Christian Koot offers an informative and broadly contextualized biography of a unique map and its maker, Augustine Herrman. He traces the development of the local (or colonial) view that shaped the manuscript map created in the region of the Mid-Atlantic as well as the metropolitan vision sought by the map's patron, Lord Baltimore, who (with the king) supported its transformation into a printed imperial instrument. Joining other historians of cartography (and geography), Koot embraces the concept that “maps do not simply represent geographic knowledge; instead they have the power to generate meaning” (9). It is this effort to peel back the layers, to “read maps backward to gain insight into the larger ideologies their makers and users held” (9), that drives the story and so enriches anyone who reads this work.
Koot's presentation of the life and career of Herrman, a merchant, diplomat, mapmaker, and plantation owner with clear entrepreneurial skills, takes the reader quickly from the religious and political upheavals in Bohemia of the 1620s to the heady economic environment of the Netherlands and on to New Netherland in 1644 with Herrman in the role of mercantile agent. In the approximate twenty-five years of activity that follow in this region of North America, our agent began to develop his own trading ventures from New England to Virginia. Despite the “protectionist” messages from London (or even Amsterdam), as Koot writes, both Dutch and English officials sought Herrman's intercolonial experience in their efforts to maintain mutually beneficial trade networks. In 1660, then, after a meeting between himself (as one of the Dutch representatives) and Philip Calvert, then the secretary of the colony of Maryland and soon-to-be governor, Herrman urged the Dutch not only to press their claims to the South River (Delaware River) but also to consider making a map of the region. Nearly a year after this meeting with the English and finding no action by the Dutch on his advice, Herrman took his offer to make a map to Lord Baltimore. In 1661 Herrman—with letters of denization—purchased and took possession of 4,000 acres in the strategic economic region of the Upper Chesapeake and with the further “blessings” of Baltimore began to construct his manuscript map of the region.
As if this is not enough to grab the reader's attention, in chapters 2 and 3, Koot carries the local thread of his thesis to relate the story of how Herrman might have created his distinctly colonial map but also his unique position in the second half of the seventeenth century as colonial trader, planter, landowner, and mapmaker in the inter-imperial region of the Mid-Atlantic. Koot situates Herrman's map in the train of English and Dutch works of the period from Smith's Virginia (1612) to those of the Jansson-Visscher map series (c. 1650s) among others as well as the influence of Dutch chartmaking. This was a map for movement—navigation—for “local cross-border commercial” activity in which Herrman and his colonial associates were quite experienced, and a work for Lord Baltimore to see their confidence in successful intercolonial trade. Koot writes, “The map is a claim that they—colonial planters and merchants, English and Dutch—not those in England had made this place” (136).
In the remaining two chapters of the book, Koot picks up the metropolitan thread of his argument to demonstrate how this colonial object was transformed into “the definitive English image of the Chesapeake, complete with a new narrative,” (140) that is an imperial narrative replete with symbols of English authority and an orderly urban colony. He describes the process of turning the manuscript map into a printed metropolitan image and the consumption of that image from London coffeehouses to the library of London elites such as Samuel Pepys to the boardroom of the Lords of Trade. While he acknowledges that Herrman's manuscript is not extant, Koot adopts Jeannette Black's conclusion that two manuscript maps (1677) on vellum in the Thames School tradition (likely commissioned by the Lords of Trade) were based on information on Herrman's map. Herrman's presentation of the waterways of the Chesapeake from a colonial perspective now paired with the emblems of imperial power, stock images of Native Americans, many European or English toponyms, and the enumerated manors of the region not only supported the idea that the region could now be known by consumers, but also that it enjoyed English possession. Koot writes “as a tool for navigation, claiming territory, resolving border disputes, and imagining strange lands, it [the map] had become a thoroughly imperial artifact” (214). And Herrman, too, appears on the map in a “cultivated” portrait that erased the colonial reality and replaced it with a more fitting image (for the imperial narrative) of a metropolitan conventional scholar.
Koot ends his last chapter with an interesting story of how this “imperial artifact” might have “played” on a colonial stage. An anonymous Maryland petitioner complained of the “Maryland Papists” and Lord Baltimore whose absolutist intentions were on full display in the map as Calvert's coat of arms were presented equally with the royal arms. Putting aside the reality that Calvert's arms were smaller and presented in a lower position to the royal arms on the map, Koot reminds the reader that “a colonial way of seeing lurks in many metropolitan maps” (216).
Into the eighteenth century, Herrman's map of the Chesapeake influenced other works even as the navigational information became obsolete and now stripped of its local meaning it was fully absorbed into the imperial narrative (220). Herrman's story, too, lost its intercolonial foundation in favor of a nineteenth-century son of Bohemia or more ironic for Herrman, “a true American” (228). No matter one's interest or discipline with or without an area of research, Koot presents an exceptional story to be savored while read.
