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Description

Scarce large format map of the British Colonies, from the Upper Chesapeake and Delaware Bays to Piscataway and Albany, centered on New York City, Long Island and Cape Cod.

The map is extemely detailed for the period, locating dozens of towns, Indian villages, rivers, forts and other places of note and illustrating the primary colonial road from Portsmouth, through Boston, New Bristol, Newport, New York City, Perth Amboy, Burlington and finally Philadelphia. The map also locates the towns to which Missionaries have been sent by the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

The map appeared in David Humphreys's An Historical Account of the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Containing their Foundation, Proceedings, and the Success of their Missionaries in the British Colonies, to the Year 1728. The work contains a number of interesting contemporary reports from the Colonies, including accounts of Yamasee and Tuscaraora wars in the Carolinas, the New York slave insurrections of 1712, the Four Indian Kings who traveled to England, and a 1715, New York edition of a Mohawk prayer book. In general, Humphreys documented the inevitable trials of attempting to convert and educate a strong aboriginal populace. As noted by Decker, the book

Deals entirely with America, compiled from papers sent to the Society by the Governors of the Colonies. This work details accounts of the travels, hardships and adventures of missionaries sent to New York City, Westchester Country, Albany, Staten Island, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas. There is also some account of the Iroquois and their leaders; of the people and churches of Boston, Rhode Island, Narragansett, Newbury.

The maps in Humphrey's book rarely appear on the market. No copy of this map is noted by AMPR as having appeared in a dealer catalog or at auction in nearly 30 years and this is the first time we have ever seen the map offered for sale separately. While the book's theme relates to missionary travels among the Indians of the the British Colonies, the map is among the most detailed single sheet English maps of the region in the first half of the 18th Century. It comes prior to the issuance of most of the multi-sheet English regional maps of the British Colonies. While the title is similar to Moll's much smaller New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pensilvania &c., the scale and detail of this map are much better than the smaller map.

Condition Description
Narrow margins, as issued. Minor repair at lower central fold.
Reference
Howes H795; European Americana 730/125; JCB Library 452; Simmons 1730 #16; Sabin 33801; Cumming 209; Siebert 141. Decker 41:218
Herman Moll Biography

Herman Moll (c. 1654-1732) was one of the most important London mapmakers in the first half of the eighteenth century.  Moll was probably born in Bremen, Germany, around 1654. He moved to London to escape the Scanian Wars. His earliest work was as an engraver for Moses Pitt on the production of the English Atlas, a failed work which landed Pitt in debtor's prison. Moll also engraved for Sir Jonas Moore, Grenville Collins, John Adair, and the Seller & Price firm. He published his first original maps in the early 1680s and had set up his own shop by the 1690s. 

Moll's work quickly helped him become a member of a group which congregated at Jonathan's Coffee House at Number 20 Exchange Alley, Cornhill, where speculators met to trade stock. Moll's circle included the scientist Robert Hooke, the archaeologist William Stuckley, the authors Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and the intellectually-gifted pirates William Dampier, Woodes Rogers and William Hacke. From these contacts, Moll gained a great deal of privileged information that was included in his maps. 

Over the course of his career, he published dozens of geographies, atlases, and histories, not to mention numerous sheet maps. His most famous works are Atlas Geographus, a monthly magazine that ran from 1708 to 1717, and The World Described (1715-54). He also frequently made maps for books, including those of Dampier’s publications and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Moll died in 1732. It is likely that his plates passed to another contemporary, Thomas Bowles, after this death.