New England and New York in 1676 - Boston, New York City, Cape Cod

John Speed, England's best-known mapmaker of the Stuart period, died in 1629, but this map of New England and New York did not reach print until 1676, engraved by Francis Lamb and issued in the Bassett & Chiswell edition of Speed's "Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World." The Prospect began as a modest supplement to Speed's county atlas, "The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine," and only reached its fullest form in 1676, when publishers Thomas Bassett and Richard Chiswell added a run of new maps to the plates they had acquired after passing through several hands. This sheet is one of the first English maps to register the 1664 English seizure of New Amsterdam, redrawing Dutch geography from Jan Jansson's earlier map under new English place names, and its ornament runs to two cartouches, two compass roses, and a coat of arms worked into the corners with a formality its Dutch prototype never carried. Coming just twelve years after the English took the colony, the map captures New York and New England still absorbing a Dutch inheritance under new English administration.

Boston appears here for the first time on any Speed map, having been omitted entirely from Jansson's Dutch original, while New York keeps its brand-new English name over the erased memory of New Amsterdam. Cape Cod is plotted, inaccurately, at nearly the same latitude as New York City, a Jansson-derived error Lamb's engraving never corrected, and the Hudson River is shown bending east to meet the Delaware, another borrowed inaccuracy traceable to early surveys by Samuel Champlain and Adriaen Block. Lake Champlain sits displaced far east of its true position and Lake Ontario is omitted entirely. New Jersey's name appears in one of its earliest printed spellings, "New Iarsey," on a coastline still being renamed piece by piece as English administration took hold.

A fitting gift for a New York or New England family tracing roots back to the region's earliest English years, or for a collector building out a run of 17th-century Speed maps. Unlike the Dutch charts it draws from, this is a specifically English political document, printed a dozen years after the changeover, and its errors are as historically telling as its accuracies. It's available unframed in a range of print sizes.