conflict to follow (Gray). This foundational map of the colony was not based on any contemporary surveys, but rather on at least two pre-existing maps: most importantly, Augustine Herrman’s 1673 Virginia and Maryland As it is planted and Inhabited this present Year 1670, and an earlier map printed and sold by John Thornton, A Mapp of Virginia Mary-Land, New-Jarsey, New-York, & New England… (1678-1679) which itself was based on Herrman’s 1673 map. Importantly, Penn’s 1681 map, like Adlum’s more than a century later, depicts the mouths of the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers and their hinterlands as being devoid of indigenous people, a landscape whose most obvious feature is a regularly spaced series of named trees that any English observer would find familiar: walnut, ash, poplar, beech, mulberry, oak, fir, pine, chestnut, and cedar (Mann 78-80, 84-92). Some topographic detail is included, although it appears mostly schematic, and only settlements located along the rivers are named. Indeed, the cartographer has not attempted to expand the geographical knowledge of the enormous tract of land granted to Penn or to delineate the vague and contested boundaries. One scholar has argued that “because of its incorrectness … the Penn map actually subtracted from contemporary knowledge rather than added to it” (Black 106). Crucially, in the copies of the map that include a four-column textual description of the colony pasted below the map itself, the inhabitants are described as being “… by nation Sweads, Dutch, English, who are capable of giving Entertainment to New Commers till they can provide for themselves.” This cartographic depiction of the embryonic colony presents indigenous people as being entirely absent, bar a mention of an “old Indian field” in the upper reaches of the Delaware River (Mann; Black 102-108; Garrison 262-63), a deliberate cartographic distortion of the half-century of dense and conflictual indigenous-European relations that preceded Penn (Soderlund; Thompson).

12Thomas Holme was the colony’s first surveyor-general, appointed by William Penn in 1682, and, in 1687, he produced the first map of the colony based on contemporary surveys, those that he himself conducted. The product of four years of work, the monumental, seven-sheet map is entitled A Map of the province of Pennsilvania, containing the three countyes of Chester, Philadelphia, and Bucks… and has been called by one historian of cartography “without question the finest printed cartographic document relating to North America to be published to date” (Burden 299). Holme dedicated this map to his patron, William Penn, and used vocabulary that would see an echo many years late in Adlum’s map of 1792. Like Penn’s 1681 map before it, the map was expressly compiled, designed and published to increase the interest of prospective colonists and was issued with a pasted-on textual description below the neat line that states that the “Business of this Map is to shew the Improvements of the said Proprietary and Inhabitants’ since the foundation of the Province in 1681” (Gallo, “William Penn, William Petty and Surveying”).

13Holme himself was the “Proprietary” (or landowner) in question: even before arriving in the colony and being named surveyor-general, he had purchased 5000 acres of land (ultimately acquiring a total of 11,000 acres across the colony) and become a subscriber to £50 of stock of the Free Society of Traders (Garrison 264-65). Even more significantly, he was a central figure in colonial administration as a member of the first assembly, representing Philadelphia County in the Provincial Council and serving on many colonial committees with responsibility for charting the direction of the burgeoning colony. Crucially, in his various official capacities, Holme was active in negotiating treaties with indigenous people. Nevertheless, although he addresses the cultural practices of the native inhabitants of Pennsylvania in the accompanying textual description, they appear nowhere on the map. Indeed, the map’s focus is on displaying the existing structures of colonial land ownership, presenting in extraordinary detail the lots of some 700 landowners along the Delaware River stretching upriver from Penn’s own property at Pennsbury to Newcastle downriver. In addition, a reduced version of a plan of Philadelphia that Holme had published in 1683 was inserted in the upper right quadrant of the map to indicate the urban vitality of the colony. Even more clearly than the anonymous Penn map, then, Holme’s map is a dynamic vision of colonial promotion through which, and in which, the social and economic roles of landowner, land speculator, colonial administrator, lawmaker, and cartographer combine to produce a representation of colonial space evacuated of indigenous people (Burden 299-301; Garrison 263-69; Love 157-59).

14The production of maps of Pennsylvania increased significantly through the eighteenth century, and it is not within the scope of this essay to consider every cartographer or map individually; nevertheless, before I consider the work of Adlum’s contemporary Reading Howell in the late 1780s and 1790s, I will focus, if only briefly, on the cartographic production of Lewis Evans and Nicolas Scull in the 1740s and 1750s, and Scull’s grandson William Scull in the 1770s. All these men consolidated the “surveyor’s vision” of Pennsylvania that cartographically represented the lands stretching between Lake Erie and the Atlantic coasts drained by the Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers as peopled largely, if not entirely, by European and Euro-American settlers. Indigenous people are present but only barely: apart from the proliferation of indigenous toponyms, these textual narrative on the maps imply, following the model of 1681 Penn map’s ‘Old Indian field,’ that the time of ‘Indians’ was ephemeral or in the past. The present and future of these landscapes involved an entirely different set of social relationships guided, shaped, and embodied by the surveyor/cartographer/proprietor/speculator class responsible for the maps’ production.

