1647 / 1661 Dudley Map of North America East Coast

This is the 1661 edition of Robert Dudley's general map of the east coast of North America. According to Burden, this is the 'first printed sea chart of North America by an Englishman and the first to record soundings.' It is a great rarity on the market and a keystone map for any collection of early American cartography.

A Closer Look

Centered roughly on the Hudson River and Long Island (MaruWaes), coverage of the eastern coast of North America extends from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the Bahamas, thus including New England, Cape Cod, Nova Scotia, the Chesapeake Bay, the Outer Banks, Florida, Bermuda, and the Bahamas. The map is notable for its soundings all along the coast, but specifically near Florida, the Outer Banks, the Chesapeake Bay, and off Cape Cod.

It names several early English colonies and settlements, including 'Newe Plymouth' (Plymouth, Massachusetts), 'Newe England', Maryland, both 'Verginia Nuova' and 'Verginia Veccia' ('Virginia New' and 'Virginia Old'), and 'James Cittie' (Jamestown). Further south, in Florida, the larger city of St. Augusino (St. Augustine) is illustrated. Far to the north, 'Quiboc' (Quebec), founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608, is named.

The map features notably different geography from the more specific charts found in later 1647 volumes of the Dell'Arcano Del Mare, thus hinting at different, even opposing, sources. Dudley's source for this map was likely the 1639 manuscript chart of John Daniell (1565 - 1649), a Thames School chartmaker whose work Dudley heavily relied on. The present general chart, completed in 1646, makes no reference to Dutch activity on the Hudson or in Manhattan. For example, instead of using Dutch terminology, as on the Carta Particolare, here he names the Hudson as it is named today, after its discoverer, Henry Hudson. (The large unnamed island at the mouth of the river is Manhattan.) The disparities between this 1646 chart and the subsequent 1647 regional charts indicate the extent to which Dudley was continuously updating his charts with new information as it became available, even as Lucini's engraving was in process.

Nurembega - the El Dorado of New England

Of some interest is the land of Noranbega (Nurembega), located here just north of Long Island. This mysterious land appeared on maps of New England as early as Verrazano's 1529 manuscript. He used the term 'Oranbega,' which in Algonquin means 'lull in the river.' The first detailed reference to Noranbega, or as it is more commonly spelled Norumbega, appeared in the 1542 journals of the French navigator Jean Fonteneau dit Alfonse de Saintonge. Allefonsce was a well-respected navigator who, in conjunction with the French nobleman Jean-François de la Roque de Roberval's attempt to colonize the region, skirted the coasts south of Newfoundland in 1542. He discovered and sailed some distance up the Penobscot River, encountering a fur-rich American Indian city named Norumbega - somewhere near modern-day Bangor, Maine.

The river is more than 40 leagues wide at its entrance and retains its width some thirty or forty leagues. It is full of Islands, which stretch some ten or twelve leagues into the sea... Fifteen leagues within this river there is a town called Norombega, with clever inhabitants, who trade in furs of all sorts; the town folk are dressed in furs, wearing sable.... The people use many words which sound like Latin. They worship the sun. They are tall and handsome in form. The land of Norombega lies high and is well situated.

Though Roberval's colony lasted only two years, Andre Thevet, writing in 1550, records encountering a French trading fort at the site of Norumbega.

A few years later, in 1562, an English slave ship wrecked in the Gulf of Mexico. David Ingram, one of the survivors, claimed to have trekked overland from the Gulf Coast to Nova Scotia, where he was rescued by a passing French ship. Possibly inspired by Mexican legends of El Dorado, Cibola, and other lost cities, Ingram returned to Europe to regale his drinking companions with boasts of a fabulous city rich in pearls and built upon pillars of crystal, silver, and gold. The idea caught on in the European popular imagination, and expeditions were sent to search for the city - including that of Samuel de Champlain.

The legend of Norumbega thus seems to have transitioned from Allefonsce's most likely factual description of a lively American Indian trading center to Thevet's French trading post to Ingram's fabulous paradise of dripping wealth. Allefonsce's description of the American Indians he encountered in Norumbega corresponds well with those of Hudson, who also met a tall, well-proportioned people. Sadly, only a few years later, many of these tribes began to die off at extraordinary rates (over 90% of the population perished) due to outbreaks of smallpox and other diseases carried by the unwitting European explorers. It seems reasonable that Allefonsce may have stumbled upon a periodic or semi-permanent indigenous fur trading center on the Penobscot. It also seems reasonable that French colonists may have set up their fur trading post at the same site, for it was fur, not gold, that was the real wealth of New England and Norumbega. Alas, it was Ingram's fictitious account, which, though wholly the product of a drunken sailor's imagination, produced the most enduring image of Norumbega.

Publication History and Census

This map was completed by Sir Robert Dudley in manuscript form c. 1636. It was subsequently engraved in an Italian baroque style by Antonio Francesco Lucini and printed in Florence in 1646. The present second-state example (exhibiting the notation 'Lº.2º.' in the cartouche) appeared in the 1661 edition of Dudley's Dell'Arcano Del Mare.

Rare. Burden describes it as 'of great rarity.' We see the separate chart in about 5 institutions. Complete or partial examples of the Dell'Arcano Del Mare are more widely distributed among institutional libraries, though still quite rare.