Our Earliest Known Map
A noted \ortli Carolina authority on
maps conics across one antedating
White's drawings.
A crudely drawn map in the British
Public Record Office has recently
been identified as the carles! known
detailed sketch of the North Carolina
coast, sent back to England from the
Roanoke Colony soon after the land¬
ing of the colonists in 1585. It is an
unsigned, undated drawing, with nu¬
merous explanatory notes scrawled
across its face, of the Pamlico and
Albemarle sounds region; it extends
far enough inland to give a repre¬
sentation of present Bertie County be¬
tween the Roanoke and Chowan
rivers. It shows the Outer Banks, with
Ocracokc and other inlets; Roanoke
Island, and other adjacent islands;
and. to the south. Maltamuskect Lake
and the mouths of Pamlico and Ncuse
rivers.
The legends on the map correlate
with the account of the colonists' dis¬
coveries during the summer of 1585
as reported by Governor Ralph Lane
and Thomas Hariot. The map is ap¬
parently an early, rapid sketch which
antedates the more careful drawings
of John White now in the British Mu¬
seum and the still later engravings of
the Dc Bry. published in the first
volume of the Grands Voyages in 1 590
to accompany Thomas Hanoi's A
Briefe and True Report. This anony¬
mous sketch may have some relation
to the well-known and often repro¬
duced pictorial engraving which is the
second plate in Dc Bry's 1590 volume.
This plate by De Bry. "The Arrival
of the Englishmen in Virginia." does
not correspond to any of the White
drawings in the British Museum draw¬
ings and maps. The unsigned sketch
may be in fact, the earlier form of a
pictorial map. now lost, which White
made and which Dc Bry used for his
second plate. If so. the engraving
omits the left or southern part of the
sketch and the information given on
the legends; it adds several wrecked
ships near the entrances to the Outer
Bank inlets and the depiction of a
boatload of Englishmen approaching
Roanoke Island.
In 1952 the present writer obtained
a copy of the anonymous sketch map.
P.R.O.. M & P. G.584 (which is here
By W. P. CUNNING
l)i. Cummins (of Dividvon CoH<se) auihoi of
a new book. "The SoulhcaM in tally Map».”
reproduced, with a transcription of the
legends) from the Public Record Of¬
fice. After a study of the map he was
unsatisfied with the seventeenth cen¬
tury date previously assigned, because
of problems raised by the information
given in the legends. In 1955 David B.
Quinn, professor of history in the Uni¬
versity College of Swansea. University
of Wales, identified the Roanoke
Colony provenance of the map. with a
brilliant and authoritative analysis of
the legends and their connection with
the discoveries and expeditions of the
colonists during the summer of 1585.
This examination of the map appears
in his The Roanoke Voyages 1584-
1590. a two-volume work published in
London by the Hakluyt Society. Pro¬
fessor Quinn ( Roanoke Voyages, Vol.
II. pp. 846-847) considers the docu¬
ment to be "a rough note of the map¬
ping done by White and Hariot in the
first phases of discovery. It was most
probably sent to England early in Sep¬
tember 1585. on the ‘Roebuck’ or
‘Elizabeth.’ possibly with the letter
from Lane to Walsingham of 8 Sep¬
tember 1585.”
The early date of the map and the
significance of the legends on it have
not been realized until recently be¬
cause it has been associated with a
letter of 1618 from Captain John
Smith to Lord Bacon. In this letter
Smith said that he was enclosing two
maps "to show the difference betwixt
Virginia and New England." The New
England ntap is lacking. Apparently
during a rearrangement of the Colo¬
nial Papers in the Public Record Of¬
fice sonic lime in the nineteenth cen¬
tury this sketch map of Virginia, also
in the Colonial Papers, was arbi¬
trarily placed and numbered with two
items from Smith to Bacon. In 1892
Alexander Brown, in his The Genesis
of the United States, II, 597. accepted
the "Virginia" sketch map as possibly
Smith’s attempt "to copy from some
drawings of our present North Caro¬
lina coast." Neither the handwriting
on the map nor the endorsement, how¬
ever. can be identified with that in the
letter to Lord Bacon (C.O.
1/1.
42)
or "Description of New England"
(C.O. I/I. 42 (i) ). according to a
letter of August 4. 1953. from the
Secretary of the Public Record Of¬
fice to the present writer. The infor¬
mation peculiar to the map was not
used by Smith in his map of the same
area published in 1624; and the
legends have no apparent connection
with any known expedition from the
Jamestown settlement.
Though the technique of the map
is not John White’s nor the handwrit¬
ing Thomas Hariot’s. the information
given, as Professor Quinn (I, 216-
217) shows in his careful and exten¬
sive footnotes on the legends, can
hardly derive from or apply to any
other expeditions except those made
by Lane’s colonists in 1585. The
watermark in the paper (entwined
columns) is one appropriate to 1585
(Quinn. I. 217, and references there
made). It is endorsed "A discript ion
of the land of Virginia."
The following transcription of the
legends on the map has been checked
against those of Brown and Quinn.
They follow in roughly a counter¬
clockwise sequence the items of the
map. beginning at the upper center.
1. poniaiokc (Lane. Hariot, White,
and others reached "The Townc of
Pomciokc" on July 12 from Wococon.
The lake behind is Lake Maltamuskect
(Paquippc on White’s map).]
2. secotan (This village, which Lane
and his group reached July 15, is vari¬
ously located on different early maps;
here it is on the north bank of Pamlico
River. It is the name given to the
whole area back of Pamlico Sound in
Whitc-Dc Bry 1590 and so continued
( Continued on page 22)
Opposite page: The earliest known
map of North Carolina is published
by permission of the British Public
Record Office and is a document iden¬
tified by that office as " Xt.P.G . 584."
TO
THE STATE. January 11. 1958
