Georgia in 1748 - Savannah, Augusta, Darien

Emanuel Bowen engraved this map of Georgia for John Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, a major English collection of voyages and travels first published in 1705, with the Georgia map itself appearing only in the later 1744-48 and 1764 editions once a new chapter on the young colony's history had been added. Bowen, appointed mapmaker to both George II of England and Louis XV of France despite dying in poverty, trained two of the era's most prominent cartographers, Thomas Kitchin and Thomas Jeffreys, and this map ranks among the most highly sought after of all early Georgia maps, standing today as the only reasonably obtainable large-format map of the colony published before the American Revolution.

The map covers the region from Charleston to the Mississippi River, recording coastal settlements in South Carolina, the Indian tribes considered friendly or hostile to the English, and the chief trading paths connecting them, all with especially complete detail along Georgia's roads, settlements, and the Flint River. Savannah anchors the colony as its founding town and seat of government, established by General James Oglethorpe under a royal charter granted in 1732 that envisioned Georgia as both a haven for English debtors and a military buffer protecting the Carolinas from Spanish Florida, while Augusta and Darien, both established in 1736, round out the colony's earliest permanent settlements. Oglethorpe's strict early rules, banning both slavery and large plantations in favor of small freeholds, shaped a colony this map captures in its formative first years.

This map is a compelling gift for a family with deep Georgia roots, for a transplant now settled in Savannah, or for a collector of the scarcest pre-Revolutionary American colonial maps. It is offered unframed in a range of sizes.