Simon de Passe's cartographic portrait of Captain John Smith and a new England (1616/7)

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many librarians have been of great help to this study, in particular Susan Danforth of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University; Brian Dunnigan of the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; and especially Yolanda Theunissen of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. I must also thank several people for their comments on drafts and for their general support of the project: Catherine Armstrong, Frank Benevento, Joseph Conforti, Jess Edwards, William Gartner, John Krygier, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Kirsten Seaver, Yi-Fu Tuan and Jed Woodworth. Notes 1 – As will become clear, De Passe's ‘cartographic portrait’ combines bust and map within a single whole, so its overall title requires elements from its respective parts. I use ‘<>’ to suggest the interconnections between the two parts and to avoid the use of a solidus |, slash /, or dash —, each of which might be taken inappropriately to divide and separate rather than join and combine the title elements. 2 – Daniel Franken, L’Œuvre gravé des van de Passe (Amsterdam: Frederik Muller, 1881), no. 875, misattributed the work to Simon's elder brother Crispin (II) de Passe. This mistake was corrected by Sidney Colvin, Early Engraving & Engravers in England (1545–1695): A Critical and Historical Essay (London: British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1905), p. 100; Arthur M. Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Descriptive Catalogue with Introductions, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952–1964), vol. 2, p. 273; and J. Verbeek and Ilja M. Veldman, De Passe (Continued), vol. 16 of Hollstein's Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450–1700, 69 vols (Amsterdam: Van Gendt, 1974), p. 153. Note that it was older scholarly practice to refer to the family as ‘Van de Passe’. 3 – To be fair, this point was recently appreciated by Raymond M. Brod, ‘The Art of Persuasion: John Smith's New England and Virginia Maps’, Historical Geography, 24/1 and 2 (1995), pp. 91–106, followed by Walter W. Woodward, ‘Captain John Smith and the Campaign for New England: A Study in Early Modern Identity and Promotion’, New England Quarterly, 81/1 (2008), pp. 91–125, esp. pp. 99–102. Brod's analysis is, however, cursory and accomplished mostly through a comparison with Smith's other famous map, Virginia (see Figure 5). The brief assessment by David H. Watters, ‘Revising New England: Self-Portraits of a Region’, Colby Quarterly, 39/1 (2003), pp. 10–33, esp. pp. 12–13, that the image was a ‘double portrait’ of Smith is valid only if one presumes the logical separation of image from map. 4 – James Granger, Portraits Illustrating Grangers Biographical History of England, 3 vols ([London]: W. Richardson, 1792–[1812]), p. 3: pl. 60. Granger apparently employed two different plates, reproduced by Randolph G. Adams, ‘Notes on the Engraved Portraits of Captain John Smith’, William & Mary Quarterly, 2s/21 (1941), pp. 27–8, pls. 4 and 6; Adams could not identify the source of his pl. 6, but it is the same as the Smith portrait in the British Library copy of Granger's album, as reproduced in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. 5 – For example Helen Rountree, Wayne E. Clark and Kent Mountford, John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages, 1607–1609 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. [ii]. A colorized version by Jamie May is readily found online: e.g. http://www.apva.org/history/jsmith.html or http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1615180,00.html (which credits it as ‘Stock Image/Getty’); both websites were last accessed in December 2007. 6 – Adams, ‘Engraved Portraits of Captain John Smith’; John Long, ‘Captain John Smith's Portraits on His Maps of New England’, Mapline, no. 67 (1992), pp. 1–4. 7 – Franken, L’Œuvre gravé, no. 875, did not even acknowledge that the bust was part of a larger image. 8 – Franken, L’Œuvre gravé, no. 830; Hind, Engraving in England, vol. 2, p. 266, no. 47; Verbeek and Veldman, De Passe (cont.), p. 180. 9 – Verbeek and Veldman, De Passe (cont.), p. 182 (quotation, emphasis added). Previously, Hind, Engraving in England, vol. 2, p. 268. 