Marmaduke Raynor and the 1617 Map of the James River, Virginia

ABSTRACT

Who deserves credit for the map of detailed soundings taken in the James River in the summer of 1617, the foundation for all subsequent navigation in Virginia for the next half century? This essay proposes that the chartmaker is not a pirate, as previously suggested, but one Marmaduke Raynor, a trained and experienced seaman who might have been commissioned by the Virginia Company of London as part of a new initiative. The original map is no longer extant, but was copied, perhaps surreptitiously, and then used by the famous Dutch mapmakers of the Vingboons family for their chart of the ‘Powhatan River’ of 1639.

KEYWORDS:

• Jamestown
• Virginia
• pirate
• Vingboons
• Elfrith
• James River

Who deserves credit for the map of detailed soundings taken in the James River in the summer of 1617, the foundation for all subsequent navigation in Virginia for the next half century? The missing map is apparently the source for the chart of the Jamestown settlement produced in the late 1630s by Johannes Vingboons of the Netherlands, and it is from that later, derivative map that one can make deductions about an original sketched in 1617. Jarvis and van Driel (1997) first studied the extant Dutch map in detail and identified its probable English source. This original source map, now lost, reveals the search for a deep water path along the James River (formerly known as the Powhatan River from the name of the paramount chiefdom) from Cape Henry to Jamestown, suitable for ocean-going vessels.

This essay proposes that the chartmaker was one Marmaduke Raynor, a trained and experienced seaman who might have been recruited by the Virginia Company of London as part of a new initiative to revitalize the colony. In the absence of any direct and conclusive evidence, these suggestions are based on a confluence of circumstantial evidence including timing, location, training, personal networks in Virginia and London, and colonial interests involving ships sent to America. This all comes into focus against the backdrop of maritime commerce and competition with the Dutch.

The surviving Dutch map includes English and Native American place names and English measurements, suggesting that the original author was an Englishman (Jarvis and van Driel, 1997: 384). But which Englishman? The 1617 chart of the James River was not a drawing of personal interest done to while away the time during the long summer days in sweltering Virginia. Nor is it likely to have been the surreptitious work of the notorious seaman and privateer Daniel Elfrith, as Jarvis and van Driel tentatively proposed. The original drawing (which is no longer extant) seems to have been the work of a professional acting for the Virginia Company of London rather than that of an enterprising mariner on his own initiative.

What survives is a pen and ink watercolour copy made in 1639 by Johannes Vingboons, of which a few copies exist in elaborate collections of handmade maps intended for aristocratic patrons (Gosselink, 2007). Copies of that original, labelled ‘Caert van den rivier Powhatan geleg in Niew Nederlandt’ can be found in the Vatican Library (the Christina Atlas) and in The Hague (Nationaal Archief) (Stephenson, 1984: 40; Vingboons, mid C17th). Another copy from the Vingboons atlas that was dismembered and sold in pieces in 1887 is now lost (Jarvis and van Driel, 1997: 381). The Library of Congress, Washington DC has a Vingboons atlas that includes a map of the Atlantic coast of North America from Chesapeake Bay to Florida and one of the coast from New England to Virginia made the same year, but does not include the chart of the Powhatan River (Vingboons, 1639a, 1639b).

Not merely of antiquarian or genealogical interest, the identity of the mapmaker and the circumstances under which he created this chart underscore the political and financial struggles involved in the early settlement of Virginia. These matters touch on important issues of international trade competition, navigational skills, professional expertise, and the transfer of knowledge in the Atlantic World. They also challenge prevailing opinions about Anglo-Dutch cooperation and exchange in the early colonial period.

The mapmaker was employed and likely had the tools of his trade provided by the Virginia Company, as they provided the tools for other employees. A project of this kind demanding instruments, skills, and time suggests that it is best understood as a result of institutional patronage; this map appears as part of the deliberate and well-advertised relaunch of the settlement after the expiration of the first joint-stock in November 1616. During the late sixteenth century, navigational skills were far advanced in Spain and Portugal. By the early seventeenth century, however, English seamen were able to combine specialist education and practical skills to become leaders in the maritime arts through growing mastery of mathematics, science, and observation (Waters, 1958; Rose, 2004). Commercial sponsorship rather than royal beneficence provided an impetus. Maritime navigation (river pilotage and oceanic steering) had become a profession that required both education and practice. In order to produce the original chart of 1617, the James River mapmaker would have to have been not just experienced, but also schooled. A ‘rutter’, or sailing directions, was only one of a number of necessary tools for a professional: pilots needed to understand science and mathematics as well as possess the ability to take observations on board (Taylor, 1971; Zandvliet, 1998; Levy-Eichel, 2017). That combination of education and specialist tools required substantial financial support (Johnston, 1991).

