CHAPTER 2

Things to Think With

The Use of Borders on a Seventeenth-Century Map of New England

CHRISTIAN J. KOOT

Sometime in 1681 John Povey, who had just begun working as clerk to William Blathwayt, secretary of the Committee of Lords of Trade and Plantations, picked up a brush and painted the borders of seven colonies in watercolors on Robert Morden and William Berry’s A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia (ca. 1676) (Figure 2.1). At the same time either Povey or another individual in the Plantation Office adjusted the toponyms of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Plymouth to conform to the new painted borders.1 One of the many maps the committee stored in a series of custom-built “presses for papers, books and Maps” at their Scotland Yard office in London, this map is one of the most distinctive English maps of seventeenth-century New England.2 The Lords of Trade and Plantations were voracious map consumers in the late 1670s as they worked with Charles II and his ministers to understand, consolidate, and reform the expanding English empire.3 During 1681 their focus was largely on New England as they mediated disputes about Massachusetts’s borders, and this work likely provoked Povey to annotate the Morden and Berry map. While borders had become a common feature on engraved and printed maps by the middle of the seventeenth century, this map’s watercolor borders are a rare trace of the usually ephemeral tactile process of colonial border-making at the highest level of government. That the Lords of Trade turned to printed maps as a key apparatus of empire is less novel. Scholars have long described how European architects of empire relied on maps and the borders they represented to claim distant lands, chart colonial developments, and ultimately to bring empire into existence.4 What is so surprising about Povey’s embellishment of A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia is that the borders he drew did not accurately represent the actual borders of the New England colonies. The northern border of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, is shown far below the Merrimack River, its true place, and the western borders of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and John Mason’s Province of New Hampshire are equally vague. What should we make of Povey’s lines? They did not represent Massachusetts’s claimed borders, they did not represent those the lords recognized, nor were the map’s borders where they would eventually be placed. Instead Povey appears to have been marking the general location of the New England colonies’ borders. This imprecision suggests a more complicated understanding of the geographic space of early modern empire than scholars, even those who consider maps as “weapons of imperialism,” have previously assumed.5 Historians typically explain early modern English cartographic inaccuracies by pointing to the confluence of powerful Indigenous nations that restricted access to territory, poor cartographic instruments, rugged terrain, and unskilled draftsmen and engravers. If boundaries could have been rendered precisely, these scholars’ narratives run, they would have been.6 The Povey borders, however, suggest a different interpretation. They were generalized rather than exact because that fuzziness opened the space for the Lords of Trade to reimagine the political organization of New England and advance the imperial goal of restraining Massachusetts. Imprecise borders were not mistakes but part of the plan.

Focusing on the key moment in the seventeenth century when English state-builders were working to consolidate control of the growing empire after the Restoration of Charles II, this essay traces the multiple, often conflicting ways imperial projectors formulated boundaries in cartographic images of English New England when they drew borders on maps. Most immediate to the colonial project, administrators and sovereigns used maps as legal claims to empire that worked alongside colonial charters and evidence of occupation to solidify sovereignty over colonial places. Englishmen also believed that maps created order in the colonial world by naming territories and geographic features and by representing the unfamiliar in familiar ways. As important as marking borders on maps was for claiming sovereignty and creating order, rulers, government bureaucrats, mapmakers, and colonists did not consider the political borders rendered on maps to be rigorous depictions of reality. This way of thinking about maps as scientific and rational instruments for state building whose authority rested on the accurate representation of space, the delimitation of boundaries, and the demarcation of those divisions on the landscape did not develop fully until the nineteenth century.7

To be sure, seventeenth-century mapmakers relied on precise geographic data to render landscapes and to denote borders when possible, and makers and viewers employed the language of accuracy and precision when evaluating maps’ accomplishments. The steady accumulation of geographic knowledge in the seventeenth century and the increased precision with which cartographers could represent it enabled European empires to rationalize colonial space, to consolidate authority over colonial places and peoples, and to secure political boundaries.8 But to say that maps had the power to make empire does not mean early modern Englishmen intended the borderlines drawn on maps to represent reality precisely. As John Povey’s inexact lines on the Morden and Berry map suggest, English state-builders—including the high-ranking officials who made up the Committee of Trade and Plantations—did not yet believe that lines on maps were immutable boundaries. This was especially true in the Americas where competing empires and the presence of Indigenous nations meant the Westphalian principles of sovereign territorial statehood were contested and frontiers changed frequently.9 In these places imprecise boundaries on maps accommodated ever-changing ambitions and opened the theoretical space that enabled opportunistic imperial state-builders to imagine (and thus create) new boundaries when needed. If we want to understand how conceptions of space shaped imperialism, we need to be more exact about how English authorities, maritime boosters, colonists, and—as others suggest—Indigenous Americans thought about the borders on maps in the seventeenth century and by extension the nature of borders themselves. Carefully examining the lines drawn on maps and the intentions behind them allows us to see imprecise and porous borders as intentional and even politically strategic.