15And yet, the realities of European and Euro-American settlers in late seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries were intensely intertwined with those of indigenous people. While the focus of such “improvers” as Robert Morris and John Adlum of the later period was on agricultural and industrial development far into the interior, the fur trades that interested William Penn even before his arrival in 1682 and that depended on sustained connections with indigenous traders remained active until at least the mid-eighteenth century, although they too had moved westward by the 1720s. By that time, the population of Susquehannocks had been reduced by defeat by the Iroquois in the previous decades and new groups such as the Shawnees and Delawares who had themselves been displaced arrived, only to continue the move westwards to the Ohio River Valley (Hinderaker 87-133; Ridner 311-14; Soderlund). Competing for land amongst themselves, European and Euro-American settlers continued their struggle to gain territorial advantage against indigenous peoples in the following decades, moving ever westward. Most significantly, William Penn’s two sons John Penn and Thomas Penn, working in concert with the colony’s provincial secretary James Logan, successfully defrauded the Delawares out of an immense tract of land in the Delaware and Lehigh Valleys in a manoeuvre known as the Walking Purchase of 1737, a transaction that also involved coercing approval from the Six Nations (Harper, Promised Land 46-71; Love 163-70; Greer, “Dispossession in a Commercial Idiom”).

16Welsh-born surveyor Lewis Evans, whose 1749 and 1755 maps of the middle colonies have made him one of the best-known eighteenth-century American cartographers, was intimately connected with the Walking Purchase. He produced a manuscript map of the Purchase, A Map of that Part of BUCKS COUNT released by the Indians to the Proprietaries of Pensilvania in September 1737, that delineated the extent of the lands fraudulently acquired by the Penns and Logan. Some years later, he was commissioned by the Assembly of Pennsylvania to produce his first major map, published in 1749 under the title A Map of Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, and the Three Delaware Counties (Figure 3); a second edition was published in 1752.

Fig. 3: Lewis EVANS. A Map of Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, and the Three Delaware Counties.... Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Lewis Evans, 1749.

Fig. 3: Lewis EVANS. A Map of Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, and the Three Delaware Counties.... Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Lewis Evans, 1749.

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library. Permalink: https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/​luna/​servlet/​s/​xgz306

17This map was the first of its kind: a multi-sheet map entirely prepared, from compilation to printing, in the colonies, and, although it was ultimately celebrated by the Pennsylvania Assembly, it encountered tremendous criticism due largely to its idiosyncratic design and the proliferation of textual narrative which covered entire quadrants of the map (Love 163-65). The text mostly relates geographic, meteorological, and hydrographic detail of the regions the map depicts, with sparse mention of indigenous settlement or cultural presence: the only substantial exception is the text describing Onondaga territory below Oneida Lake: “Onondaga, where the General Council of the Confederate Republic of the Six Nations meets.” More typical is the mention, in the upper reaches of the east branch of the Susquehanna, where Evans notes a place “Where Indian Corn, Tobacco, Squashes and Pompions [pumpkins] were first found by the Natives, according to their Traditions,” an expression that, once again, casts indigenous people in the light of archaic traditions, rather than as active antagonists or allies.

18The surveying and drafting of Evans’s magnum opus, the map that he produced six years later entitled the General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America… (Figure 4), was undertaken in the context of the earliest intrigues of the Seven Years War, specifically the increasing evidence of an expanding French presence in the Ohio River Valley with the construction of Fort Duquesne in 1754.

Fig. 4: Lewis EVANS. General Map of the Middle British Colonies, in America; viz. Virginia, Mariland, Delaware, Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.... Philadelphia: Lewis Evans, 1755.

Fig. 4: Lewis EVANS. General Map of the Middle British Colonies, in America; viz. Virginia, Mariland, Delaware, Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.... Philadelphia: Lewis Evans, 1755.

