Virginia and Maryland in 1676 - Jamestown, St. Mary's City, Annapolis

This map of Virginia and Maryland was engraved by Francis Lamb and first published in 1676, in the enlarged edition of John Speed's atlas issued in London by Thomas Bassett and Richard Chiswell, nearly half a century after Speed himself had died. Though it carries Speed's name, it is really Lamb's work, part of a set of four maps of the English colonies that holds the distinction of being the first genuinely new printed maps of English America to appear in a commercial atlas after England consolidated control over what would become the original thirteen colonies. The map draws its coastal and inland detail primarily from John Smith's earlier survey of Virginia, updated with information from Augustine Herrman's 1670 map of Virginia and Maryland, one of the first Chesapeake surveys undertaken by a colonist rather than an English visitor. It is accompanied by a detailed English-language description of Virginia and Maryland printed on the sheet's verso, a common feature of Speed's atlas maps intended to give English readers a fuller picture of the colonies than the map alone could provide.

Jamestown appears as Virginia's seat of government, still the colony's capital two decades before it would be abandoned in favor of Williamsburg. St. Mary's City anchors Maryland as its first capital, founded by the Calvert family's Catholic colonists and still serving as the proprietary colony's seat of government at the time this map was engraved. The map's reliance on Herrman's survey brings a level of Chesapeake Bay detail that earlier English-made maps of the region had lacked, reflecting a colonist's firsthand knowledge of the bay's tributaries and shoreline. Together Jamestown and St. Mary's City represent the two rival centers of English settlement in the Chesapeake just as both colonies were beginning to mature beyond their earliest, most precarious years.

This 1676 Speed-Lamb edition is a striking gift for a Virginia or Maryland family with colonial-era roots, a Chesapeake-region transplant, or a collector building out the earliest English-published maps of the American colonies. The store's other Chesapeake-region sheet, the Homann Heirs map of 1745, covers much the same Virginia-Maryland ground nearly seventy years later and from a German rather than English press, by which time Williamsburg and Annapolis had long since replaced Jamestown and St. Mary's City as each colony's capital. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a large statement piece.