Mapping New England

Let’s return to John Povey and his map of New England. What exactly was Povey thinking about in 1681 as he colored the borders of New England provinces on Morden and Berry’s map? First, his choice of watercolors to annotate the map was not unusual. Watercolors were commonly used for map-coloring because their transparency meant that they would not obscure the printed lines beneath. The medium was likely familiar to Povey. Adding watercolors to maps was a part of elite education and, as an important art manual first published in 1676 noted, was also “an excellent recreation for those gentry, and others, who delight in the knowledge of maps.”10 The map that Povey embellished was one of a host of new maps published in London during the 1660s and 1670s. As map consciousness expanded along with the English empire, Londoners sought new cartographic representations. Increased demand created new opportunities for mapmakers like Morden and Berry, who for the first time were able to compete with Continental suppliers. The copy of A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia that Povey colored is one of at least forty-eight maps the Lords of Trade collected in this period and is now part of what is known as the Blathwyat Atlas, held at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. The lords used this collection of both printed and manuscript maps at the Plantations Office in Whitehall during the 1670s and 1680s. Procured largely by Blathwayt from English as well as Continental suppliers, these maps—only a small part of that office’s extensive cartographic holdings—enabled the Lords of Trade to imagine the expanding English empire, to chart its progress, and to manage its affairs.11 Morden and Berry’s map was purchased at this critical moment as Charles II and his ministers worked to consolidate and reform the expanding empire.12

There is much the Lords of Trade likely admired about A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia. The mapmakers present an unbroken line of English settlement running from Virginia in the south to New Hampshire in the north and stretching as far west as the Appalachian Mountains and Lake Ontario (see Figure 2.1). Though recording the presence of Indigenous nations on the land—the Mohegan, the Raritan, and the Susquehannock among others—the map’s overriding effect is to indicate extensive English knowledge about the eastern seaboard. Buttressed by the confidence engendered by a large scale, graduated longitudinal and latitudinal lines, and the precise placement of numerous rivers and towns all bearing English names, the map is a declaration of English control of its North American empire.

It is still unknown exactly how and where Morden and Berry acquired their geographic information about New England, but their image marks a distinctive break from earlier maps of the region, many of which relied on Dutch surveys. The most likely source was a combination of a manuscript map of unknown origins supplemented by the addition of places newly important to English audiences for their association with King Philip’s War (1675–78). The map, for example, includes references to “Mounthope,” (the home of Pometacomet, or King Philip), “King Philip’s Country,” and “Spaw [Squaw] sachem” (the residence of Pometacomet’s sister-in-law Weetamoo, the important Pocasset saunkskwa and diplomat). The inclusion of these places and the map’s 1676 publication date suggest that Morden and Berry hoped to appeal to Londoners reading about the conflict in their newssheets. These references to King Philip’s War also reinforced the map’s accuracy as they testified to the freshness of the map’s information. The section depicting the Chesapeake likewise breaks from earlier Dutch precedents and is based on the recently published Virginia and Maryland As it is Planted and Inhabited this present Year 1670, which had been drawn by Augustine Herrman of Maryland and engraved by William Faithorne, which John Seller began to sell in London in 1674. The only portion of the Morden and Berry map not based on recent English surveys is the section depicting New Jersey, which follows the well-known Dutch Jansson-Visscher map series supplemented with new information about English land grants. Published just two years after the final return of New Netherland to the English, A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia embodies the consolidated North American empire Charles II had pursued for a decade and a half.13

In its depiction of North America as an English space the Morden and Berry map was a key component of English efforts to defend Charles II’s claim to authority over his colonial possessions against other empires. By the seventeenth century maps had become essential tools in articulating legal imperium—the sovereign claim to authority over a place—and dominium—the authority to govern that place. It was not enough to simply discover a territory. Rather, to receive international recognition of sovereignty empires also had to demonstrate long and continuous occupation and rule. Maps were effective markers of what is often referred to as “occupation and prescription” because they clearly demonstrated that land was known, measured, and occupied; that the land was held by a specific sovereign monarch whose presence was marked by symbols and nomenclature upon the map; and, when placed in a series of maps, that control was continual. The specificity of geographic information presented on a map—the location of rivers, mountains, and towns—helped to reinforce its power as an object of possession because these details indicated command and control of the geographic space.14 A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia served these functions by presenting the most up-to-date cartographic knowledge of North America.

Reinforcing the map’s cartographic claiming of the land is the map’s cartouche, a vignette of eight Native people in the lower right-hand corner. Comprising four distinct but overlapping scenes, the figures—pictured bare-chested and wearing animal-skin skirts—are shown fishing, hunting, butchering deer, preparing hides, and packing generic bales for shipment. Drawn from stock representations of Native peoples common in European maps and prints—the fishing scene, for example, is based on Theodor de Bry’s engravings of John White’s Roanoke watercolors—the cartouche works with the map to make North America comprehensible for English viewers. Among the most familiar depictions of Amerindians, De Bry’s images emphasized Native Americans’ exoticness, but the figures’ frequent duplication across a variety of media meant that period viewers were so versant with these representations that they no longer stood for the real Algonquin-speaking people they initially depicted but instead became abstracted into the type of the “Indian.” Pictured here laboring to produce goods for European trade, the Amerindians’ inclusion on the map served to underline supposed English mastery of colonial peoples and enabled Englishmen to compare their supposed civility with Native Americans’ supposed savageness.15 Together the familiar cartographic and iconographic modes of representation employed on A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia allowed viewers to imagine themselves in control of English North America.

