The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I, Part 9

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897; Jewett, C. F. (Clarence F.)
Publication date: 1880
Publisher: Boston : Ticknor
Number of Pages: 702

USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 9

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5 Lescarbot, Hist. de la Nouvelle France, 1866, ii. 410. This covered the New England coast.

6 Le Cap aux Isles, he calls it, in reference 10 the three islands which Smith, a few years later, named the Three Turks' Heads, to commemorate one of his Eastern exploits. An early French map, of which Mr. Francis Parkman procured a copy, somewhat strangely confounds matters, when the C. St. Louis of Champlain, on the Marshfield shore, is fixed here, with C. St. Anne as an alternative, -a canonization of the royal consort of King James that improves on the simpler adulation of Smith.

THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

Bay ; and Champlain adds, " I observed in the bay all that the savages had described to me." Sailing then to the west-south-west, between numerous islands, the French anchored near an island, finding on their way the coast a great deal cleared, and planted with corn and fine trees. The islands Gramplain- about them were covered with wood.1 This is supposed to depict Boston Harbor, and it is the Charles, perhaps, that he describes when, towards the end of his chapter, he says, "There is in this bay a very broad river, which we named River du Guast, which stretched, as it seemed, toward the Iroquois."

Passing outside the harbor, we next track them to Brant Rock Point, on the Marshfield shore, -their Cap St. Louis, -whence they skirted a low sandy coast to Port du Cap St. Louis, seemingly the same harbor in which the " Mayflower " landed her company in 1620.2 Again following the bend of the bay, they reach Cap Blanc, our Cape Cod, which they rounded, and, going south a little further, they had a skirmish with the natives, and turned back.

The next year, 1606, Champlain came back with Poutrincourt. Having occasion to calk their shallop in Gloucester Harbor, he has left us a map of it in his book. He says, however, very little of his now following his previous track beyond Cap St. Louis to a harbor, which was perhaps Barnstable; and so again rounding Cap Blanc he tacked away to the south, finding the shore and the shoals doubtless different from now, and so proceeded to the entrance of the Vineyard Sound, a little further than before, when he again turned back, and never again visited these shores. He left on them, however, names that clung to some maps for a long time. The full narrative of these explorations appeared in the 1613 edition of Les Voyages du Sicur de Champlain, published at Paris; and it was ac- companied by two maps, - the one showing the coast from the St. Law- rence to the Chesapeake, "faiet l'an, 1612;" and the other carried the coast south only to about the extent of his own observations. This is called the map of 1613. In the first we have Baye Blanche inside of C. blan ; the Baye aux Isles, from its relation to C. St. Louis, might be Plymouth ; the R. de Gas flows into a bay dotted with islands, and comes, as his text indicates, from a region west near Lac de Champlain, which is marked as the country of the Yrocois. The 1613 map is not so carefully drawn, but it has the same prototype of the Charles, stretching still to the western Yroquois, just south of Lake Champlain. Some of these features still clung

1 A manuscript in the State Paper Office, for the Prince Society, and edited by Rev. E. London, has events a good deal mixed. Cf. Mass. Ilist. Soc. Proc , January, 1861.

2 A plan of this bay is rudely given in the 1613 and 1632 editions of Champlain; and Drake, Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast, copies it. This whole narrative is easily followed in the English translation of the 1613 edition which has been made by Professor Otis

F. Slafter, IS7S, vol. ii. The Quebec edition of Champlain's works has all the maps in fac-simile. I regret that I have not been able to agree with Mr. Parkman - Pioneers of France in the New World, p. 232 - in fixing the modern correspondences of Cham- plain's localities. My views accord with Mr. Slafter's.

EARLIEST MAPS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY.

to the larger map1 of 1632, which appeared in the consolidated edition of Champlain's successive narratives of that date; but the supposable Charles has dwindled in this later map to a mere coast stream, while Lake Cham- plain, interposing to the east of the Hudson, lies not farther distant to the west from the site of Boston than the Cap aux Isles (Cape Ann) lies to the east.

