A. Bibliographical.—Rhode Island has been fortunate in its bibliographer. Mr. John Russell Bartlett, the editor of the State’s early Records, issued at Providence, in 1864, his Bibliography of Rhode Island, with Notes, Historical, Biographical, and Critical (150 copies printed). Mr. Bartlett began a “Naval History of Rhode Island” in the Historical Magazine, January, 1870. As the adviser of the late Mr. John Carter Brown in the forming of what is now so widely known as the Carter-Brown Library, and as the cataloguer of its almost unexampled treasures, not only of Rhode Island, but of all American history, Mr. Bartlett has also conferred upon the student of American history benefits equalled in the labors of few other scholars in this department. Mr. Brown erected for himself in his Library a splendid monument. There may exist in the Lenox Library a rival in some departments of Americana, but Mr. Bartlett’s Catalogue of the Providence Collection makes its richness better known. Mr. Brown began his collections early, and was enabled to buy from the catalogues of Rich and Ternaux. The Library is now so complete, and its desiderata are so few and so scarce, that it grows at present but slowly. Mr. Brown, a son of Nicholas Brown, from whom the university in Providence received its name, was born in 1797, and died June 10, 1874. But fifty copies of the two sumptuous volumes (1482-1700) constituting the revised edition of the catalogue (there is a third volume, 1700-1800, in a first edition) have been distributed, and they are the Library’s best history; but those not fortunate enough to have access to them will find accounts of it in the Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1876; Rogers’s Libraries of Providence; N.E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., April, 1876; American Journal of Education, xxvii. 237; American Bibliopolist, vi. 77, vii. 91, 228.
The several volumes of the Rhode Island Historical Society, so far as they relate to the period under examination, are noted in the preceding text; but the Society has also issued a volume of Proceedings for the years 1872-1879. Two supplemental publications of the Rhode Island antiquaries have been begun lately,—the Newport Historical Magazine, July, 1880, and the Narragansett Historical Register, July, 1882, James N. Arnold, editor, both devoted to southern Rhode Island.
B. Early Maps of New England.—The cartography of New England in the seventeenth century began with the map of Captain John Smith in 1614 (given in chap. vi.), for we must discard as of little value the earlier maps of Lescarbot and Champlain. The Dutch were on the coast at about the same time, and the best development of their work is what is known as the “Figurative Map” of 1614, which was first made known in the Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, i. 13, and in O’Callaghan’s New Netherland. The part showing New England is figured in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 57. It had certain features which long remained on the maps, and its names became in later maps curiously mixed with those derived from Smith’s map. It gave the Cape Cod peninsula (here, however, made an island) a peculiar triangular shape; it exaggerated Plymouth’s harbor; it ran Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket into one, and divided Long Island into several parts. The marked feature of the interior was the bringing of the Iroquois (Champlain) Lake close down to the salt water, as Champlain had done in his map of 1612, and as he continued to do in his larger map of 1632. Blaeu, in his Atlas of 1635, while he copied the Figurative Map pretty closely, closed the channel which made Cape Cod an island, and gave the “Lacus Irocociensis” a prolongation in the direction of Narragansett Bay. De Laet, in 1630, had worked on much better information in several respects. Cape Cod is much more nearly its proper shape; and he had got such information from the Dutch settlements up the Hudson as enabled him to place Lake Champlain with fair accuracy. A fac-simile of De Laet’s map is given in Vol. IV. chap. ix. Meanwhile the English had enlarged Smith’s plot, as the map given on an earlier page from Alexander and Purchas (Pilgrimes, iii. 853) shows. Champlain’s plotting in 1632 of the great river of Canada could not, of course, have been known to this map-maker of 1624, while Lescarbot’s was.
Pure local work came in with the map which accompanied Wood’s New England’s Prospect, which is called “The south part of New England as it is planted this yeare, 1634.” It only shows the coast from Narragansett Bay to “Acomenticus,” on the Maine shore, with a corresponding inland delineation. Buzzard’s Bay is greatly misshapen; Cape Cod has something of the contemporary Dutch drawing; and, in a rude way, the watercourses lie like huge snakes in contortions upon the land. There are fac-similes of the map in Palfrey, i. 360; Young’s Chronicles of Massachusetts, p. 389, and in other places noted in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 524. Two years later (1636), in Saltonstall’s English version of the atlas of Mercator and Hondius, the English public practically got De Laet’s map; and indeed so late as 1670, the map “Novi Belgii et Novæ Angliæ Delineatio,” which is given alike in Montanus’s De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld and in Ogilby’s America, hardly embodied more exact information. The Hexham English version of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas, intended for the English market, but published in Amsterdam by Hondius and Jannson in 1636 (of which there is a fine copy in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society), in its map of “Nova Anglia,” etc., kept up the commingling of Smith’s plot and names with the present Dutch ones. Blaeu’s of 1635 was the prototype of the chart in Dudley’s Arcano del Mare (1646), of which a fac-simile is given in the preceding chapter.
NEW ENGLAND, 1650.
This is a reduction of a sketch of a part of a manuscript Map of North America, dated 1650, of which a drawing is given in the Massachusetts Archives; Documents Collected in France, ii. 61. The key is as follows:—
1. Sauvages Hurons.
2. Lac des Iroquois [Lake Champlain].
3. Sauvages Iroquois.
4. Sauvages Malectites.
5. Sauvages Etechemins.
6. Pemicuit [Pemaquid].
7. Pentagouet.
8. Isle des Monts Deserts.
9. Baye de Kinibequi.
10. Sauvages Kanibas.
11. Caskobé [Casco Bay].
12. Pescadoué [Piscataqua].
13. Selem [Salem].
14. Baston [Boston].
15. Nova Anglia.
16. Sauvages Pequatis [Pequods].
17. Plymuth.
18. Cap Malabar.
19. Sauvages Narhicans [Narragansetts].
20. Isle de Bloque [Block Island].
21. Isle de Nantochyte [Nantucket].