So far this reading accords with the understanding of the map’s role as a political tool, but if the ca. 1676 Morden and Berry map was already so potent an instrument of empire, why did Povey feel the need to edit it? The answer to this question lies in the timing of his act and the conversations underway in the Plantation Office in the 1670s and 1680s. John Povey became clerk there in 1680 and the seven New England colonies ceased to exist as depicted here when James II created the Dominion of New England in 1686. During these years the Lords of Trade engaged in a long-running and often acrimonious discussion about the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its place in the empire. Many in London were frustrated by the colony’s leaders’ constant infringement upon the territory of its English neighbors, their rejection of English political authority, and Massachusetts residents’ growing intercolonial (and often illicit) trade, which critics argued was a drag on England’s own commerce. The solution to all these problems, many in England began to argue, was the dissolution of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter and the imposition of royal authority on the colony. As the Lords of Trade put it in 1681, perhaps the only way to bring “New England” to a “perfect settlement” was to dispatch a “general governor” for the region to be maintained not at local expense but at the imperial government’s so as to make him responsive to imperial, not colonial, concerns. Though no clear decision had yet been reached to withdraw Massachusetts’s charter when Povey added the borders to the Morden and Berry map, English administrators were beginning to reconceptualize the political geography of New England. Ultimately that work was completed when James II, with the support of the Lords of Trade and their secretary William Blathwayt, established the Dominion of New England in 1686. This new province was designed to consolidate metropolitan control of New England by bringing the region under a unified administration headed by a new royal governor.16

The Borders of New England

Drawn during this period of administrative reform and reconsideration of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter, Povey’s imprecise borders can best be understood as part of Charles II and the Lords of Trade’s efforts to assert authority over the empire and more directly as a tool to restrain the leaders of the Bay Colony’s territorial ambitions. As numerous scholars have demonstrated, the fight over the Massachusetts charter was wrapped up in broader imperial, legal, religious, and political concerns, but it also was a product of differences in geography.17 A key part of tensions with the colony were varying interpretations of the colony’s geographic bounds as described in the Massachusetts Bay Company’s 1629 charter and in subsequent charters for Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York as well as preexisting land claims in what is now New Hampshire and Maine. The details of these debates are complex and involve both Massachusetts’s northern and southern bounds, which were fixed in the charter as running from a point three miles south of the southernmost branch of the Charles River in the south and a point three miles north of the Merrimack River in the north.18 The difficulty in settling these borders was twofold. First, James I and the Council of New England (a company convened to oversee settlement in New England) had set down the geographic bounds of the New England colonies in textual charters and land grants that hinged on the interpretation of poorly understood geographic features. This decision meant that colonial companies, proprietors, and officials on the ground struggled to agree about where exactly these lines were. Massachusetts’ leaders exacerbated these conflicts in every case by interpreting their charter in the broadest ways possible so as to justify their land grabs from neighboring colonies.19

With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 colonial governments weary of futile intercolonial negotiations brought their concerns to England. The result was a series of lawsuits in English courts and appeals made to the Crown and Lords of Trade to restrain the ambitions of the leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1662 two years of lobbying by agents for Connecticut, for example, resulted in a new charter for that colony that settled its northern border with Massachusetts in Connecticut’s favor.20 The General Court of Massachusetts’s hesitancy in proclaiming the new king in 1660 and Massachusetts’s Puritan leadership put the colony in a difficult position in London. The arrival of a royal commission to investigate the Bay Colony’s abuse of its authority, including its expansive territorial ambitions in 1664, brought these issues to a head. While the commission’s primary responsibilities were not geographic, much of their work was designed to rein in Massachusetts’s leaders’ exuberant land grabs including along its border with Rhode Island (the so-called Narragansett Country or King’s Province) and its westward boundary (its charter extended this to the Pacific Ocean). In addition, the commission investigated the situation in New Hampshire and Maine where Massachusetts authorities had ignored the land claims of Robert Mason and Ferdinando Gorges, both of whose grandfathers had been granted land between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers a half-century earlier. Here the commissioners reestablished royal control of the Maine lands, though they left the decision about New Hampshire to the Crown. These measures, however, did not fully resolve the border disputes, and the work of the commissioners stalled once they returned to England. Many of the most damning petitions and papers they collected against Massachusetts were (providentially to Massachusetts Puritans) lost, and Charles II’s administration was grappling with a variety of crises.21

The General Court of Massachusetts took advantage of waning pressure from the Crown and the commissioners’ departure to reassert their authority in Maine and New Hampshire. These actions combined with continued petitioning from Mason and Gorges (they presented sixteen petitions in rapid succession) brought the issues of Massachusetts’s expansive border policy back to the attention of the Lords of Trade in the mid-1670s. When combined with Massachusetts’s authorities’ continued flouting of royal authority, violations of English trade law, and provoking of King Philip’s War the colony’s actions were enough for English officials to intervene in Massachusetts policy again. This time the lords sent agent Edward Randolph (cousin to Robert Mason) to Massachusetts to investigate and gave him the power to demand that the colony send agents to England to answer the king directly.22 Again the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s borders were not the central issue, but they were important enough that one of Randolph’s first actions after arriving in Boston on June 10, 1676, was to deliver Gorges and Mason’s petitions to the governor and council. To counter their critics the Massachusetts General Court dispatched maps of New England that defended their aggressive border claims with agents William Stoughton and Peter Bulkeley to make their case directly in London. The Lords of Trade repeatedly held hearings to discuss Stoughton and Bulkeley’s interpretation of Massachusetts’s boundaries before the Lords Chief Justices ruled that the Bay Colony had “no right to governe” the lands claimed by Gorges in 1677, and the Lords of Trade restored Mason’s lands and established the Province of New Hampshire in 1679. This action did not end matters, however, as the quarreling continued despite the lords’ actions. Massachusetts’s leaders tried to settle the conflict in Maine by buying much of the disputed Maine territories from Gorges’s heirs, but the New Hampshire lands remained in Mason’s hands. Meantime, the issue of the bounds of the Narragansett Country (or King’s Province), which had first been settled by a royal boundary commission in 1665, arose again to occupy the lords’ attention when agents from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut resumed their efforts to gain control of the region. It is clear, therefore, that in 1681 when Povey likely annotated the Morden and Berry map the matter of the borders of the New England colonies remained unsettled, and these matters continued to crowd the Lords of Trade’s agenda.23

