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Rare two sheet map of the British & French Colonies in North America, showing the Theater of the French & Indian War.

Little has been written about this map, much of it incorrect. While Kershaw and others have described it as a German edition Mitchell's map, the cartography is clearly based upon D'Anville's map of North America from 1746.

First, the shape of the Great Lakes is clearly based upon D'Anville and bears little resemblence to the classical Mitchell treatment of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie.

Second, as noted by Lloyd Brown in Early Maps of the Ohio Valley, the treatment of the Ohio Valley would seem to predate the Mitchell and Evans maps. Brown praises the map as "one of the earliest attempts to indicate the topography of the Ohio Valley and and the surrounding country as well as the dense forests and mountain ranges. The use of fine shading and hachures to indicate relief is unusual for the period..." Brown further notes that Rhode seems to differentiate between the settled and unsettled regions of America through the use of forests in relief, and shows a great savannah along the banks of the Wabash and Illinois rivers.The projection on which it is drawn accounts for the distortions of shapes and distances.

The language of the map is an interesting combination of Latin, German and English, with a few local Indian names included as well. Brown, who clearly studied the map much more closely than Kershaw, does not suggest a Mitchell connection. There is no mention in any source that two states of the map exist, this state, which includes Fort Frederic (Crown Point) in an inset, and the first state, which pre-dates the inclusion of the inset. The inset of Crown Point has been adapted from a plan which appeared in Le Rouge's Recueil des Plans del'Amerique Septentrionale, Paris, 1755.

The map depicts in great detail the English colonies from Pimlico Sound to Nova Scotia, along with the French controlled Great Lakes and the contested regions of the Ohio Valley. The maps is perhaps the finest general map of the the region published during the French and Indian War published in any country other than the belligerent nations. For this reason, Rhode's map occupies a unique niche as it is neutral in its detail, while the maps published in France and England were created to advance their claims. A fine copy of a truly rare and interesting map.