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library. Permalink: https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/​luna/​servlet/​s/​6m042l

19The map was accompanied by a 32-page pamphlet, Geographical, historical, political, philosophical and mechanical essays… (Philadelphia, 1755), in which Evans expanded on his geographical observations made over the years of his surveying and mapping career. Scholars have long focused on the many afterlives of the map and its use in boundary decision-making in subsequent decades, as well as its presentation of topographical and geodetic data via, once again, extensive embedded narrative text (Brückner ,The Social Lives of Maps in America 25-41; Garrison 269-74; Klinefelter; Love 168-69). For my purposes though, the crucial departure between the 1755 Evans map and his earlier maps, as well as the others I am considering here, is in his depiction of indigenous peoples’ connections to lands he depicted, which ranged from the Saint Lawrence River Valley and the lower Great Lakes in the upper quadrants of the map to below the beginnings of Chesapeake Bay, extending westward to the Ohio River Valley.

20In the 1755 map, Evans presents indigenous people as protagonists in their geographical setting and full actors in the histories of trade, warfare and inter-imperial competition that sweep across his map. Indeed, the midsection of the long subtitle of the map, contained within a title cartouche at the top of the map, states Evans’ goals most directly, goals that provide a forceful contrast to those of his earlier map. Here he describes the map’s focus as being “… the country of the Confederate Indians; comprehending Aquanishuonîgy proper, their place of residence, Ohio and Tïiuxsoxrúntie, their deer-hunting countries, Couxsaxráge and Skaniadarâde, their beaver-hunting countries….” Directly below the cartouche between Lake Huron and Lake Ontario, text describes how the ‘Confederates’ relinquished land to the English at two points in the eighteenth century in exchange for their protection. Southwest of this narrative, just above the Wabash River, more embedded text describes the Illinois’ alliance with the French; a third example is text describing a sweep of land south of Lake Erie crossing the Miami and Sandusky Rivers, which Evans describes thus: “These parts by the Confederates were allotted for the Wiandots when they were admitted into their League.” Most telling of all is a small legend to the right of the title cartouche in which Evans provides an explanation of how his map design accounts for the presence these indigenous protagonists: with the following text - “The ITALIC CAPITALS show the seats of the Indians” – followed by colours allocated to each group, Evans distinguishes between “extinct,” “nearly extinct,” and “considerable,” using colour coding to inscribe, and to claim to know, differentiated levels of indigenous activity and power.

21To be clear, Evans’ claims were not impartial, nor were they necessarily accurate at the time the map was published, so I am not contending that Evans was displaying a new level of knowledge of, or respect for, indigenous sovereignty or autonomy in the 1755 map. Rather, I maintain that in the context of growing British-French antagonism in the earliest years of the Seven Years War that were characterized by border skirmishes in exactly the regions mapped by Evans, his cartographic perspective reveals a profound understanding of how pivotal to each European and Euro-American side indigenous military alliances would prove – and were already proving – to be. As Max Edelson has argued, the Seven Years War and its aftermath provided a new impetus for the surveying and mapping of British colonies, and the maps themselves took on new strategic importance with the evolution of British post-war imperial imaginings (Edelson 21-101). Edelson also contends that the foundations of the 1763 Royal Proclamation which purported – in “bad faith” (141) – to protect indigenous lands westwards of an imaginary boundary had been laid forty years earlier, with a series of British attempts to close the open western border that were made at least partly to ensure indigenous possession of land for diplomatic reasons (Edelson 141-59; Richter, Trade, Land and Power 155-76). These attempts did nothing to solve the intractable conflicts inherent in the consolidation of British-American colonial space, but, especially during the volatile war-time years when military alliances took on a new valence, I argue that indigenous peoples themselves were mappable as allies, in a way in they hadn’t been in 1749. The social worlds of Evans’ 1755 map expanded to reflect these facts (Anderson 11-73; White 50-93).

22Like Lewis Evans, Philadelphia-born cartographer Nicholas Scull had a professional career that consistently brought him into close contact with the Conostoga, Delaware, Gawaneses, Shawni and Lenape peoples living in close proximity. Following in his father’s footsteps, Scull trained and worked as a surveyor of the regions around the Schuylkill and Lehigh Rivers, and he ultimately was appointed surveyor-general of Pennsylvania between 1748 and his death in 1761, but his surveying was only one part of an active and influential public life which entailed developing a deep level of linguistic proficiency in indigenous languages and cultural knowledge of indigenous affairs. Alongside several of his brothers, he served as an interpreter and intermediary for the Governing Council of Pennsylvania between the 1720s and the 1740s, delivering messages to indigenous chiefs on the Council’s behalf and serving as the Council’s representative, and he was elected sheriff of Philadelphia several times in these decades (Richter, Facing East From Indian Country 110-50, 182-87). He was, moreover, an important landowner in Pennsylvania. (Pennsylvania Colonial Records, Vol. 3, p. 187, 328, 389, 393, 411; Vol. 4, p. 413, 420, 743, 748, 767; Vol. 5, p. 55)