For a map so focused on borders, one of the most curious aspects of this map is that Povey completely ignored New York. Recently wrested from the Dutch, this colony’s borders, especially those it shared with Connecticut, were also in dispute in the 1660s and 1670s. This omission highlights how imperial politics shaped Povey’s work. When established in 1662 Connecticut’s charter, which had been issued under Lord Clarendon’s hand, awarded the colony a western border that terminated at the Pacific, putting it in direct conflict with Dutch New Netherland, which claimed a border with Connecticut some twenty miles east of the Hudson River. England’s conquest of New Netherland two years later made this dispute less pressing, but the grant the Duke of York received complicated matters further as it placed New York’s new eastern border at the west bank of the Connecticut River. Local negotiations between Richard Nicolls, governor of New York, and Connecticut governor John Winthrop Jr. settled the matter temporarily. However, because the agreement was not ratified by the Crown and because it was based on disputed geographic features, this border too remained an almost constant feature of dispute on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1670s these issues flared after the brief reoccupation of New York by the Dutch in 1673. The return of English rule necessitated a new charter for New York in 1674 that firmly placed New York’s eastern border at the Connecticut River. New York’s new governor, Edmund Andros, attempted to enforce this border, but the duke refused to raise the issue in London because he believed that he would be in a more advantageous position if he waited until the completion of the investigations of the New England colonies, which had just begun. Before he could press his advantage, however, the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis intervened to sideline the Duke of York as James was forced out of London by the king. Between 1679 and 1682 he was only briefly in London, spending most of his time first in Brussels and then in Edinburgh. The political campaign against James, which had its origins among radical Whigs in the Parliament, tainted his reputation in court, and his physical absence left him unable to use his influence to secure the expansive borders that his grant gave New York. This political sidetracking of New York’s strongest voice likely explains why New York is missing from the 1681 annotations on the Morden and Berry map and why Povey, despite the Board of Trade’s Tory sympathies under Blathwayt’s leadership, didn’t mark its boundaries.24

As a whole Povey’s lines constituted a thoughtful and direct response to Massachusetts’s violation of its neighbors’ borders. Given the extensive attention that border disputes within and between the New England colonies generated locally and in London, the Lords of Trade and John Povey’s lack of fidelity to the charter borders in his map in 1681 cannot be understood as accidental or sloppy. Instead the new borders Povey drew on the Morden and Berry map were a clear assertion of power—by the Lords of Trade, not Massachusetts’s rulers—to set colonial boundaries. The generalized watercolor, rather than ink, borders helped to detach each of the New England colonies’ boundaries from those that their charters articulated. And in their capricious placement Povey and the lords suggested disdain for the colony’s punctiliousness. The use of the sobriquet “Boston Colony” for Massachusetts on the hand-lettered key to the painted borders on the one hand could reflect the inflated way that many in that city saw their importance to the wider colony. On the other hand, given the lords’ frustration with Massachusetts in the 1670s the term more likely subtly mocks the territorial ambitions of what was still a small city.25 Povey’s hand-colored borders are not the only editing that was performed on A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia at the Plantation Office. Someone also scrawled out the parts of the toponyms of “Connecticut Colony,” “Massachusetts Colony,” and “Plymouth Colony” that extend beyond the bounds of those colonies and reinked them in new locations while adding “The Province of New Hampshire” as well (see Figure 2.1). The map’s watercolor lines and inked corrections showed active engagement with the framing of New England policy in action.

As Povey painted in new borders and altered the map’s toponyms he was participating in the ongoing process of creating borders. Once unmoored from the claims and counterclaims of colonial governments and proprietors the borders of the New England colonies could be redrawn and reframed. The Povey annotated map, in other words, helped accomplish the ideological work of reimagining New England’s political geography. His alterations indicate that the lords would not be bound by past charters and colonial claims; it would be they and the Crown who determined the empire’s shape. Amending the map in these two ways, even if it benefited metropolitan policy, was risky because the action called into question the power of maps themselves. If printed maps could be so casually altered, did they have the authority they claimed?26 The Lords of Trade’s reimagining of the political geography of New England was a potentially destabilizing act in that it undermined the authority of the map’s political assertions and by extension the king and empire it proclaimed as sovereign. In this case, though, as the lords labored to remake the Stuart empire, the risky act of redrawing New England’s borders afforded them an irresistible opportunity to reassert metropolitan authority. The lords judged gaining greater control over New England worth the risk.

Imagining New England

The effort to reframe New England’s geography in the 1670s and 1680s extended beyond the Plantation Office. At the same time that the lords were discussing the future of the Massachusetts charter, a rush of maps went on sale in London’s shops that represented the colonies of New England in innovative ways. The name “New England” was first used to identify the English possessions between New Netherland and New France on John Smith’s map New England, The most remarqueable parts (1616). Soon it had become the standard term used for the region on European maps. But before the late 1670s it was unusual for these maps to mark out New England as a distinct political space. Rather, most maps, even if employing “New England” in the title or using the term as a toponym on the map itself, displayed the political borders and names of individual colonies as well. This convention is clear in the most famous map of seventeenth-century New England, the so-called Hubbard A Map of New-England (1677) (see Figure 2.2). Long celebrated as the first map to be printed in British North America, this woodcut map accompanied William Hubbard’s history of King Philip’s War, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians (Boston, 1677). Re-cut and printed in London to accompany the version of Hubbard’s pamphlet printed there, The Present State of New-England (1677), the map circulated widely on both sides of the Atlantic and fundamentally shaped English understanding of the region’s geography.27 This image is labeled “A Map of New-England” but the map’s framing of land and use of borders belies that title. Indeed, it is a map of Massachusetts. Among the thickest and darkest marks on the map are the two parallel lines that represent the northern and southern bounds of the Massachusetts Bay Colony according to its charter. This rendering of Massachusetts follows a manuscript map created by Bostonian William Reed in 1665 in response to a demand from Charles II that Massachusetts furnish “a mapp or draught . . . made with all exactness possible” so that the Crown could “well understand” the colony’s “bounds . . . in discoursing of them.”28 Though the Reed map was lost at sea, a copy of it ultimately reached the Lords of Trade where it sparked anger because it placed Massachusetts’s border so far north as to claim the coastal settlements of New Hampshire and Maine.29 The Hubbard map’s use of the distinctive Reed borders isolates Massachusetts from the rest of its neighbors and advances the Bay Colony’s highly localized and politicized understanding of its geography. Residents’ cartographic claim for an expansive Massachusetts works against the map’s title, which presents a map of “New England.” The darkly pictured borders focus the viewer’s attention on the map’s central panel, an effect enhanced by the map’s orientation—with west to the top—and the darkly printed Connecticut River. In its representation of borders, its framing, and depiction of waterways this map makes clear that there was as yet no such political unit as “New England.”30

