1778 Pingeling / Leiste German Map of the United States of America, Revolutionary War

This is Thomas Albrecht Pingeling's finely engraved map of the British American colonies, published soon after their declaration of independence in Christian Leiste's 1778 book Beschreibung des Brittischen Amerika.

A Closer Look

Coverage extends from Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River at top to the Chesapeake Bay at bottom. Both colony/state and county lines are traced throughout, in some cases in red. Cities and towns, forts, Native American settlements, waterways, mountains, and other features are noted throughout. Many curious toponymic spellings that were later abandoned appear, as is typical with maps of the era, with a prominent example being the 'White Hills,' the common contemporary name for the White Mountains. Areas of the map are also left blank, a reflection of the limited Euro-American geographic knowledge of the frontier (for example, 'Mountains without end' in northern Pennsylvania at left). A circle surrounds New York City at a fixed radius, indicating cardinal directions from the city.

As the title of Lesite's book suggests, this map closely follows English-language maps (namely of Jefferys), with many placenames remaining in English (Massachusetts Bay, Chesapeake Bay), though others have been translated into German (Der Sund Long Island, Der Grosse Sumpf, Die Blauen Gebirge, Tausend Inseln). Also noteworthy are the Pennsylvania towns named for German cities or consisting of German emigres and their descendants - Manheim, Heidelberg, Germantown, Frankfort (now Frankford, part of Philadelphia), Ephrata, Humels Town (now Hummelstown), Neumans Town (now Newmanstown) - a point of interest for the map's German audience. Two scales in German miles appear at top, one based on the 1756 Homann (Heirs) map of the British North American colonies ('America Septentrionalis…'), which was itself based on the 1755 map by Anville (by way of Jefferys), 'Canada Lousianne et Terres Angloises'.

Publication History and Census

This map was engraved by Thomas Albrecht Pingeling for Christian Leiste's 1778 book Beschreibung des Brittischen Amerika zur Ersparung der Englischen Karten. The map is only independently cataloged in the United States at the Library of Congress, while physical examples of the entire book are held by nine institutions in the U.S., with both the map and book being more widely distributed in Germany, though still quite rare.