10 – Hind's mentor had previously reproduced all eight lines (but not the signature); Colvin, Early Engraving and Engravers in England, p. 100. The website of the National Portrait Gallery — NPG 4594; David Saywell and Jacob Simon, Complete Illustrated Catalogue (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004), p. 570 — also shows the fourth couplet, but still without the signature (image accessed, January 2008). 11 – Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ‘“Brasse without but Golde within”: The Writings of Captain John Smith’, Virginia Cavalcade, 38 (1988), pp. 66–75 and 134–43, esp. p. 67; Watters, ‘Revising New England’, p. 12. 12 – As John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy declared in his The Portrait in the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books for the Bollingen Foundation, 1966), p. 1, ‘portraits are empirical’. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), proposed a complex relationship between artist and sitter, building on Hans-Georg Gadamer's concept of ‘occasionality’, yet nonetheless remained constricted by his adherence to a necessarily mimetic status for portraiture. Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 11–12, suggests a less constrained, and interculturally applicable, approach to portraiture as the construction of identity. 13 – A detailed analysis of how historians of cartography and exploration have consistently misunderstood the nature of the portrait's mappish elements, and so of the ideals presumed for modern cartographic representation, is in preparation. 14 – Emerson D. Fite and Archibald Freeman, A Book of Old Maps Delineating American History from the Earliest Days Down to the Close of the Revolutionary War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926; reprinted New York: Dover, 1969), p. 127; Philip L. Barbour, The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), pp. 326 and 328; David Buisseret, The Mapmaker's Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 105. Only Horace Everett Ware, ‘Notes on the Commendatory Verses Inscribed on Smith's Map of New England’, in Transactions, 1910–1911, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 13 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1912), p. 232–4, and Watters, ‘Revising New England’, pp. 12–13, sought to analyze the poem. 15 – Even the crucial essays advocating the analysis of cartographic iconography — esp. J.B. Harley, ‘Maps, Knowledge, and Power’, in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography, 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277–312; repr. in Harley, The New Nature of Maps, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 51–81 — have tended to distinguish the ‘map’ from its ‘decoration’. 16 – R.A. Skelton, Decorative Printed Maps of the 15th to 18th Centuries (London: Staples Press, 1952), pp. 16–19. 17 – Philip D. Burden, The Mapping of North America II: A List of Printed Maps, 1671–1700 (Rickmansworth, Herts: Raleigh Publications, 2007), no. 429; Ivan Kupcík, ‘Die kartographische Tätigkeit von Augustin Herman (ca.1621–1686): Realität und Fiktion’, in Mappæ Antiquæ: Liber Amicorum Günter Schilder. Essays on the occasion of his 65th birthday, ed. Paula van Gestel-van het Schip et al. (’t Goy-Houten, Netherlands: HES & De Graaf Publishers, 2007), pp. 203–20. 18 – Antony Griffiths and Robert A. Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603–1689 (London: British Museum Press, 1998), p. 13. Laurence Worms, ‘The London Map Trade to 1640’, in Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward, Vol. 3 of The History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 1693–1721. 19 – Roy Strong, ‘The British Obsession: An Introduction to the British Portrait’, in The British Portrait, 1660–1960 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collector's Club, 1991), pp. 9–73, esp. pp. 11–12. 20 – Hondius worked in London from 1583 to 1593, Van den Keere from 1585 to 1593. Günter Schilder, ‘Jodocus Hondius, Creator of the Decorative Map Border’, The Map Collector, no. 32 (1985), pp. 40–3; idem, Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica, 8 vols (Alphen aan den Rijn: Canaletto, 1986–2006), vol. 6, pp. 55–81; Worms, ‘London Map Trade’, p. 1705, who also (p. 1706) reproduced Hondius's innovative Typus Angliae (London, 1590). The Japanese also borrowed extensively from Dutch cartographic imagery and created similar cartes à figures: James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, eds, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), esp. pp. 100–1 and 144. 21 – Griffiths and Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, p. 21. 