Just a few years later, however, as the Lords of Trade debated the future of New England and two years before Povey remade Morden and Berry’s A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia, several leading mapmakers with close ties to the Plantation Office and the Crown began to reimagine the region’s political geography and to present New England as a politically distinct geographic unit. In 1679 Morden and Berry published A Map of ye English Empire in ye Continent of America by Richard Daniels. Replicating the framing of the Jansson-Visscher series, this map is most notable for its equation of New England with Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, New York, and New Jersey in its cartouche. Placing New England—made up by a group of colonies—alongside individual colonies, Daniels encourages viewers to understand New England as a single colonial unit. The map itself includes toponyms naming the individual New England colonies, but they are represented in a type far smaller than that used to denote New England and Virginia (though New Jersey and New York are rendered in the same size font as the New England colonies). The version of this map held at the John Carter Brown Library goes even further to erase New England’s individual political units.31 This copy includes hand-colored borders rendered in different colors as on the Povey map. These borders do not follow the boundaries of individual New England colonies, but rather combine New England and New York as one unit (as would the Dominion of New England) even as they represent Virginia and Maryland singularly. The next year John Seller, one of London’s most prominent map publisher and sellers, brought out a map that even more assertively created a distinctive New England. Hydrographer to the King since 1671 and publisher of perhaps the most important cartographic achievement of the period, The English Pilot, Seller was tied closely to the Stuart court.32 In 1680 Seller published a new atlas entitled Atlas Terrestris: or a collection of choice mapps of all the Empires, Monarchies, Kingdoms, which included a map of eastern North America. A chart of the sea coasts of New-England, New-Jarsey, Virginia, Maryland and Carolina is derived from a number of different Seller maps and pictures the coastline in impressive detail.33 Most striking about the map, however, are the decorative coats of arms that ornament each colony. Heraldic symbols were common on seventeenth-century maps where they served to denote English proprietary control of territory. What is most notable about their use on this map is that like the 1679 Morden and Berry map New England is placed alongside Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York as a discrete political unit. The placement of the arms of Great Britain within New England reinforces Crown control over the region in the most direct way possible. Produced at a moment when Massachusetts’s charter was being questioned because of the colony’s challenges to royal authority, Seller’s imprinting of the chief symbol of the monarch’s sovereignty onto Massachusetts indicates that the colony’s legitimacy rests not with its dissenting past but with the monarch. The distinctive local geographic imagination of Massachusetts that is so prominent on the Hubbard map has been subsumed by a metropolitan reimagining that erased that colony and replaced it with an imperially controlled New England.34

English policymakers’ shift toward imagining New England as a single political unit is apparent on a wide range of maps of the region published in the last two decades of the seventeenth century. Though some English mapmakers continued to issue maps indicating the bounds of individual colonies, most cartographic images published in England in these years followed the shift toward representing New England as a single political unit even after the collapse of the Dominion of New England in 1689.35 This trend is clear in the maps that represented the New England coastline that were included in John Thornton and William Fisher’s newly published The English Pilot, The Fourth Book (West-India) (London, 1689). The English Pilot was the standard guide to sea navigation in the English empire and was reprinted with only occasional updates to its content until the 1790s.36 New England is depicted multiple times in a series of overlapping maps in The English Pilot; each time it is shown as a discrete political entity alongside its neighboring colonies.37 Philip Lea’s North America divided into its III principall parts (London, ca. 1685) shares the Thornton map’s depiction of New England.38 This map captures the colonies of the three European empires that claimed North America from the Caribbean to the Arctic and from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific and makes little attempt to distinguish the individual colonies of New England. Instead, the maker imprinted the label “New England” over them even as it more clearly lists each other English colony, including the closely packed West Indian territories. Povey’s 1681 hand-drawn borders, then, appear to be an early iteration of a larger cartographic reimagination of New England’s political geography. As the lords debated revising Massachusetts’s charter in the 1670s and 1680s, Povey’s hand-inked borders created the metaphorical space to reframe the political organization of New England.