It is interesting to remember that in 1609, only three or four years after Champlain's voyage, Henry Hudson landed at Cape Cod on his way to explore the river since called by his name; and his reports made it pos- sible for Champlain to make his map of the harbor of New York and its magnificent river as well as he did. In the same year, 1609, Lescarbot brought out in his Nouvelle France a map which did further service in the later editions of 1611 and 1612. Cape Cod would hardly challenge our ac- quaintance in this map, and the bay within seems but one of a zigzag series of contours which run north, each well supplied with islands, till the region of the Kinibcki is reached, when the coast turns eastward. There are no names from Malebarre to Choïtacoet, the latter well up into the bend of the coast.2 In the year of the original issue of Lescarbot, Hakluyt had caused an English translation of it to be published in London. This Nova Francia, as it was called, came out in 1609, with nothing to show that Lescarbot was its original source except that it had his map; and this was the latest engraved cartographical expression of this region which Englishmen could have seen when that " thrice memorable discoverer, Captain Smith," as Wood calls him, took up the problem. Lescarbot had certainly gone far from a solution, as many others had done, if we may trust Smith's own words. "I have had six or seven several plots of these northern parts, so unlike each to other, and most so differing from any true proportion or resemblance of the country as they did me no more good than so much waste paper, though they cost me more. It may be that it was not my chance to see the best." 3

Smith left England in March, 1614, on this trading expedition, four London merchants joining him in the commercial venture, and two

1 One of the 1632 editions in Harvard Col- lege Library has the map. It is given in fac- simile in the Quebec edition, vol. vi. of Cham- plain, and defectively in O'Callaghan's Docu- mentary History of New York, iii.

2 The 1612 Lescarbot is in Harvard College Library. The map is fac-similed in Tross's re- print of the book, - Paris, 1866, p. 224; and other reproductions are in the Abbe Faillon's Histoire de la Colonie Française en Canada, i. 85, and in The Popham Memorial. A fac-simile is also given herewith.

3 Smith's reference must be to drafts made by English explorers or fishermen on the coast. The only engraved maps to which he couldl have referred were lescarbot's and Champlain's ; and it seems improbable that he knew the lat-

ter. The French, after this, added nothing to our knowledge of the coast. Their later maps were drawn to express their knowledge of the great lakes and the Mississippi ; and, when the eastern seaboard was drawn in, it was with little or no regard to detail. Franquelin made for Colbert various maps ; and others of his time are noted in llarrisse's Notes sur la Nouvelle France, and in the appendix to Parkman's La Salle. Mr. Parkman's tracing of the great map of Franquelin, the original of which has disap- peared from the French archives, gives Boston, with the hook of Cape Cod, but nothing else dis- tinctively. An earlier map shows an undulating line from Maine to Jersey. Mr. Parkman has lately placed his collection of maps in Harvard College Library.

VOL. 1 .- 7.

THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

ships 1 carried his company and his supplies. He sailed away for North Virginia, as the country was then called, and struck the coast near the Penobscot. Leaving his vessels to fish and trade, he took eight men in a boat, and started to map out the bay. He speaks of passing " close aboard the shore in a little boat," and of drawing " the map from point to point, isle to isle, and harbor to harbor, with the soundings, sands, rocks, and landmarks," and adds that he "sounded about twenty-five excellent good harbors." We follow him in his coursing pretty accurately round Cape Ann, which he named Cape Tragabigsanda, after an old Turkish flame of his, while the neighboring islands were set down on his plot as the Three Turks' Heads, the doughty navigator having memorably decapi- tated an equal number of Moslems at some past time.2

Our present interest in his narrative is to ascertain how closely he explored Boston Harbor. His language is usually held to signify that he struck across from the north shore and touched the south shore some- where in the neighborhood of Cohasset, and that he mistook the entrance by Point Allerton as the debouching of a river. lle Smith. wrote afterwards that he thought "the fairest reach in this bay" was a river, "whereupon I called it Charles River." The map which two years later he published clearly shows a bay with eight islands in it, into which this river flows. From this one would infer that he at least got within the outer harbor, and mistook one of the inner passages for the river's mouth.3 It is, of course, possible that he embodied in this map what information he obtained from the descriptions of the natives at that time, but he does not say he did. He afterwards made use of later explorers' reports, when he extended on his map this same bay farther inland, and increased the num- ber of its islands; describing at the same time " that fair channel " as divid-

1 These vessels were of fifty and sixty tons. Mr. Deane has gathered a number of instances of the sizes of the ships of these early naviga- tors. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., October, 1865.

