Historical Sketch of the County of Passaic, especially of the First Settlements and Settlers. Privately printed, by William Nelson, Paterson, 1877.
The History of Newark, New Jersey, being a Narrative of its Rise and Progress from May, 1666, by Joseph Atkinson, Newark, 1878; a book giving, however, only in a new garb, the older chronicles of the place. It gives a map of the town as laid out in 1666.
The annexed sketch-map is an extract from a map entitled, Le Canada, ou Nouvelle France, etc., par N. Sanson d’Abbeville, geographe ordinaire du Roy, Paris, 1656, and by its dotted lines shows the limits conceded by the French to the different colonies of the northern seaboard of the present United States, a few years before the establishment of New Caesaria. New England was defined on the east by the height of land between the waters of the Penobscot and the Kennebec, and on the northwest by a similar elevation that turned the rainfall to the St. Lawrence. New Netherland stretched from Cape Cod to the Delaware, where it met New Sweden, which lay between it and Virginia,—the Maryland charter not being recognized; nor was the absorption of the territory of the Swedes the year before (1655), by the Dutch, made note of. The map-maker, in defining these limits, pretends to have worked on English and Dutch authorities; but the Plymouth colonists would have hardly allowed the annihilation to which they were subjected, and the settlers of Massachusetts would scarcely have recognized the names attached to their headlands and harbors, and never having any existence but in Smith’s map, which the royal geographer seems to have fallen in with.
[NOTE ON NEW ALBION.]
BY GREGORY B. KEEN.
Late Professor of Mathematics in the Theological Seminary of St. Charles Borromeo, Corresponding Secretary of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
THE English did not attain supreme dominion in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Delaware until the grant of King Charles II. to his royal brother, the Duke of York, in 1664; yet the history of these States and that of Maryland would not be complete without specific mention of the antecedent attempt to settle this part of America, made by the unsuccessful colonist Sir Edmund Plowden.
This person was a member of a Saxon family of Shropshire, England, whose antiquity is sufficiently intimated by the meaning of its surname, “Kill-Dane,”—being the second son of Francis Plowden, Esq., of Plowden, Salop, and grandson of the celebrated lawyer and author of the Commentaries, Serjeant Edmund Plowden, a Catholic, who declined the Lord-Chancellorship of England, offered him by Queen Elizabeth, lest he should be forced to countenance her Majesty’s persecutions of his Church.[737] In 1632, this gentleman, who like his ancestors and other relatives was a Catholic,[738] and at that time resided in Ireland,[739] in company with “Sir John Lawrence, Kt. and Bart., Sir Boyer Worsley, Kt., John Trusler, Roger Pack, William Inwood, Thomas Ryebread, Charles Barret, and George Noble, adventurers,” petitioned King Charles I. for a patent, under his Majesty’s seal of Ireland, for “Manitie, or Long Isle,” and “thirty miles square of the coast next adjoining, to be erected into a County Palatine called Syon, to be held of” his “Majesty’s Crown of Ireland, without appeal or subjection to the Governor or Company of Virginia, and reserving the fifth of all royal mines, and with the like title, dignity, and privileges to Sir Edmund Plowden there as was granted to Sir George Calvert, Kt., in New Foundland by” his “Majesty’s royal father, and with the usual grants and privileges to other colonies,” etc. And a modified form of this prayer was subsequently presented to the monarch, in which the island spoken of is called “Isle Plowden,” and the county palatine “New Albion,” and the latter is enlarged to include “forty leagues square of the adjoining continent,” the supplicants “promising therein to settle five hundred inhabitants for the planting and civilizing thereof.” The favor sought was immediately conceded, and the King’s warrant, authorizing the issue of a patent to the petitioners, and appointing Sir Edmund Plowden “first Governor of the Premises,” was given at Oatlands, July 24, the same year;[740] in accordance with which, a charter was granted to Plowden and his associates above mentioned, by writ of Privy Seal, witnessed by the Deputy-General of Ireland, at Dublin, June 21, 1634.[741] In this document the boundaries of New Albion are so defined as to include all of New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania embraced in a square, the eastern side of which, forty leagues in length, extended (along the coast) from Sandy Hook to Cape May, together with Long Island, and all other “isles and islands in the sea within ten leagues of the shores of the said region.” The province is expressly erected into a county palatine, under the jurisdiction of Sir Edmund Plowden as earl, depending upon his Majesty’s “royal person and imperial crown, as King of Ireland;” and the same extraordinary privileges are conferred upon the patentee as had been bestowed two years before upon Lord Baltimore, to whose charter for Maryland that for New Albion bears very close resemblance.