An exhibition at Colonial Williamsburg shows how early maps were used as propaganda to promote exploration

Colonial explorers created elaborate maps to track where they were going and to pinpoint their finds as they moved into the “New World.”

The maps also made for good propaganda.

They showed exotic waterfalls and lush vegetation, rivers rimmed with prized beaver and quaint Indigenous people tilling fertile farms. The message was that people already live there, but the land and its offerings were up for grabs.

It worked.

A new exhibition, “Promoting America: Maps of the Colonies and the New Republic,” is open at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum. It is one of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. Both museums reopened this summer after a three-year-long expansion and renovation project.

The exhibition, which runs through March 27, 2022, is the first in a new gallery space dedicated to maps, prints and drawings. It consists of 21 pieces including maps, rare books, prints and other pieces that show how explorers beginning in the late 1500s came to the eastern seaboard with more than food, supplies and men. They came with a business plan.

Katie McKinney, Colonial Williamsburg’s Margaret Beck Pritchard assistant curator of maps and prints, said mapmakers made engravings and drawings to send back to England even before settlements were established. Artist John White was part of the unsuccessful 1585 expedition to Roanoke Island in North Carolina. His job was to document what he saw. But when he sketched the Algonquian town of Secota, for example, he depicted a village that looked like a manicured English estate with orderly plots of corn, sunflowers and squash. Archaeology has since shown that wasn’t how the Algonquian farmed.

His works were an attempt to make “something unfamiliar look familiar” and entice people to invest in exploration, McKinney said.

In 1590, White’s sketches were reproduced as engravings by Theodore De Bry and included in the book “A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.” The book was published in four languages and even included a drawing of Adam and Eve to suggest the area was a “biblical paradise,” McKinney said.

A copy of the book is included in the exhibition.

“It really became the way that Europeans understood and thought about Indigenous people, plants and animals,” McKinney said. “It was meant for elite European audiences, but then the imagery trickled down into maps and other visual culture and was highly influential.”

Capt. John Smith proved to be as much of a salesman as an explorer after helping establish Jamestown, England’s first permanent North American colony, in 1607.

In 1608, he canvassed the Chesapeake Bay and met several Native American tribes. The “Virginia” map he created in 1612 is part of the museum’s show, and in it Smith shows the region’s topography and identifies 10 tribes and 166 of their towns. He sketches Chief Powhatan in a seat of power in the left-hand corner and draws an even larger, commanding Susquehanna figure on the right.

In 1614, Smith scouts the coastline of present-day Massachusetts to Nova Scotia and returns to England excited about setting up a settlement at a place he called Plymouth. The map he produced in 1616 is a stark contrast to his Virginia map.

The latter map doesn’t include any mentions of Native Americans and gives islands and areas English names, including dubbing the area “New England.” Smith also includes a portrait of Smith himself on the map.

“It kind of shows how the attitudes about putting down those roots changed over the span of time,” McKinney said.

The exhibition flows chronologically and shows how maps became necessary to record the continent’s topography as colonization spread. They also were political in how they delineated between the territory that England was taking as opposed to France and Spain.

One map that best shows the British Empire’s interests is “A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements,” created by Henry Popple in 1773. It was intended to make a statement, McKinney said. At 8 feet by 8 feet, it is the largest map of North America printed before the Revolutionary War. While its size suggests dominance, the map labels England holdings as part of the “Empire” while referring to those by the French and Spanish as “settlements.”

A Native American in the left corner points to the title as if to back-up the assertion that Britain is boss.

The latest dated map in the exhibition is the 1822 “A Map of North America” by Henry Schenck Tanner. The map boosts the idea that America’s future is west and that it is open and ready for pioneers and investors. It uses information taken from the 1804-1806 expedition by Merriwether Lewis and William Clark and later excursions by Zebulon Pike and Stephen H. Long. The map shows the abundance of vegetation and animals that could support west-bound families and provide income for those interested in trade. The cartouche, the decorative element in the map’s lower corner, combines images of both Niagara Falls and Virginia’s Natural Bridge, which President Thomas Jefferson constantly promoted as national emblems.

Rome had its ruins, England its castles, but America had these ancient beauties that Jefferson referred to as examples of “inherent civilization,” McKinney said.

“And it incorporates rattlesnakes, beavers, eagles, there’s a moose and bear, it pulls them all together to show off, once again, Americans natural wonders as symbols of pride,” McKinney said of the map’s cartouche.

The maps were large and vibrant enough to hang as artwork in the homes of the wealthy and be reprinted and marketed as an “open” sign for America.

“I think what’s interesting about these maps is that they are great tools for conversation,” McKinney said. “You can look at what’s on the map what’s being portrayed, and then think about what’s actually happening on the surface.”

Denise M. Watson, 757-446-2504, denise.watson@pilotonline.com

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