23Even more germane to his cartography, like Lewis Evans, Scull had a tight connection to the 1737 Walking Purchase, a connection that was made material in the 1759 map for which he is best known, the Map of the Improved Part of the Province of Pennsylvania (Figure 5). The first connection was made immediately in his capacity as surveyor: Scull was physically present the day in September 1737 when the three colonial walkers set out to “walk” (or, rather, sprint) the day and a half north from a boundary in Bucks County to establish the northern limits of the tract of land that James Logan, the provincial secretary, claimed the Delawares had agreed to sell. More importantly though, Scull was central to the claims of legitimacy that the Walking Purchase continued to have in subsequent decades when it was challenged. In 1757, twenty years after the Walking Purchase had been completed, the Delawares contended to Governor Denny that the Walk had been carried out dishonestly by Thomas Penn with the result of defrauding them of land (Harper 2004). Nicholas Scull, basing his testimony on his eyewitness account and acting in his capacity of Surveyor-General, personally attested in writing to Pennsylvania’s Governing Council that the exercise had been carried out lawfully and exactly according to the terms that had been set out (Pennsylvania Colonial. Records Vol. 7, 399-400; Vol 8, 246-261). Scull’s 1757 testimony concerning the Walk was the only one of six depositions made that day that was retained and entered into the conference minutes, even though it contradicted the testimony of several other eyewitnesses.

Fig. 5: Nicholas SCULL. To the Honourable Thomas Penn and Richard Penn, Esqrs., true & absolute proprietaries & Governours of the Province of Pennsylvania & counties of New-Castle, Kent & Sussex on Delaware this map of the improved part of the Province of Pennsylvania. / Is humbly dedicated… Philadelphia: Nicholas Scull, 1759.

Fig. 5: Nicholas SCULL. To the Honourable Thomas Penn and Richard Penn, Esqrs., true & absolute proprietaries & Governours of the Province of Pennsylvania & counties of New-Castle, Kent & Sussex on Delaware this map of the improved part of the Province of Pennsylvania. / Is humbly dedicated… Philadelphia: Nicholas Scull, 1759.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. Permalink: http://hdl.loc.gov/​loc.gmd/​g3820.ar129400

24William Buck, a nineteenth-century historian, has argued that Scull’s testimony was inescapably and indisputably unreliable because of Scull’s close ties to the landowning ‘proprietaries’ and colonial administrators Thomas and Richard Penn, who both commissioned the Walking Purchase in 1737 and, in 1757, were the object of the official complaints of the Delawares (Buck 172-76). This patronage network is made manifest by the dedication that makes up the full title of Nicholas Scull’s multi-sheet map of Pennsylvania, which, although published in 1759, was in its final years of preparation in 1756-1758, exactly the years of the Delawares’ attempts to obtain redress for the Walking Purchase deception. The full title of the map reads To the honourable Thomas Penn and Richard Penn esq., True & absolute Proprietaries & Governors of the Province of Pennsylvania & Counties of New-Castle, Kent & Sussex on Delaware, this Map of the improved Part of the Province of Pennsylvania is humbly dedicated by Nicholas Scull.

25Scull’s map is an exemplary instance of the “surveyor’s vision”: both intimately tied to the colonial establishment of landowners and administrators and directed towards the possibilities of transforming the colonial landscape in ways that directly benefitted himself as well as his benefactors. He was not reflecting but rather constructing a geographic model that set the stage for John Adlum’s map of 1792 three decades later (Myers 24-25; Pritchard and Taliaferro 188-89). In contrast to Lewis Evans’ maps, the map is focused exclusively on Pennsylvania. It is a large, 78 x 153 cm 3-sheet map and it was the first of its kind: a large-scale, large format map, printed in the colonies and, consequently, one of the most significant examples of eighteenth century British imperial cartography. Pennsylvania’s boundaries with New Jersey and Maryland frame the map on its eastern (right) and southern (bottom) edges, and the upper reaches of the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers (and of their tributaries) form the northern (top) edge; the Allegheny mountain chain runs along the western edge (left) of the map; only land west of the Delaware River is depicted in any detail. The map is notable for many reasons: it balances a strong focus on topography (and the presence of named mountain chains in particular) and the Delaware and Susquehanna watersheds with tremendous detail regarding European and Euro-American settlement, particularly in the vicinity of Philadelphia. Scull locates and names roads and towns, as well as a variety of structures built by colonists, such as meeting houses, forts, farms, taverns, mills, churches, ferries, and even a printing house. The only function of the rare text embedded in the map is to provide additional geographic detail (“This is one of the best Gaps for crossing the Mountains,” “Susquehanna R. at the Narrows is but 60 Perches broad; and the depth has been largely Sounded…”)