2 The authorities for this exploration are his own Description of New England, 1616, of which there are copies in Harvard College Library ; in the Prince Collection ( Boston Public Library) ; in Charles Deane's Collection, &c. It was re- printed at Boston- seventy-five copies - by Veazie in 1865, and is in 3 Mass. Ilist. Coll. vi. 95 (the Prince copy being followed), and in Force's Tracts, ii. It was afterwards included in his Generall Historie, of which there are copies of different editions in Harvard College Library, in the Prince Collection, and in Mr. Deane's. C'f. also his Advertisement to Planters, 1631, of which there are copies in the College Library and in Mr. Deane's Collection. This also was reprinted by Veazie in 1865; and it is also in- cluded in 3 Mass. Ilist. Coll. iii. 1. Smith's letter to Lord Bacon (161S), giving an account of New England, is printed in the Historical Maga-

sine, July, 1861. Mr. Deane says the body of the letter is not in Smith's hand; but he thinks the signature above given is. Cf. Mass. Ilist. Soc. Proc., January, 1867. Summarized accounts of this New England voyage will be found in Belk- nap's American Biography ; Hillard's Life of John Smith ; Palfrey's New England, where (i. p. S9) there is a note on the authenticity and veracity of Smith's books. Accounts of his published works are to be found in Allibone's Dictionary of Authors : in Hillard, p. 398; and an estimate of their literary value in M. C. Tyler's Hist. of American Literature, i.

3 Ilis language already quoted would seem to imply that he was in the bay when he descried its "fairest reach," and we know he makes in another place Massachusetts Bay and Charles River one and the same. The question at issue seems to be what Smith saw and thought to be a river's mouth, -the lighthouse chan- nel, or the passage between Long Island Head and Deer Island. I incline to the latter view.

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LESCARBOT'S MAP, 1612.

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CHAMPLAIN'S MAP, 1612.

EARLIEST MAPS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY.

ing itself "into so many fair branches as make forty or fifty pleasant islands within that excellent bay."1 Smith thence sailed across Massa- chusetts Bay, made his draft of the Cape Cod peninsula, and then, rejoin- ing his vessels to the eastward, set sail for England, and reached port in August. Smith was, or professed to be, well pleased with what he saw; but as he next engaged in a project for settling the country, which first took from him the name of New England, his enthusiastic description may savor perhaps of self-interest. "Of all the parts of the world I have yet seen not inhabited," he said, " I would rather live here than anywhere."

The site of Boston before this had been successively found within a region variously designated. To the Northmen it was Vinland. In 1520 Ayllon could not have sailed much above 30° north latitude, yet in Ribero's map Tierra de Ayllon stretched up into New England. So again, a little later, the Tierra de los Bretones was extended west and south from the region where Cabot made his landfall. After Verrazzano and Cartier, Francisca, Nova Francia, La Terre Française, and Nouvelle France was stretched to the south over New England, and sometimes the Spanish Florida, as in Ruscelli's map, 1561, came well up to the same latitude. The earliest native name to be applied to the country by Europeans was Norumbega, which appears in the narrative of the French captain quoted in Ramusio, in 1537, and, by the time Mercator made his great chart in 1569, this name began to be general. It seemed at first to cover a terri- tory stretching well along our eastern scaboard, but gradually became fixed on the region of the Penobscot.2 Smith, in 1620, makes Virginia a part of Norumbega. Virginia first appeared on maps in Hakluyt's edition of Peter Martyr's Decades, 1587, and later Gosnold and his successor considered they were exploring the northern parts of Virginia, and so it was known to Smith before he gave it the designation it now bears, - New England. " My first voyage to Norumbega, now called New England, 1614," is his marginal note in his Advertisement to Planters. Hunt and other navigators called it Cannaday. Smith's designation did not wholly supplant the Dutch New Netherland in European maps (which began to be used also about this time), till the Hollanders were finally expelled from New York; and even after that the Dutch name vanished slowly.

To further his colonization scheme, Smith set sail from England again in March, 1615, with two ships, one commanded by himself and the other by Dermer. The latter alone succeeded in reaching the coast, and returned after a successful business in August.3 Meanwhile Smith's ship was dis-

1 There is a narrative on the early records of Charlestown, which represents Smith as having come up to that peninsula. It is printed in Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts. It can be, however, of no authority. Frothinghanı, in his History of Charlestown ( unfortunately never to be completed), says that it was written in 1664 by John Greene, and not, as Thomas Prince had affirmed, by Increase Nowell. Frothingham

himself says rather unguardedly that "Smith entered Charles River and named it."

