British Library Journal (volume 22, number 1, spring 1996)

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Benjamin Franklin and the snake that would not die
(1996-05)
Cook, Karen Severud
ON 9 May 1754 an article was published in Benjamin Franklin's newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, calling for the British colonies on North America's eastern seaboard to unite against the threat of French aggression from the western interior. This rousing exhortation was echoed by an accompanying illustration depicting the British colonies as a snake cut into segments and was captioned, 'JOIN, or DIE' (fig. i). Although often cited as the first political cartoon published in an American newspaper, this illustration has rarely received more than passing mention. The frequent inaccuracies in such citations inspired (or rather irritated) Albert Matthews to write the only detailed historical study of the original snake cartoon and its subsequent variants. Even Matthews, however, failed to make the important observation that the snake cartoon is a map.
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'A very common and usuall trade': the relationship between cartographic perceptions and 'fishing' in the Davis Strait circa 1500-1550
(1996-05)
Seaver, Kirsten A.
FROM the time it was certain that one could sail westwards from Europe and reach land on the other side of the ocean, three kinds of European travellers headed west into the northern Atlantic: those searching for a north-west passage to the spices and silks of the Orient through what soon became known as an intervening American continent; those hoping to find gold or silver ashore in the New World; and those content to exploit everyday commodities obtainable from the eastern shore of North America and its adjacent waters.
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Thomas Jefferys's map of Canada and the mapping of the Western part of North America, 1750-1768
(1996-05)
Winearls, Joan
THOMAS JEFFERYS (c. 1710-71), the major English engraver and map publisher of the mid-eighteenth century, is known particularly for the important maps of the eastern half of North America which he produced mainly from the early 1750s and into the 1760s. His maps of Virginia (1753), New Map of Nova Scotia, North America from the French of Mr D'Anville and New England all produced in 1755, detailed maps of Louisbourg and the St Lawrence River and South Carolina (1757), Halifax and Quebec (1758, 1759), and his involvement in the engraving and publication of some of James Cook's charts of Newfoundland in the late 1760s have been discussed at some length by various scholars. But little has been said about his maps of the western areas of the continent and his approach to the mapping of the De Fonte fantasy about the purported discovery of a northwest passage from Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean. One of the most prominent of his later maps is the Map of Canada and the North Part of Louisiana (1760; see fig.2) which was derived from the manuscript source map, 'A Map of the Northern Parts of America' (BL, K.Top.CXIX.7-2; Plate III).
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An early map on skin of the area later to become Indiana and Illinois
(1996-05)
Lewis, G. Malcolm
THE British Museum's Department of Ethnography, presently at the Museum of Mankind, London, has on permanent loan a large map made on skin (Plate VII and fig. 2). Centred on the long axis of a diagrammatically straightened Wabash River, when redrawn on a modern map it covers most of what are now the states of Indiana and Illinois (fig. i). Although occasionally featured in the Museum's own displays or included as a loan item in exhibitions elsewhere, the artefact is little known and has not been an object of serious research. This might at first seem surprising. Maps on skin, though frequently reported from the North American frontier, are rare. Furthermore, this one must have been made and used before 1825, in which year it was brought to England as an ethnographic artefact. There is, however, no immediately obvious intrinsic evidence of its provenance; no title, endorsement, date, personal names, key, or revealing associated document. By tracing the artefact's descent retrochronologically it is possible to establish an intermediate, early nineteenth-century provenance. Thereafter, careful examination of the artefact's physical characteristics and the map's information content has associated them with negotiations with or by Indians prior to a never implemented major land purchase of approximately fifty years earlier.
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Two manuscript maps of Nuevo Santander in Northern new Spain from the eighteenth century
(1996-05)
Reinhartz, Dennis
IN the eighteenth century, through the occupation of Texas and Alta California and for a time parts of Louisiana and even the western side of Vancouver Island on Nootka Sound, the Spanish Empire in North America and with it Spain's imperial expansion globally attained its greatest geographical extent. After a brief five-year occupation, the deliberate abandonment of Vancouver Island in 1795, largely as a result of compelling British finesse, initiated the retreat of the Spanish Empire that was soon to be dynamically accelerated by the revolutions and independence of the new Latin American states from Terra del Fuego to northern California and the Pecos and the Red Rivers in 1808-24. Nevertheless, the earlier advance of the frontier of New Spain further to the north and northeast was of particular and lasting importance. The Spanish-Mexican era still accounts for over half of the history of European presence in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, and its heritage continues to be a vital part of the cultural identity and diversity of the North American Greater Southwest.
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British Library Journal (volume 22, number 1, spring 1996)

British Library Journal (volume 22, number 1, spring 1996)

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