22 – Roy Strong and V. J. Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered, 1520–1620 (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1983), p. 12: Nicholas Hilliard was paid only by the piece for his miniatures of the queen, so he opened a shop off Fleet Street in the 1570s to reach a wider clientele. He did not receive a court position until 1599. See Eric Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625, vol. 7 of The Oxford History of English Art, 11 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 209, on the effects of commercialization. 23 – Strong, ‘British Obsession’, p. 11. 24 – Roy Strong, ‘From Manuscript to Miniature’, in The English Miniature, ed. John Murdoch, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon and Roy Strong (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 25–84, esp. pp. 73–84; Strong and Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court, pp. 11 and 156. See also Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625, pp. 190–216; Graham Reynolds, English Portrait Miniatures, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 10–37. 25 – Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 29–41; Strong, ‘From Manuscript to Miniature’, pp. 68–73. 26 – For example Roy Strong, Tudor & Jacobean Portraits, 2 vols (London: HMSO for the National Portrait Gallery, 1969), vol. 2: pls 98 (1589), 262 (1591), 366 (1580), 367 (1581), 673 (1548). Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 43. 27 – Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625, p. 259. 28 – Hind, Engraving in England, vol. 1, pp. 159–60; Strong, Tudor & Jacobean Portraits, vol. 1, pp. 70–71 and vol. 2, pl. 128. Sarah Tyacke, Helen Wallis, and Pat Higgins, Sir Francis Drake: An Exhibition to Commemorate Francis Drake's Voyage around the World, 1577–1580 (London: British Museum for the British Library, 1977), no. 24. 29 – Griffiths and Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, p. 14. 30 – Hind, Engraving in England, vol. 2, pp. 145–62; Griffiths and Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, pp. 17–18 and 52–53. 31 – Colvin, Early Engraving and Engravers in England, p. 100; Hind, Engraving in England, vol. 2, pp. 115–39; Griffiths and Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, pp. 21, 39, 49–52, and 56–63. Strong, English Icon, pp. 47–8. 32 – Strong and Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court, 9 (quotation). Generally see Strong, Tudor & Jacobean Portraits, p. ix; idem, ‘From Manuscript to Miniature’, pp. 69–73; Patricia Fumerton, ‘“Secret” Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’, Representations, no. 15 (1986), pp. 57–97. 33 – West, Portraiture, pp. 59–60. 34 – Steven J. Gores, ‘The Miniature as Reduction and Talisman in Fielding's Amelia’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 37/3 (1997), pp. 573–93, esp. p. 575 and p. 592n12, made the same connection. See Matthew H. Edney, ‘Bringing India to Hand: Mapping Empires, Denying Space’, in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 65–78; idem, ‘Mapping Empires, Mapping bodies: Reflections on the Use and Abuse of Cartography’, Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia, no. 63 (2007), pp. 83–104. 35 – Griffiths and Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, pp. 21 and 56. For Simon de Passe's work in this regard, see Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain and Ireland, to the Death of George II, 19 vols (London: British Museum, 1904–11), vol. 2, p. xiii, no. 18, p. xvi, nos. 1–9, p. xvii, no. 5, p. xviii, no. 6, and p. xix, no. 13; Hind, Engraving in England, vol. 2, pp. 275–84, esp. p. 275 re similarities to painted miniatures and 277 on the re-engraving of copies guided by printed copies of the original medallion. 36 – Smith described his explorations in John Smith, A True Relation of such occurences and accidents of noate as hath happened in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony, which is now resident in the South part thereof, till the last returne from thence (London: for John Tappe, 1608), and idem, A Map of Virginia. With a Description of the Countrey, The Commodities, People, Government and Religion (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612). The so-called Zuñiga Map is widely taken to be the product, copied from Smith's own work, of these travels: Philip L. Barbour, The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609, 2 vols, Publications of the Hakluyt Society, 2s/136–37 