26 Crucially, references on Scull’s map to the many indigenous communities which whom Scull was so intimately familiar are exceedingly scarce. Other than the inevitable recourse Scull makes to indigenous toponyms, references to the cultural or geographic presence of the numerous indigenous peoples with whom Scull himself had worked are remarkably few. On the one hand, on the map legend Scull notes the presence of Indian towns with a triangle: the number of such towns that Scull places across the entire expanse of Pennsylvania does not exceed ten. More important is the network of paths that Scull denotes with dotted lines (“The prick’d lines are Indian paths”) that ranges across the map, sometimes intersecting with other roads and paths, but mostly quite separate. The paths often run alongside creeks or tributaries to the major rivers, and they are often named ‘Warriors Path’. With these two ghostly sets of symbols, Scull alludes to an indigenous presence that was, in actuality, much richer and denser, and much more actively involved in a contested and antagonistic relationship with Scull, his patrons and his community than his map shows.

27 William Scull, Nicholas Scull’s grandson, followed in the footsteps of both his father and his grandfather by becoming a surveyor, and he reprised his grandfather’s 1759 map in 1770 with the publication of his own Pennsylvania map: the full title, reflecting the familiar patronage network now many decades old, reads To the Honorable Thomas Penn and Richard Penn, Esquires, true and absolute proprietaries and Governors of the Province of Pennsylvania and the territories thereunto belonging and to the Honorable John Penn, Esquire, Lieutenant-Governor of the same, this map Of the Province of Pennsylvania Is humbly dedicated… Scholars have debated to what extent William Scull’s map deviated from his grandfather’s, perhaps because the 1770 map is distinctly reminiscent of the 1759 map, despite its reduced size (Garrison 277-79; Love 173-75; Doktor 11-17). Nevertheless, it is clear that Scull petit fils substantially expanded the map’s geographical scope, most notably pushing the westward boundary across the line of the Alleghenies and extending the map to show the forks of the Ohio River. The reason for this set of changes is certainly connected to the Seven Years War, and the removal of the French threat in the Ohio River Valley.

28 As a final example, I will extend this analysis of the “surveyor vision” that dominated early Pennsylvania mapping across the divide of the US War of Independence to include Reading Howell, the cartographer who created the map attached to Robert Morris’ 1791 proposal cited in the essay’s introduction (Garrison 281-82; Love, 180-82, Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation frontispiece). Howell, like many of his predecessors discussed here, was a landowner and, in addition to being a professional surveyor, was appointed one of three commissioners charged with exploring the headwaters of the Susquehanna, Lehigh, Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. He was a contemporary of John Adlum’s, and almost certainly his competitor as well. Certainly, the two men were working on their multi-sheet maps of Pennsylvania in the same years; indeed, Howell published a preliminary less-detailed map of Pennsylvania focusing on roads and inland navigation, drawn from the work he had done for his more detailed map in order to have his name associated with this work before Adlum. Howell registered his magnum opus, entitled A Map of the State of Pennsylvania, in 1791 and it was published in 1792, achieving the distinction of being the first four-sheet map of the state post-independence. In this map, Howell was responding to the needs clearly articulated by Pennsylvania’s merchant class, land speculators, and potential settlers for an accurate representation of the land on the westward border of the state, distances between locations, and the means of transportation that would allow these lands to be ‘improved.’ Accordingly, the map extends fully westward to today’s state border west of Pittsburgh, north to Lake Erie and the border with New York and is bounded by borders with Virginia and New Jersey. It is characterized -- and distinguished from its predecessors – by its westward focus as much as by its wealth of topographic detail and mass of internal civil administrative divisions. Harkening back to Nicholas Scull’s 1759 map, the totality of any indigenous presence is reduced to paths (represented by the slimmest of several kinds of dotted lines) and towns (represented by a small house symbol), both of which are almost completely lost in the accumulation of other detail. Perhaps most chilling is the mention, along the Pine Creek above where it joins the west branch of the Susquehanna in the top left quadrant of the map, of ‘Indians Killed,” the sole other reference to indigenous peoples.

