A Disturbing Map...

I find a modern rendition of William Hubbard’s map of New England, published in two variants in Boston and London in 1677, rather upsetting.

Late yesterday or earlier today, Twitter spat up this Google-style map (“Ye Olde Google Maps”) of New England, based on the 1677 map by William Hubbard. It was originally posted on reddit by the user jacoobz some three years ago.

I’m really disturbed by this. Deeply. Viscerally.

Why?

In part because the original map…

William Hubbard, Map of New-England (Boston 1677)

…is one that I know well, having written about it at some length (Edney and Cimburek 2004; Edney 2005; Edney 2019, 37–39) and having used it in many presentations. It’s an old friend, full of meaning and nuance..

The modern rendition betrays the essence of the map. It reduces Hubbard’s map to its geographical content. It casts the geographical data of coastlines, rivers, lakes, and town names with modern signs. It ignores the physical nature of the original as a work printed from a woodblock. It ignores all the numbers that point to entries in a summary list of events in the parent book, each with cross-references to fuller treatment of events in Hubbard’s main narrative of “King Philip’s War.” It ignores the orientation of the original. It’s curiously bloodless.

It is an anti-historical work. Its very nature proclaims that everything I find fascinating about early maps—about their materiality and design, their consumption, their cultural significances, their fit within particular spatial discourses—is all utterly irrelevant.

So, yes, I’m insulted by the rendition. Why make this modern map except to claim it for oneself by redrawing, repurposing…and repossessing it. A key part of my work has been usurped.

References

Edney, Matthew H. 2005. “Puritan New England’s Precarious Perch on ‘This Western Coast’.” In The Map Book, edited by Peter Barber, 175–76. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Edney, Matthew H. 2019. Cartography: The Ideal and Its History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Edney, Matthew H., and Susan Cimburek. 2004. “Telling the Traumatic Truth: William Hubbard’s Narrative of King Philip’s War and his ‘Map of New-England’.” William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 61, no. 2: 317–48.