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), vol. 1, pp. 238–40; David B. Quinn, New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, 5 vols (New York: Arno Press and Hector Bye, Inc., 1979), vol. 5: fig. 137; William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps, ed. Louis De Vorsey, Jr., 3rd edn (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), no. 28; John R. Hébert, ‘The Westward Vision: Seventeenth-Century Virginia’, in Virginia in Maps: Four Centuries of Settlement, Growth, and Development, ed. Richard W. Stephenson and Marianne M. McKee (Richmond, VA: Library of Virginia, 2000), pp. 2–45, esp. pp. 12–13 and 33. Also, Rountree, Clark and Mountford, John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages. 37 – This map has been frequently discussed and reproduced. Most recently, see: Philip Barbour, in John Smith, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580–1631) in Three Volumes, ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for The Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 140–2 and vol. 2, pp. 133–5; Philip D. Burden, The Mapping of North America: A List of Printed Maps, 1511–1670 (Rickmansworth, Herts: Raleigh Publications, 1996), no. 164; Margaret Beck Pritchard, ‘A Selection of Maps from the Colonial Williamsburg Collection’, in Margaret Beck Pritchard and Henry G. Taliaferro, Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America (New York: Henry N. Abrams, for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2002), pp. 54–311, no. 5; Lisa Blansett, ‘John Smith Maps Virginia: Knowledge, Rhetoric, and Politics’, in Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 68–91; Helen C. Rountree, He Drew What He Saw, and He Saw Selectively: Captain John Smith as Mapmaker, Alan M. and Nathalie P. Voorhees Lecture in the History of Cartography, 10 March 2007 (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2008). It is now de rigueur to base discussions of De Passe's cartographic portrait on comparisons with Virginia — e.g. J.B. Harley, ‘New England Cartography and the Native Americans’, in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, ed. Emerson W. Baker et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 287–313 (repr. in J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, ed. Paul Laxton [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001], pp. 169–95), esp. pp. 290–93, and Brod, ‘Art of Persuasion’ — but as such comparisons make clear, the two maps really are different in of their and 38 – John Smith, A Description of New England: The and of Captain Smith of that in the North of in the of with the of that the and the accidents the of With the of the this this eight are to make (London: for Robert the source of all these Smith 5, 8 and the of he could in and the – Smith apparently one of the Description of New England by a in to from of I with Barbour, in Smith, Complete vol. 1, p. that Smith did not the the same – A of the of the of of 5 vols (London: vol. p. reprinted in Smith, Complete vol. 1, p. See and of London and (Oxford: Press, pp. and on the of – Smith, Description of New England, p. – It is which was the were with Smith and the had previously Smith's True Relation the the was also one of the who had in the Virginia in See in Smith, Complete vol. 1, pp. and The of the A of the in England, which in the of North America by the England and for the of the now by the of 2 vols (Boston, MA: Mifflin, vol. 1, pp. by Barbour, Three pp. and was to suggest that George the was also one of the who to the Virginia – and of London pp. the for of – ed. of the of vol. 2, p. in vol. 2, p. vol. 5, p. – Griffiths and Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, p. – Worms, ‘London Map Trade’, – Smith, True See William ‘Mapping the and in John Smith's A True American (2003), pp. – Smith, Description of New England, p. – Smith, Description of New England, pp. 4 and – John Smith, New the of employed within these eight and the of that by and With the of that but by in the (London: by William Smith, The True and of Captain Smith, and from to (London: p. also Smith, The of Virginia, and the with the of the and from their First to this (London: p. – in Smith, Complete vol. 2, p. A of Captain John Smith (New York: Society of — a of Joseph et A of Books to from its to the (New p. — by and the of this also for the the of the – Barbour, in Smith, Complete vol. 1, p. that Smith was still in Henry was in – Smith, Description of New England, – in Smith, Complete vol. 1, p. Note that this the made