29 Although John Adlum was preparing his map in the same years as Howell, and had both a similar professional background and a similar audience in mind, Adlum’s 1792 map which forms the nucleus of this essay is strikingly different. It is distinguished from Howell’s by the absence of obvious state borders and other kinds of internal civil divisions and by the singular unity of its focus. As described in the beginning of this essay, it is almost entirely concerned with the region’s network of rivers, tributaries, canals, and roads. The map provides much more detail of the states bordering Pennsylvania, as well as of the Delmarva Peninsula and both the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. It is, above all, marked by the presence of four extraordinary technical engravings of locks and canals in the bottom left quadrant of the map: in one series of three illustrations, two of the engravings show canal boats placed in a lock empty and full of water respectively, and the third is a birds-eye view of the boat in the lock. The fourth engraving illustrates a canal with two locks, and the ensemble of illustrations is accompanied by textual descriptions that describe the functioning of locks in canals. Robert Fulton is perhaps the engineer and inventor from Pennsylvania most associated with canal building and promotion, and there is, indeed, a parallel between the technical drawings on Adlum’s map and the series of seventeen technical engravings that Fulton produced for the publication of his Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation (1796). Nevertheless, Adlum’s work stands alone; during the years he was preparing his map, Fulton was in England studying art under Benjamin West, and only after the publication of his treatise did Fulton unsuccessfully attempt to interest both the United States and the French governments in his proposals (Dickinson 8-21; Love 89-92).

30By reaching beyond Pennsylvania’s borders and freeing his map of topographic detail, Adlum’s map escapes the more conventional focus on internal administration and a kind of topographic realism that define Howell’s map, and it propels Adlum’s “surveyor’s vision” in a new direction. All of these features – Adlum’s interest in the Delmarva Peninsula, the focus on rivers and tributaries, the relative absence of borders and topography and the technical drawings of locks – combine to produce a map uniquely representative of a conception of industrial and economic development (“improvement”) that looks forward to the nineteenth century (Myers 250-51). “Improving” landscapes and waterscapes has a long history and an extensive geographic reach across the early Americas: in the late eighteenth century alone, this term was used not only to describe the proto-industrialization of waterways and roads in the interior of the middle states, as we see on Adlum’s map, but it was also a rhetoric used, for example, by plantation owners in the Caribbean who sought to exploit enslaved labour more efficiently and with less risk (Dierksheide). On Adlum’s map, “improvements” are not restricted to Pennsylvania proper. Taking the form of proposed roads and canals, they cross the Delmarva Peninsula, the Pennsylvania-New York boundary line and are shown in upstate New York itself. Indeed, it is instructive to consider that in 1807, only 16 years after the publication of Adlum’s map, Jesse Hawley published his initial proposals for the Erie Canal, which, when finished in 1825, connected the cities of Albany and Buffalo in upstate New York following the Mohawk River upstream then heading west, effectively linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Adlum’s map, in fact, depicts a proposed road moving westward from Albany, exactly the route that the Erie Canal will ultimately take.

31In this cartographic vision, both borrowing from established Pennsylvania cartographic practice and looking forward to the nineteenth century, Adlum has evacuated indigenous social life from the map. While indigenous toponyms still exist, there is no explicit mention of indigenous life other than a reference to an Oneida reservation at the top of the map below Lake Oneida. The only other traces of the history of intense European-indigenous interaction that preceded Adlum and of the ways in which European geographic knowledge of the region was rooted in indigenous spatial knowledge and navigational practices are minor: two mentions of portages, an element that, in fact, appeared on early maps as well. Adlum includes a 9.5-mile portage between Lake Erie and Chatoughque Lake, and another portage north of the Mohawk River, just east of Canada River.

32So how does Adlum cartographically depicts the social worlds of these regions, and which social worlds are they? He certainly includes reference to Euro-American settlement in the Chesapeake, along the Atlantic coastline and into the interior: settlements are indicated using well-established cartographic conventions. But I would argue that the true social world of A Map Exhibiting a General View of the Roads and Inland Navigation of Pennsylvania … resides in the groups of presumed map readers to whom this map was addressed, and here Brückner’s ideas about maps in social life are of particular use: the social life of maps is not only that which is captured through cartographic representation. The social life of a map is also made up of an intended body of map readers (including map printers, map engravers, map sellers, etc.) and the late eighteenth century was a time in which maps were both purchased in increasing numbers and consciously displayed for symbolic purposes, as much in the new United States of America as in England or France (Pritchard 43-53; Pedley). Moreover, this map fits the pattern, identified by David Bosse in his study of map producers, sellers and buyers in eighteenth century Anglo-America, of increased map production post-1783, as maps began to be understood to offer creative answers to the inevitable questions of national identity that emerged in the post-revolutionary years (Bosse 24-26). Adlum’s vision of a Pennsylvanian future defined by westward expansion and the development of inland waterways fit this new republican moment perfectly.

