Matthew H. Edney and Susan Cimburek

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Matthew H. Edney and Susan Cimburek | Telling the Traumatic Truth: William Hubbard's Narrativeof King Philip's War and His "Map of New-England" | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2 | The History Cooperative

Notes and Documents

Telling the Traumatic Truth: William Hubbard's Narrative of King Philip's War and His "Map of New-England"

PUBLISHED in Boston in 1677, the "Map of New-England" has long been renowned as the first map, the first book illustration, and one of the very first graphic images to have been printed in the English colonies in North America (Figures I, II).¹ It has been featured prominently in histories and exhibitions of colonial maps and prints.² It has been reproduced in many accounts of colonial New England.³ The map is so iconic that it has been reproduced on the dustjackets of histories of seventeenth-century New England and even within their pages with neither explanation nor identification.⁴ Its heavy lines—printed from a rough-hewn woodblock—appear to be consciously, even aggressively, unrefined both in their aesthetic and in their technology. As such, the map is taken to exemplify the comparatively primitive material conditions of life in the colonies.⁵ Yet no matter how crude the "Map of New-England" might have been, it nonetheless serves as an important marker of "a new status reached by American printing" in the later seventeenth century and thus for "the process of cultural production that was [then] shifting across the Atlantic to New England."⁶ One of only a few visual images to have survived from seventeenth-century New England, the map has taken on a life of its own and has become a universalized symbol for its culture rather than being thought of as an object crafted in a particular time and place for specific reasons. As a result, historians have considered the map neither as a cultural construction of regional identity nor as an integral element of political and religious discourse in later-seventeenth-century New England.

FIGURE I
[William Hubbard], "A Map of New-England" (the so-called White Hills map), probably cut by John Foster, from Hubbard's Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians ... (Boston: printed by John Foster, 1677). Second state. By permission of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland (OS-1677–3).

FIGURE II
[William Hubbard], "A Map of New-England," detail of title block. By permission of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland (OS-1677-3).

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