2 Cf. De Laet's Novus Mundus ; Kohl's Disc. of Maine; Hakluyt's Western Planting ; De Costa's Northmen in Maine, p. 44; Congrès des Am: ricanistes, 1877, p. 223, &c.

3 The absolute continuity of the New Eng- land and Virginia coasts was later proved by Dermer first among the English. Cf. Purchas's

THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

abled in a storm; returned to refit; again set sail, June 24, but only to be captured by a French cruiser. After many mishaps in his captivity, Smith got back to England late in 1615, bringing with him the narrative of his first voyage, which he had written while a prisoner to the French. In June, 1616, he published it in London, as A Description of New England : or The Observations, and Discoveries, of Captain John Smith (Admirall of that Country), in the North of America, in the year of our Lord, 1614. - London. Humfrey Lownes, for Robert Clerke, 1616. It was a little quarto volume, of a size and shape common to that day, of about eighty pages. A folding map of New England, extending from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod, went with it. With this publication Smith sought to incite a movement for colonization. Ile journeyed about the western counties distributing it. "I caused," he says, " two or three thousand of them [the book] to be printed ; one thousand with a great many maps, both of Virginia and New England, I presented to thirty of the Chief Companies in London at their halls." No immediate results came from Smith's efforts. He never again was on the coast, and his endeavors were but a part of the causes that finally worked together to establish the English race permanently upon Massachusetts Bay.

Smith's map, as the real foundation of our New England cartography, deserves particular attention. To the draft which he made he affixed the Indian names, or such as whim had prompted him to give while he sur- veyed the shores. There is rarely found in copies of the Description of New England a leaf, printed on one side only, which reads as follows : " Because the Booke was printed cre the Prince his Highnesse had altered the names, I intreate the Reader peruse this schedule; which will plainly shew him the correspondence of the old names to the new." Below this are two columns, one giving the old names, the other the new ones; the latter such as Prince Charles, then a lad of fifteen, had affixed to the different points, bays, rivers, and other physical features, when Smith showed him the map. As engraved, the map has the Prince's nomen- clature; the book has Smith's or the earlier; and this rare leaf is to make the two mutually intelligible.1

So far as is known to me, this map exists in ten states of the plate, and I purpose now to note their distinctive features.2

I. The original condition of the map bears in the lower left-hand corner, Simon Pascus sculpsit ; Robert Clerke excudit ; and in the lower right-hand corner, London,

Pilgrims: 2 N. V. Hist. Soc. Coll. i .; Thornton's Ancient Pemaquid. In 1616 the settlement of Richard Vines at Saco, and other ineffectual plantations, enlarged the knowledge of the coast. ('f. Gorges's Narrative ; Palfrey's New England, i. ch. 2; Folsom's Saco and Biddeford, &c.

1 The Prince copy and the l'eter Force copy ( Library of Congress) are the only copies known to me which have this leaf, unless in fac-simile,

Mr. Deane having caused such a fac-simile to be made from the Prince copy. Mr. Deane's copy, that in Ilarvard College Library, and the three copies in the British Museum, want it.

2 In this study I make use of some memor- anda of Mr. James Lenox and Mr. Chas. Deane, printed in Norton's Literary Gasette, new series, i. ( 1854) 134, 219; but I add one condition ( VIII.) to their enumeration.

/ ADMIRALL OF NEW ENGLAND

PORTRAICTUER OF CAPTAYT

HLIWS NHOI

These are the Lines that few thy Face; but those That Thew thy Grace and Glory, brighter bec ?. Thy Faire-Difcoueries and Fowle- Over throwes !. Of Salvages, much Civiliz'd by the 'Beft Thew. thy Spirit;and to it Glory Wyn; So,thou art Braße without, but Golde within ..

Ffo; in Braße ftvo Soft Smiths Acts to beare) fix thy Fame,to make Braße Steele out weare.

hine,as thou art Virtues, Join Dauics. Heref:

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SMITH'S MAP. 1614 .

CAPT. JOHN SMITH.

-THE

EARLIEST MAPS OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY.

Printed by Geor: Low. The title NEW ENGLAND is in large letters at the top, to the right of it the English arms, and beneath it, The most remarqueable parts thus named | by the high and mighty Prince CHARLES, | Prince of great Britainc. The latitude is marked on the right-hand side only : there are no marks of longitude. Boston Harbor is indicated by a bay with eight islands, and a point of land extending from the southwest within it. The River Charles extends inland from the northwest corner of the bay, a short distance. A whale, a ship, and a fleet are represented upon the sea. There is no date beneath the scale. There are many names on later states not yet introduced, and some of the present names are changed in the later impressions, as will be noted below.