The Virginia Company mapmaker would have known how to read a globe and to manipulate the mariner’s astrolabe, cross staff, back staff, log line, various kinds of compasses, binnacles, sounding weights (both shallow water lead and ‘dipsie’ for deep water), traverse boards, nocturnes, sandglasses, and gimbals; instruments used to measure location, direction, depth, and speed; as well as various drafting instruments to record and translate the numerical findings graphically for practical use (Schechner, 2007). He would have used this complex equipment and also been able to compensate for the limitations and the distortions that resulted after long and damp weeks at sea (Ash, 2007).

As well as expensive, finely crafted instruments, the mapmaker would have needed training and reference works. Immediately before departure, for example, the Virginia Company chartmaker (‘hydrographer’) might well have been given such works as William Barlow’s Magneticall Advertisements (first issued in 1609 and reprinted in 1616) on how to improve compass readings, Edward Wright's Certaine Errors in Navigation (2nd ed. 1610), and Robert Tanner’s A Brief treatise of the use of the globe celestial and terrestriall: wherein is set downe the principles of the mathematicks, for all […] navigators (1616), which was issued in a second edition in 1620. He could have had at hand as well the contents of two Spanish rutters that appeared in the 1600 edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. Officials of the Virginia Company in London were conscientious about providing printed instructional texts for their employees (Quinn, 1969; Schechner, 2007: 135). Early modern navigational training combined practical and theoretical information in a myriad of ways (Schotte, 2014, 2019).

The James River chart of 1617 was a noteworthy accomplishment. Although described by the time of the earliest extant copy (1639) as an ‘example of obsolete information’, and one that ‘certainly did not reflect the state of English settlements along the James’, the original composition was quality work (quotations in Jarvis and van Driel, 1997: 385). Although it was superseded by later maps, these subsequent works did not offer improvements on the hydrography: the Vingboons’ version of the Virginia Company chart remained the single best map of the James River for two and a half centuries, until the US Coastal Survey work of the 1860s (Virginia Institute of Marine Science, 1997).

The mapmaker did not approach a task of this kind as a sole practitioner, but as one of a number of contemporaries working to improve techniques in practical navigation and surveying. There was a lively (and competitive) London scene and therefore important interchanges among instrument makers, practitioners, and theorists (Taylor, 1967; Harkness, 2007). ‘Never were there better or nearer helps to attain [mathematical knowledge] than at this present, in this City,’ declared almanack maker G. Gilden (Taylor, 1967: 58). Individuals and institutions closely involved with the Virginia Company settlement were in the forefront of practical education in navigation and many regarded their work as a religious duty. Trinity House, for example, the English institution responsible for training mariners, had invested some communal funds in the Company (Harris, 1983: 10). Active members and employees of the Virginia Company circulated their hard-won knowledge both in manuscript and print, among them Sir Henry Mainwaring, Captain John Smith, Bermuda Governor Nathaniel Butler (Boteler), and the mathematician Henry Briggs. Drawing attention to the Company chartmaker thus draws attention as well to that circle of his friends and colleagues, which included the multitalented Thomas Hariot, and to the thriving community of Thames School chartmakers (Thrower, 1978; Gwyn, 1984; Barber, 2007; Edney, 2011). The archaeological excavations now underway in Virginia at Jamestown Rediscovery testify to the high levels of expertise in science and technology fostered by the colonial sponsors (Hudgins, 2005; Kupperman, 2011).

Some of these men might have provided formal instruction to senior Virginia Company mariners either individually or in groups. The head of the Virginia Company at this time, Sir Thomas Smythe, years earlier had been one of the sponsors of Thomas Hood’s public mathematical lectures, which were held in his home and corporate headquarters (Johnston, 1991: 332). This was in keeping with the tradition of Sir Walter Ralegh, who had hired Thomas Hariot to tutor himself and his sea captains in mathematics in his effort to settle Virginia. (Moran, 2007, and citing Shirley, 1983: 90–91). Hariot, who exhibited exceptional abilities as a surveyor and cartographer in addition to his other scientific talents, last appears in the records as an advisor on Virginia in 1609 (Quinn, 1970: 281); until his death in 1621 he was living in London, not far from Virginia Company headquarters. Practical information was exchanged on the docks in London, in meeting rooms of the various joint-stock companies and in written instructions from the organizers, but also on the decks during long days at sea crossing the Atlantic. After the soundings were taken, the chart would have entailed a collaborative process moving from the instrument readings to drafting the map. The Company often required its employees to train others.

In addition to the scientific and financial contexts, one should also consider the politics of mapmaking. Based in part on the presence of this map in Dutch hands, it has long been assumed that Dutch ships plied the James from the earliest days of tobacco production. Indeed, an entire Dutch trade with early Virginia (dating from before the establishment of the Dutch West India Company, the WIC, in 1621) has been imagined or assumed (Parker, 1961; Goodfriend, 1999; Enthoven and Klooster, 2001; Enthoven, 2003; van Ittersum and Enthoven, 2006; Klooster, 2006; Games, 2014). There is no evidence, however, of any direct Dutch trade with Jamestown during the years when the Virginia Company of London was in control of the colony (1607–1624).