Pinning Down Borders

During the second half of the eighteenth century a new form of scientific cartography began to emerge in Britain and much of western Europe that had more confidence in the accuracy of maps to capture the reality of geographic space. This new thinking intersected with the British government’s development of more centralized, systematic, and uniform ways of managing the empire during and after the Seven Years’ War. The result was a series of British maps produced at mid-century that sought a more accurate representation of colonial borders to “impose order on a disordered colonial world,” especially in terms of clearly demarcating political authority.39 The very title of Emanuel Bowen’s An accurate map of North America (London, 1755) stresses this new emphasis on precision. The map’s text reinforces this message by explaining away any errors in the map as being a result of earlier cartographic and political failures. “The Limits of His Majestys several Provinces are here laid down as they at present exercise their Jurisdiction,” the map reads, but the borders between “Massachusets [sic] Province with New York, New York with new Jersey, Connecticut with New York, and Pensilvania [sic] with Maryland” not to mention “the Boundary of North & South Carolina . . . or of South Carolina & Gorgia [sic]” were not as accurate as they could be because they had “not yet [been] finally determined.”40 Scholars have tended to echo Bowen’s complaint and have argued that the failure of seventeenth-century English maps to render borders accurately was a product not of ideology but of technology. And even when borders were mapped government was too weak to enforce them. Imprecise borders, many historians contend, were a product not of ideology but of technology.41

What I hope to have shown here is that these borders remained imprecise in English perception and on English maps by design. As things to think with rather than definite, these borders could encompass and accommodate new imaginings of empire and allow actors at multiple levels—local, imperial, bureaucratic, royal, cartographer, and Native informant—to articulate borders. This fictionality of borders was not a bug or failure in the system but rather was vital for building an empire. The Lords of Trade’s copy of A Map of New England New Yorke New Iersey Mary-Land & Virginia with Povey’s watercolor borders shows one example of how English state-builders used this fictionality to the empire’s advantage in the late 1670s and 1680s by exploiting it to help enforce their political control over New England.

