Public Lecture, 16 Nov 2009: John Smith's Map of New England (1616)

“A Gloriously Bold Portrait of Colony and Colonizer: John Smith's Map of New England (1616).”
Yarmouth Historical Society, Maine.
Matthew H. Edney, Osher Chair in the History of Cartography, University of Southern Maine

When: 7:30pm, 16 November 2009.
Where: Log Cabin, Main St., Yarmouth, Me.

Capt. John Smith sailed down the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod in the summer of 1614. On his return to England, he talked up the area as a site for a new English colony, which he promoted as "New England." To support his colonial vision, he published a small book in 1616 and his famous map. Since the mid-1800s, the map has served as an iconic image of exploration, colonization, and the origins of New England. It has been reproduced in numerous books and articles. Map historians have traced the many states of the map, art historians the large portrait of John Smith. But no historian has ever actually analyzed the whole image. Indeed, no one has yet realized that this is the *only* map from the era to feature either a large portrait of its maker or a dedicatory poem!

In this public lecture -- fully illustrated with original maps and portraits -- Prof. Matthew Edney presents the results of several years' research that started with the question: why is there a map and a poem on this map? By considering the map in the context of contemporary printed portraiture, he argues that the image was strictly rhetorical in nature. It was not a map in the modern sense of a guide or work of reference, and it was more than a statement of colonial potential and territorial agrandizement. The entire work, designed by Simon de Passe, was an image of Smith's exterior visage and interior soul. It was a cartographic portrait.

Yarmouth Historical Society