GUT OF ANNAPOLIS.
Note.—The above cut represents the entrance to the Annapolis basin, as it would appear to a spectator at the position corresponding to the letter B in the words “Baye Françoise” in the northwest corner of the map on the opposite page. It follows on a reduced scale one of the coast scenes made by the British engineers to accompany the hydrographic surveys, published by Des Barres, just before the American Revolutionary War, and which frequently make part of the Atlantic Neptune. A modern drawing of the view looking outward through the gut is given in E. B. Chase’s Over the Border (Boston, 1884), where will be found a view of the old block house in Annapolis (p. 64), which stood till 1882.
The map (on the opposite page) is by the royal (French) engineer Nicolas Bellin, and was published by Charlevoix in his Histoire de la Nouvelle France, and is reproduced in Dr. Shea’s translation of Charlevoix, v. p. 170; and on a reduced scale in Gay, Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. p. 125. A MS. plan (1725) is noted in the Catalogue of the King’s Maps in the British Museum, i. p. 38; as also are other plans of 1751, 1752, 1755. One of date 1729 by Nathaniel Blackmore is plate no. 27 in Moll’s New Survey of the Globe. One of 1733 is in the North collection of maps in Harvard College library, vol. ii. pl. 11. One of 1779, after a manuscript in the Dépôt des Cartes in Paris, is no. 11 in the Neptune Americo-Septentrional. This Bellin map may be compared with the draughts of the basin made in the early part of the preceding century by Lescarbot, published in his Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1609), and by Champlain as given in his Voyages du Sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois (1613),—both of which maps are produced in the present History, Vol. IV. pp. 140, 141.
There is on a previous page a view of the town and fort of Annapolis at the upper end of the basin. Various papers respecting Annapolis Royal, as it was called after coming into English possession, can be found in the Belknap Papers (MSS.) in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, including letters from Governor Richard Phillips, Lieutenant-Governor John Doucett, and Paul Mascarene. The history of Nova Scotia so much centres in Annapolis, previous to the founding of Halifax, that all the histories of Acadia and Nova Scotia tell the story of the picturesque and interesting region in which the town is situated. (Cf. Vol. IV. p. 156.)
Jacques Nicolas Bellin, the maker of the opposite map, as he was of all the maps given by Charlevoix, was born in Paris in 1703, and died in 1772. He was one of the principal hydrographers of his time in France, and was the earliest to hold a governmental position in the engineer department of the Marine. He has left a large mass of cartographical work, chiefly given on a large scale in his Neptune Français (1753 in folio) and his Hydrographie Française (1756 in folio). The same, with other maps reproduced on a smaller scale, constitute his Petit Atlas Maritime (1764, five volumes in quarto). All of these publications contain maps of American interest, and in 1755 he printed a special contribution to the study of American cartography, Mémoires sur les cartes des côtes de l’Amérique septentrionale.