Of the names which the Prince assigned, but three became permanently attached to the localities, and these are, - Plimouth to the spot which Champlain had called Port St. Louis, which the natives called Accomack, and which the Pilgrims continued to call by this newer name, seven or eight years later ; Cape Anna, for which Smith had sacrificed the remembrance of his Eastern romance ; and The River Charles, which had been previously known as Massachusets River ; while the name Massa- chusets Mount, earlier applied to our Blue Hill, became, under Charles's pen, Cheuyot hills.1 Gosnold's Cape Cod proved better rooted than Charles's monument to his dynasty, Cape Fames, and so the Prince's Stuard's Bay has given place to Cape Cod Bay. Our own name, - Boston, -as is the case with many other well-known names of this day, appears in connection with a locality remote from its present application. It supplanted Smith's Accominticus, and stood for the modern York in Maine. Two of the Captain's names were suffered to stand, - New England as the general designation of the country, and Smitli's Isles, within ten years afterwards to be known among the English as the Isles of Shoals.2 London was put upon the shore about where Hingham or perhaps Cohasset is ; Oxford stood for the modern Marshfield ; Poynt Suttliff is adjacent, and does duty for Champlain's C. de S. Louis and the present Brant Rock ; and Poynt George is the designation of the Gurnet.

Of the copies of the book known to be in America, but one has the map in this state, and that is the Prince copy, in which the map is unfortunately imperfect, but not in an essential part.3 From this copy C. A. Swett, of Boston, engraved the fac-simile which appeared in Veazie's reprint of the Description of New England, in 1865.4

In 1617, Hulsius, the German collector, translated Smith's Description for his Voyages, and re-engraved the map ; but the names in the lower corners were omitted, and Smith's title, the verses concerning him, and some of the explanations were given in German. Hulsius's map, beside accompanying his Part XIV., first edition, 1617, and second edition, 1628, is often found in Part XIII. (Hamor's Virginia), and is also given in Part XX. (New England and Virginia), 1629.5

1 Smith, in his text, speaks of "the high mountaine of Massachusetts."

2 A monument to Smith was erected on Star Island, one of the group, in 1864. It is pictured in Jenness's Isles of Shoals, and in S. A. Drake's Nooks and Corners of the New Eng- land Coast.

3 A copy without the map was advertised in London in 1879 for fio los. ; white Quaritch m 1873 advertised a copy with what he called the original map (perhaps, however, not the original state) for {50. The copies sold in the

Brinley sale, March, 1879, had maps of a later state, and so do all the other copies in Ameri- can collections, - Harvard College Library, Lenox Library, the Carter Brown Library, Chas. Deane's collection, &c.

4 The reduction in Bryant and Gay's l'or. Ilust. of the U. S., i 518, is from Swett's fac- simule, which can also be found in some copies of Chas. Deane's reprint of New Eng- land's Trials.

5 " Voyages of Hulsius," in Contributions to a Catalogue of the Lenox Library, part i, 1877.

THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

II. The date, 1614, is for the first time inserted under the scale, and the names P. Travers and Gerrards Ils are put in near Pembrocks Bay (Penobscot). A copy of this second state is in the Harvard College copy of the Description of 1616. We give a heliotype of a portion of it. A lithographie fac-simile of the whole, but without the ships, &c., is given in 3 Mass. Hist. Coll. iii., and in a reduced form by photo-lithography in Palfrey's New England, i. 95.1 Mr. Lenox supposed that this state of the plate may have been first used in the 1620 edition of Smith's New England's Trials, no copy of which was known to be in this country when Mr. Deane, in 1873, reprinted it 2 in the Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Society, Feb. 1873.3

III. Smith's escutcheon, but without the motto, was introduced in the lower left- hand corner. This state is found in Mr. Deane's copy of the Generall Historie, 1624, and in the Lenox copy of the Description of 1616. Mr. Lenox supposed this state may have been first used in the 1622 edition of New England's Trials.4

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The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I, Part 9

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897; Jewett, C. F. (Clarence F.) Publication date: 1880 Publisher: Boston : Ticknor Number of Pages: 702

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897; Jewett, C. F. (Clarence F.)
Publication date: 1880
Publisher: Boston : Ticknor
Number of Pages: 702