without by — Barbour, Three p. — that De Passe had Smith's the London – Smith, New Smith, p. Smith, for the of New England, or the to to a (London: Robert p. For in Smith, Complete vol. 1, p. the use of the title and on the of the Description of New England to than a – Smith, p. – Ilja M. Veldman, de Passe and his A of Print Studies in Prints and 3 and 2001), pp. and esp. p. (quotation). Crispin de Passe sought to that he Griffiths and Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, pp. – Griffiths and Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, p. 56. – — Colvin, Early Engraving and Engravers in England, p. or not it was for the Description of New England — the original of the is – Corbett and Lightbown, Comely pp. 2, 6 and (quotation). See also Colvin, Early Engraving and Engravers in England, pp. 2 and and and Hind, Engraving in England, – Corbett and Lightbown, Comely pp. and in Smith, Complete vol. 2, pp. Burden, Mapping of North no. – A is to have printed only a of New England, he had printed for William 63 – Griffiths and Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, pp. see also van on Old Maps: and Cartographic The no. (2007), pp. has been in the of the vol. 2, p. that had the map Brown could not that Smith had made it in Smith, Complete vol. 1, pp. and that had it previously — Barbour, Three pp. — he had De Passe as the – in Smith, Complete vol. 1, pp. and – Smith, Description of New England, – Smith, Complete vol. 1, p. 67 – Smith, for p. also Smith, pp. Smith, Description of New England, – Smith, p. to John Smith, New the of these (London: William in Smith, Complete vol. 2, p. of Smith's to the London in and See also Smith, Complete vol. 2, p. ‘The Earliest Maps of and in The History of Massachusetts, ed. (Boston: James R. vol. 1, pp. esp. p. that this was of Smith's 69 – Smith, for p. – John Smith, for the History of Virginia, the and New (London, – David B. Quinn, ‘A List of Books for the Virginia Virginia of History and pp. – Smith, Smith, see in Smith, Complete vol. 2, pp. – This is Catherine Armstrong, North America in the Seventeenth English in Print and Manuscript 2007), pp. — David and England and New England in the Seventeenth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 6 — that Smith had his yet the — by Captain John Smith and the Jamestown (London: Robert p. — that the Description was a Woodward, ‘Captain John Smith and the Campaign for New England’, p. a for the map such that it could and be by as as – the of crucial — The of the An a of Society, and (Cambridge, MA: Press, — by such as The of the and the in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. and of Modern 67 (1995), pp. of the the of of Modern pp. and David of and the in England University Press, See also James The of and the English Book (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), esp. pp. – Andrew Fitzmaurice, and America: An History of English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 16–19. See also The American of Captain John Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), p. – Armstrong, North America in the Seventeenth Century, p. Smith other who or to to their – Smith, New p. emphasis – in England, in Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. Woodward, esp. p. in Renaissance in Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. Woodward, pp. esp. pp. – Tyacke, and Higgins, Sir Francis nos. and Helen M. Wallis, ‘The Cartography of Drake's in Sir Francis and the Essays the of Drake's of the ed. University of Press, pp. esp. pp. and the Mapping the European of America and the World, on Works from the Sidney R. of Early Maps, and World no. W. The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, edn CT: Early World Press, 2001), no. – or his 4 vols (London: Henry vol. p. Smith, Description of New England, p. Drake's as the for ‘New – Richard of The Elizabethan of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. – Crispin de Passe and in re Crispin de by Veldman, de Passe and his p. – Franken, L’Œuvre gravé, no. and J. Van vol. 15 of Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, ca. 1450–1700, 69 vols (Amsterdam: p. The Library of of which detailed have been taken the are not in Mapping of the – Colvin, Early Engraving and Engravers in England, pp. Portraits of and p. Hind, Engraving in England, vol. pp. and Mapping of the World, no. Hondius's map, see also David Woodward, John a Map in in to in in Mappæ ed. Van Gestel-van het Schip et pp. Strong, Tudor & Jacobean Portraits, pp. –