33But the social life of Adlum’s map was also made up of men with specific economic interests and political influence who were intimately connected to its production and who sought to use it to fashion their own futures, men such as Robert Morris and the members of the Society for Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation who commissioned the map, the Governor of Pennsylvania to whom the map is addressed, the host of land speculators and surveyors who sought a tool that would enable them to visualize western Pennsylvania as open and available for development and sale, and the architects, engineers and officials who sought to realize this goal, all of whom stood to benefit from it (Love 237-38). The self-interest of all of these men were bound up with the future envisioned by Adlum’s Map Exhibiting a General View of the Roads and Inland Navigation of Pennsylvania … For example, Robert Morris both worked for the company in charge of the canal project and served as the director of the promotional society that commissioned the map; although the canal project featured in the map ultimately foundered due to insuperable difficulties with crossing the Appalachian Mountains, Marcus Gallo, in his study of surveying and land speculation in the mid-Atlantic states, contends that the projected course of the canal was deliberately changed to run through Morris’s property, thus significantly increasing its value. Regardless of the failure of the canal project, Morris made his fortune later in the 1790s through land speculation (Gallo, Imaginary Lines, Real Power 201-202). Land speculation in late eighteenth century Pennsylvania was also tightly bound up with the profession of surveying and John Adlum himself emerges “the most successful of all the surveyors” (Gallo, Imaginary Lines, Real Power 206) in this regard. Adlum combined his early training and experience as a backcountry surveyor with both his cartographic practice and the energetic acquisition of land, ultimately acquiring more than one hundred thousand acres (Gallo, Imaginary Lines, Real Power 4-15, 68, 187-223; Kent and Deardorff). Indeed, A Map Exhibiting a General View of the Roads and Inland Navigation of Pennsylvania … unites these disparate elements of Adlum’s professional life, demonstrating how the representation and the use of land merged in colonial and early republican mapmaking.

*

34In conclusion, Adlum’s map is extraordinary for the bridge it creates between an older imperial/early republican mapping convention, as I have shown, and what was to come in the practice of cartographic representation in the nation state of the United States. Natural questions emerge about similarities and divergences between this Pennsylvania example and other colonies and states of the eastern seaboard and beyond. These other colonies, and later states, largely shared Pennsylvania’s ‘surveyor vision’ of the new lands that Europeans and European Americans sought to possess and transform in ways utterly distinct from the regimes of land possession and use practiced by the indigenous residents living in these regions before and during the arrival of the transatlantic settlers and the spread of their descendants. While it is far out of the scope of this essay to address these questions, I will conclude by briefly considering the example of a dramatically contrasting European map of the same region made within the same timeframe: the Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France… published in 1688 by the eminent Venetian geographer, cartographer and globe-maker Vincenzo Maria Coronelli and the French cartographer and engraver Jean-Baptiste Nolin, who collaborated in Paris on this map (Burden 303-305; Heidenrich and Dahl; Milanesi) [Figure 6].

Fig. 6: Vincenzo Maria CORONELLI. Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France ou sont les Nations des Ilinois, de Tracy, les Iroquois, et plusieurs autres Peuples…Paris: chez Jean-Baptiste Nolin, 1688.

Fig. 6: Vincenzo Maria CORONELLI. Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France ou sont les Nations des Ilinois, de Tracy, les Iroquois, et plusieurs autres Peuples…Paris: chez Jean-Baptiste Nolin, 1688.

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library. Permalink: https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/​luna/​servlet/​s/​bdy6rn

35While the Partie occidentale du Canada... does not depict precisely the same regions as those that appeared in the series of maps I have presented so far, its geographic focus is not tremendously distant. The map depicts the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River east to Montréal, and the Mississippi River beginning at a latitude north of Lake Superior and descending south to the area around today’s St. Louis, Missouri. The reason the map’s focus is on the Great Lakes and the Mississippi is partly, as one can imagine, because it was land claimed by the French as being part of New France. More particularly, in the later years of the seventeenth century, the French were actively building alliances with the Iroquoian-speaking indigenous groups they encountered in the Great Lakes region to gain a greater share of the European fur trade and to expand it southwards through the system of forts that the French had built to develop this trade along the Mississippi River Valley (Delâge; Havard; Skinner).

36The social worlds of Coronelli and Nolin’s 1688 map are built around two intersecting poles. One the one hand, the geographic information about the Great Lakes that this map depicted for the first time was dependent on a series of French explorers and missionaries who undertook the expeditions to these territories for the economic goals described above, and the bureaucratic methods used to gathering their testimony: they included Louis Jolliet, Jacques Marquette, Louis Hennepin, and René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, whose evidence from their expeditions in the 1670s and 1680s was gathered, recorded and transmitted by Jean Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, the first cartographer of Canada (Palomino, “La découverte du Mississippi”; Palomino, “De la difficulté de cartographier l’Amérique”; Langlois.) However, the second of these poles tells another story, that of a manner of European and European American involvement with and cartographic representations of indigenous peoples that diverges from the British American example set in Pennsylvania. While the dependence on indigenous toponyms in Coronelli’s map is consistent with that of the Pennsylvania cartographers I have discussed above, the nature of the substantial embedded narrative of the map is considerably different. The text relates to the densely settled region around and below the Great Lakes: drawing on information provided by the explorer accounts, Coronelli describes in remarkable detail the location and cultural presence of numerous indigenous groups throughout the region, primarily but not restricted to the peoples of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora tribes).