Notes

1. 1.  The attribution (originally made by Jeannette D. Black) to John Povey is based on a comparison between the handwritten legend for the colors on the bottom right of the map. This writing matches other materials in Povey’s hand. Povey had to have made these notations between 1680 when he began work as clerk to Blathwayt and 1686 when Massachusetts was subsumed into the Dominion of New England. As will be show below, 1681 is the most likely date because that is when the lords were most concerned with Massachusetts’s border. Black argues that the edited toponyms were made in Blathwayt’s hand, but there is not enough text to confirm this. See Jeannette D. Black, The Blathwayt Atlas, vol. 2, Commentary (Brown University Press, 1975), 86–87. A high-resolution image is available at: https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCBMAPS~1~1~1135~102010001:A-Map-of-New-England-New-Yorke-New.
2. 2.  Accounts of the Lords of Trade, 25 March 1677, Add. MS 9767, BL, quoted in Black, The Blathwayt Atlas, vol. 2, Commentary, 12.
3. 3.  Daniel A. Baugh, “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of ‘a Grand Marine Empire,’” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (Routledge, 1994), 185–93; Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 25–53.
4. 4.  There is a large and growing literature on the use of maps in English state-building. Begin with Richard L. Kagan and Benjamin Schmidt, “Maps and the Early Modern State: Official Cartography,” 661–69; Peter Barber, “Mapmaking in England, ca. 1470–1650,” 1598–1609; Robert C. D. Baldwin, “Colonial Cartography Under the Tudor and Early Stuart Monarchies, ca. 1480–ca. 1640,” 1757–72, all in The History of Cartography, vol. 3, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (University of Chicago Press, 2007); Ken MacMillan, “Sovereignty ‘More Plainly Described’: Early English Maps of North America, 1580–1625,” Journal of British Studies 42, no. 4 (2003): 423–31, 435–46. For the importance of maps in conceptualizing empire and claiming space see William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (Yale University Press, 2000), 16–17, 67–69, 112–13, 116–23, 143–55, 189–90; J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 278–84.
5. 5.  Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” 282. Also, see works cited above.
6. 6.  Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession: Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 140–48; Christopher Tomlins, “The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement: English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century,” Law & Social Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2001), 324–25; Benjamin Schmidt, “Mapping an Empire: Cartographic and Colonial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 3 (1997), 563. See also Jeremy M. Black, “The Historical Atlas: Teaching Tool or Coffee-Table Book?” History Teachers 25, no. 4 (1992): 495–96; Alan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 21, 271–90.
7. 7.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (Verso, 1991), 163–64, 170–78; D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. 204–12; Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (University of California Press, 1989), 2–5; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1999), 2–3, 7, 24, 38, 44–47. Scholars have tended to read these arguments about political borders on maps back onto earlier periods even as they argue for the power of map symbolism as opposed to geographic accuracy. See, for example, Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. 100–19; D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (Yale University Press, 1986), 231–35; Schmidt, “Mapping an Empire,” esp. 550–51. More recently Nathan Braccio, too, conflates map use with the search for “precise boundaries” even as he profitably uncovers a richer noncartographic variety of describing geography in early New England than scholars have previously assumed. Braccio, “Map Scarcity in Early Colonial New England,” Early American Studies 19, no. 2 (2021), esp. 457–62, quotation, 460. Exceptions that consider a different map sensibility in the seventeenth century include Matthew H. Edney, “New England Mapped: The Creation of a Colonial Territory,” in La cartografia europea tra primo Rinascimento e fine dell’Illuminismo: Atti del Convegno internazionale “The Making of European Cartography,” ed. Diogo Ramada Curto, Angelo Cattaneo, and André Ferrand Almeida (Leo S. Olshki, 2003), 160–66; MacMillan, “Sovereignty ‘More Plainly Described,’” esp. 413–14. The one group of scholars that consistently has allowed for divergent geographic consciousness among early modern Americans is those studying Indigenous mapping. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, “Maps and Space, Paths to Connect, and Lines to Divide,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 4–25; Braccio, “Map Scarcity in Early Colonial New England,” 476–81; Gavin Hollis, “The Wrong Side of the Map? The Cartographic Encounters of John Lederer,” in Early American Cartographies, ed. Martin Brückner (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Robert Paulett, An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732–1795 (University of Georgia Press, 2012), 12–48; Gregory A. Waselkov, “Indian Maps of the Colonial Southeast,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 292–343.
8. 8.  For two examples of this use of maps in two different places in the British empire see Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (University of Chicago Press, 1999); MacMillan, “Sovereignty ‘More Plainly Described.’”
9. 9.  On the theory of territorial borders (which has largely developed to explain the period after 1700) see John Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory,” Review of International Political Economy 1, no. 1 (Spring 1994), 53, 60–62, 69–70; Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, esp. 204–12; Daniel-Erasmus Khan, “Territory and Boundaries,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2012), 231–34, 237–40; J. R. V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries (Unwin Hyman, 1987), 1–13.
10. 10.  Smith’s manual was just one of a host of similar manuals that instructed readers in using watercolors. By that date professional colormen offered watercolors for sale in London. John Smith, Art of Painting in Oyl (Samuel Crouch, 1705 ed.), 93, cited in David Woodward, “Techniques of Map Engraving, Printing, and Coloring in the European Renaissance,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3, Cartography in the European Renaissance, 603–6, quotation 605; Jackson Zyontz, “The Watercolor Manual: Legitimizing Watercolor Through Text,” in Philip Earenfight et al., A British Sentiment: Landscape Drawings and Watercolors 1750–1950 from the Collection of John Harbold (The Trout Gallery Dickinson College, 2017), 12–16.
11. 11.  Black, The Blathwayt Atlas, 2:3–14.
12. 12.  Daniel A. Baugh, “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of ‘a Grand Marine Empire,’” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (Routledge, 1994), 185–93; Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 25–53.
13. 13.  Black, The Blathwayt Atlas, 2:82–87; Richard Boulind, “William Hack and the Description of New England,” in Sibley’s Heir: A Volume in Memory of Clifford Kenyon Shipton (The Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the University Press of Virginia, 1982), 119–20. For King Philip’s War and Weetamoo see Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018), esp. 3–4, 131. On Virginia and Maryland see Christian J. Koot, A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake (New York University Press, 2018).
14. 14.  MacMillan, “Sovereignty ‘More Plainly Described,’” 426–32.
15. 15.  The cartouche closely resembles Theodor de Bry, “Their manner of fishynge in Virginia,” in Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia [Frankfurt], 1590. A high-resolution image is available at: https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCB~1~1~778~640005:Their-manner-of-fishynge-in-Virgin; Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xii–xiii; Ute Kuhlemann, “Between Reproduction, Invention and Propaganda: Theodor de Bry’s Engravings After John White’s Watercolours,” in A New World: England’s First View of America, ed. Kim Sloan (British Museum Press, 2007), 82–92. See also Martin Brückner, “The ‘New England’ Cartouche: Tablets, Tableaux, and Theatricality in Eighteenth-Century Cartography,” in New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680–1830, ed. Georgia Barnhill and Martha McNamara (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2012), 227–32.
