Virginia & Maryland Map 1676 Regional Print - Jamestown, St. Mary's City, Henrico

John Speed's map of Virginia and Maryland was engraved by Francis Lamb and first appeared in the 1676 enlarged edition of Speed's atlas, published in London by Thomas Bassett and Richard Chiswell more than four decades after Speed's own death. The map draws its geography chiefly from John Smith's pioneering early survey of Virginia, updated with information from Augustine Herrman's 1670 manuscript map of Virginia and Maryland, making it one of the first printed maps to absorb Herrman's more accurate Chesapeake coastline. It belongs to a set of four Speed maps of the English colonies that holds the distinction of being the first "new" set of American maps issued in a commercial atlas after England's takeover of the former Dutch and Swedish colonies, and the sheet carries a lengthy descriptive text on its verso. It depicts Virginia and Maryland barely a decade after Bacon's Rebellion had shaken the Chesapeake colonies' fragile social order.

Jamestown appears as Virginia's capital on the James River, the seat of government it would hold for another two decades before the move to Williamsburg. St. Mary's City anchors Maryland's own government near the mouth of the Potomac, the colony's first permanent settlement and capital at the time this map was drawn. Henrico, further up the James, marks one of Virginia's earliest inland plantations and a key point on the fall line. The map's underlying debt to Smith's survey shows in its careful attention to the river systems draining into the Chesapeake, while Herrman's more recent information sharpens the bay's outline and the Eastern Shore beyond what Smith himself had recorded six decades earlier.

This early Speed edition makes a striking gift for a Virginia or Maryland family with roots reaching back to the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, or for a collector assembling early English atlas maps of the American colonies. Among the store's other Chesapeake maps, this 1676 Speed edition is the earliest, predating the Bowen, Kitchin and Homann plates by six or more decades and drawing on Smith and Herrman rather than the later Mitchell-derived surveys those maps share. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a study to a large-format piece for an entrance hall or office.