37Specifically, Coronelli is interested in cartographically depicting the extent to which Iroquoian languages are spoken in the region and differentiating the groups that speak it. Other ethnographic elements explained in embedded text include details related to diet, hunting, fishing, and fur trading. Coronelli did this, not because he was a linguist or exceptionally interested in language, but because at the end of the seventeenth century, geography, geographic knowledge, cartography, and social order were not treated as mutually exclusive in Venetian maps of the region (Horodowich 89-142). To be sure, indigenous displacement and the destruction of indigenous autonomy and sovereignty are present on this French map as they are on the English-language maps of Pennsylvania discussed above (“Kakouagoga nation destruite” appears on the peninsula separating Lake Ontario and Lake Erie), reflecting the establishment and extension of French imperial power (Greer, Property and Dispossession 145-88). Equally, the fact that Coronelli neither lived in nor visited the regions he mapped, and thus had no personal stake in the land under examination cannot be discounted.

38Nevertheless, there is emphatically and unequivocally more place for indigenous social worlds in the French/Italian mapping conventions that underlie Coronelli’s map than in the ‘surveyor vision’ of Pennsylvania’s colonial and early republican geographies traced in this essay, with the notable exception of Lewis Evan’s 1755 map in which indigenous people gain a cartographic presence due, I argue, to their importance as military allies. This discrepancy is, above all, a function of the differing kinds of tools these maps were: whether for purposes of evangelizing or extending trading relationships (but certainly not out of benevolence), an expansive French and Italian Renaissance humanism took seriously the complexity and vast geographic presence of the indigenous peoples of the Northeast. The “surveyor vision” promoted, embodied and realized by Adlum and his predecessors succeeded at denying it almost entirely.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1: John ADLUM and John WALLIS, A Map Exhibiting a General View of the Roads and Inland Navigation of Pennsylvania… Philadelphia: 1792.
Crédits Image from the Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, courtesy of Stanford University Libraries. Permalink: http://purl.stanford.edu/​rg473wj5533
URL http://journals.openedition.org/1718/docannexe/image/8742/img-1.jpg
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Titre Fig. 2: ANONYMOUS. A Map of some of the South and eastbounds Pennsylvania in America being partly inhabited. London: John Thornton, [1681.]
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Titre Fig. 3: Lewis EVANS. A Map of Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, and the Three Delaware Counties.... Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Lewis Evans, 1749.
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Titre Fig. 4: Lewis EVANS. General Map of the Middle British Colonies, in America; viz. Virginia, Mariland, Delaware, Pensilvania, New-Jersey, New-York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.... Philadelphia: Lewis Evans, 1755.
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Titre Fig. 5: Nicholas SCULL. To the Honourable Thomas Penn and Richard Penn, Esqrs., true & absolute proprietaries & Governours of the Province of Pennsylvania & counties of New-Castle, Kent & Sussex on Delaware this map of the improved part of the Province of Pennsylvania. / Is humbly dedicated… Philadelphia: Nicholas Scull, 1759.
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Titre Fig. 6: Vincenzo Maria CORONELLI. Partie occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France ou sont les Nations des Ilinois, de Tracy, les Iroquois, et plusieurs autres Peuples…Paris: chez Jean-Baptiste Nolin, 1688.
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Bertie Mandelblatt, « Mapping Dispossession: the Social Worlds of Adlum’s 1792 Pennsylvania Map »XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 78 | 2021, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2021, consulté le 18 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/8742 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1718.8742

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Auteur

Bertie Mandelblatt

Bertie Mandelblatt is the George S. Parker II '51 Curator of Maps and Prints at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is a librarian (MLIS, McGill University) and a historical geographer (PhD, University of London) with research expertise in historical cartography, the French Americas and the early modern Caribbean. She has published in a number of anthologies and journals (History Workshop Journal; Atlantic Studies; Histoire, Économie, Société; French History; History of European Ideas; and most recently (2021) Early American Studies). Her research addresses a number of intersecting questions: cartography as an imperial practice; the historical geography of the colonial Americas; the geographies of plantation slavery; colonial trade, commodities, agriculture; and early modern subsistence and consumption.

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