16. 16.  Journal of Lords of Trade and Plantations, April 16, 1681, Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1681–1684, ed. J. W. Fortescue (H. M. Stationery Office, 1898), 31, quotations (hereafter CSPC). Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–1715 (Rutgers University Press, 1981), 11–19, 30–31, 45–46, 50–57; Stanwood, The Empire Reformed, 29–31, 49–53. The complaints against Massachusetts were most clearly articulated in Edward Randolph’s reports to the Lords of Trade. See, for example, those Randolph submitted in April 1681 to the Lords of Trade as extracted in CSPC, America and the West Indies, 1681–1684, ed. Fortescue, 31–33.
17. 17.  See most recently Owen Stanwood who situates the dispute at the intersection of Stuart imperial reforms and religious politics. Stanwood, The Empire Reformed.
18. 18.  “The Charter of Massachusetts bay,” 1637 in Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State constitutions: colonial charters, and other organic laws of the States, territories, and Colonies, now or heretofore forming the United States of America (Government Printing Office, 1909), vol. 3: 1847.
19. 19.  Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 39–42, 56; Johnson, Adjustment to Empire, 19–24.
20. 20.  Richard S. Dunn, “John Winthrop, Jr., and the Narragansett Country,” William and Mary Quarterly 13, no. 1 (1956), 68, 74–77.
21. 21.  Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 39–42, 46–59, 63–68, 83; Black, The Blathwayt Atlas, 2:63–71; Johnson, Adjustment to Empire, 19, 21–22; Dunn, “John Winthrop, Jr. and the Narragansett Country,” 82–86. The fourth article of the commissioner’s instructions encouraged them to try to negotiate border disputes. “Instructions to the King’s Commissioners to visit Massachusetts,” 23 April 1664, f. 106r, no. 51, CO 1/18, TNA.
22. 22.  Edward Randolph to Secretary Coventry, 17 June 1676, ff. 46v–47r, CO 1/37, TNA; Johnson, Adjustment to Empire, 19, 21–22, 28–33; Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 195–99, 244–46.
23. 23.  Report of Lords Chief Justices Sir Richard Raynsford and Sir Francis North to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 17 July 1677, f. 53r, CO 1/41, TNA. The Lords of Trade discussed the Mason and Gorges petitions and the Massachusetts replies nine times between March and September 1677. CSPC, America and the West Indies, 1677–80, 17, 44, 56, 79, 99, 102, 110, 118–19, 135, 147–48. The next spring the issue was back before them. Journal of the Lords of Trade, 8 April 1678, CSPC, America and the West Indies, 1677–80, 233–34; Governor Andros answer to Enquiries of the Council of Trade, April 9, 1678, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan (Weed, Parsons, & Co., 1853), 3:262–63 (hereafter DRCNY). Mason was awarded a patent for New Hampshire in July 1679. Mr. Robert Mason’s agreement with the King about New Hampshire, 1 July 1679, no. 80, CO 1/43, TNA. The final decision, however, was delayed as Massachusetts appealed. Petition of Robert Mason to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 6 August 1680, f. 424, CO 1/45, TNA. The discussion about the two colonies’ borders and limits of their authority resumed in 1681 and 1682: CSPC, America and the West Indies, 1681–1684, 129–30, 138–39, 198–99, 200, 240, 254, 288–91, 349. The Narragansett Country returned to the lords’ agenda in 1678 and remained through 1681. CSPC, America and the West Indies, 1677–1680, 306–7, 309, 462–63, 492, 499, 500, 520–21, 575–76, 578–79, 589–90, 592–94, 609–11, 617–18; CSPC, America and the West Indies, 1681–1684, 126–27, 270. For a discussion on the Stoughton-Bulkeley map see Black, The Blathwayt Atlas, 2:63–65, 69–71.
24. 24.  Journal of the Lords of Trade, April 8, 1678, CSPC, America and the West Indies, 1677–80, 233–34; Governor Andros answer to Enquiries of the Council of Trade, April 9, 1678, DRCNY, 3:262–63; Philip J. Schwarz, The Jarring Interests: New York’s Boundary Makers, 1664–1776 (State University of New York Press, 1979), 5–34; John Miller, James II, 3rd ed. (Yale University Press, 2000), 87–109.
25. 25.  For the argument that Bostonians saw their city as in effect Massachusetts and that it should be seen as such see Mark Peterson, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power (Princeton University Press, 2019).
26. 26.  On the authority of print see Stephen Orgel, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Space and Traces (Oxford University Press, 2015), esp. 9; William B. MacGregor, “The Authority of Prints: An Early Modern Perspective,” Art History 22, no. 3 (1999): 389–420.
27. 27.  There is a wide body of scholarship about this map that focuses on its authorship and timing but little work on how it pictures space. David Woodward, “The Foster Woodcut Map Controversy: A Further Examination of the Evidence,” Imago Mundi, 21 (1967), 50–61; Matthew H. Edney and Susan Cimburek, “Tell the Traumatic Truth: William Hubbard’s ‘Narrative’ of King Philip’s War and His ‘Map of New-England,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, 2 (2004), 317–21. Most scholars refer to this map as the “Foster map” after John Foster who cut the wooden block it was printed from in Boston, but I follow Edney and Cimburek who have definitively demonstrated that it was Hubbard who designed it. Edney and Cimburek, “Tell the Traumatic Truth,” 317–48.
28. 28.  Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. 4, pt. 2 (Boston, 1854), 183; Black, The Blathwayt Atlas, vol. 2, Commentary, 65–66.
29. 29.  This map is in the collection of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, R. I., William Reed. [New England, showing Massachusetts’ boundaries], [1678]. A high-resolution image is available at: https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCBMAPS~1~1~1572~101870004:-New-England%2C-showing-Massachusetts. Black, The Blathwayt Atlas, vol. 2, Commentary, 63–67; Peter Benes, New England Prospect: A Loan Exhibition of Maps at the Currier Gallery of Art (Boston University for the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 1981), 13–14, 28–29.
30. 30.  Mark Peterson, too, characterizes Massachusetts’s leaders as seeing the wider region as part of an expansive Massachusetts rather than as New England, but he attributes this vision to Boston itself and he makes no cartographic argument. Peterson, The City-State of Boston, esp. 139–63, 169.
31. 31.  A high-resolution image of Richard Daniels, A Map of ye English Empire in ye Continent of America is available at: https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCBMAPS~1~1~1123~100770003:A-Map-of-ye-English-Empire-in-ye.
32. 32.  Coolie Verner, “John Seller and the Chart Trade in Seventeenth-Century England,” in The Compleat Plattmaker: Essays on Chart, Map, and Globe Making in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Norman J. W. Thrower (University of California Press, 1978), 127–57; Sarah Tyacke, London Map-Sellers: 1660–1720 (Map Collector Publications, 1978), xii–xv.
33. 33.  A high-resolution image of John Seller, A chart of the sea coasts of New-England, New-Jarsey, Virginia, Maryland and Carolina (London, 1680) is available at: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-b042-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.
34. 34.  On this map see Brückner, “The ‘New England’ Cartouche,” 224–230.
35. 35.  This assessment is based on study of the maps listed in Barbara Backus McCorkle’s comprehensive carto-bibliography, New England in Early Printed Maps 1513 to 1800: An Illustrated Carto-Bibliography (John Carter Brown Library, 2001).
36. 36.  Coolie Verner, Bibliographical Note, in The English Pilot. London 1689: The Fourth Book (Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1967), v–xx; Verner, “John Seller and the Chart Trade,” 139–40.
37. 37.  These maps are John Thornton, Part of New England (London, 1689–1713), John Thornton Part of New England, New York, East Jersey and Long Island (London, 1689–1713), and John Thornton, A chart of the seas coast of New Found Land, New Scotland, New England, New York, New Jersey, with Virginia and Maryland (London, 1698–1749), and they are maps 689.6, 689.7, and 698.6 in McCorkle, New England in Early Printed Maps.
38. 38.  A high-resolution image is available at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3300.mf000041/.
39. 39.  S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence (Harvard University Press, 2018), 3.
40. 40.  Quotation from text printed on map. Edelson, The New Map of Empire, 55–56.
41. 41.  See note 6 above.