The Virginia Company had a vested interest in keeping Virginia trade in the hands of its monopoly, the ‘magazine’, certainly until the end of 1620 when the magazine was dissolved under a new administration. Scholars writing on early Dutch-Virginia commerce rely on Kupp (1973), but the sole example of deliberate Anglo-Dutch colonial commerce in the north Atlantic that one can point to in the historical record before 1625 is that of the nephew of Governor George Yeardley. This young man, Edmund Rossingham, later testified that his uncle had commissioned him in 1621 and 1623 to sail to Holland to serve as his factor. By that time the ‘magazine’ monopoly had been dissolved and there was (briefly) no restriction about the English selling Virginia tobacco abroad. There is no record of Dutch boats coming directly to Virginia in the Company period (for Anglo-Dutch trade once the Dutch colony of New Netherland was established, see Todt, 2011).

To argue against a Dutch maritime and commercial presence in early Jamestown, however, is to paddle against the current historiographical stream of scholars who argue for greater appreciation of Dutch presence and influence in the New World. For some time, historians failed to acknowledge the importance of Dutch involvement in the seventeenth-century Atlantic trade. But the English and Dutch were both allies and competitors (Kopperman, 1987). There was an active, surreptitious trade in maps and charts; navigation tools and accompanying charts were the first things seized from a competitor’s ships, and these were regarded as of national importance, not simply commercial advantage. The Spanish ambassadors in London were tasked with acquiring the latest English maps of the Atlantic coastline and sending them back to Madrid. The information recorded by returning English seamen was so carefully monitored that no copies of maps of the early English colonies survive in English archives (Baldwin, 2007).

Not only the Spanish, but also the Dutch kept close watch on English enterprise in the Atlantic; they treated maps and charts as valuable prizes and proprietary material, which they went to great efforts to acquire and keep secret from others (Zandvliet, 2014). Although there are instances of collaboration in mapmaking at this time, this was a brief interlude. It is conceivable that the copy of the James River map in Dutch hands represents a moment of cooperation between Dutch and English chartmakers, as reflected in the career of someone like Gabriel Tatton (Tyacke, 2007; Tyacke, 2008). The James River chart was made the same year that a Dutch cartographer copied and revised a Portuguese chart of Guiana. Another map composed by an Englishman (to judge from its English measurements) is also in the Dutch archives, which testifies to the perceived value of such charts (Tyacke, 1980). Dutch maritime cartography, of course, was highly developed at this time, a ‘golden age’ that drew international attention and appreciation (most recently Schilder, 2013, and Schilder 2017 for Dutch contemporaries).

Few ships arrived in Jamestown in the critical years after the desperate and unsuccessful plea by the Virginia Company in 1614 for parliamentary support from England (Kolb, 1980). Only 350 people were left in the colony in 1616 (Rolfe, 1616); in 1617, three ships at most are thought to have sailed to Jamestown. By 1618, however, there were more than a dozen, and the Company’s record-keeping improved significantly as the economic outlook for the colony brightened.

The talented and industrious mapmaker of the James River likely travelled on one of the few ships known to have sailed to Virginia in 1617, the George, which left England in April and arrived in Virginia in May, a crossing that carried the new deputy governor and admiral Samuel Argall, other officials, passengers, and needed supplies. This was the ship on which Pocahontas was supposed to return in triumph to Virginia; but, taken ill before the George left the Thames, she died and was buried at Gravesend just before the ship departed (Rose, 2021 forthcoming). Under the direction of Samuel Argall, the George also carried back a number of other voyagers returning to Virginia: John Rolfe, the secretary of the colony, Ralph Hamor, the newly appointed vice-admiral for the colony and his brother Thomas, Abraham Piersey, the cape merchant, and his family, Francis West, ‘maker of ordnance’ (brother of governor De La Warr who remained in England), Captain John Davi(e)s with his family, and approximately 80 others, including craftsmen and labourers. Among those who embarked for Virginia were bricklayers and plaster specialists. Their work on a church begun in 1617 demonstrates a high level of accomplishment. Also returning on the George was Uttamatomakkin (Tomocomo) and his wife Matachanna, who had accompanied Pocahontas and her family to England, as well as two Native Americans baptized in London as ‘William Crashaw’ and ‘Cleopatra’ (Rose, forthcoming). Two other female companions, baptized Mary and Elizabeth, who were unwell and remained behind in London, returned in 1621. After the George left Gravesend in Kent, it sailed to Plymouth (10th April), where Rolfe dropped off his ailing infant son to be raised in England; the George then crossed the northern Atlantic in five weeks (the initial voyage in 1607 to establish Jamestown had taken four and a half months; Argall’s 1609 crossing took nine weeks).

The George arrived in Virginia in May and headed back to England in early September 1617, the date by which the original chart was evidently completed. Argall’s seamen had the authority and opportunity to take soundings, and might well have done so under Argall’s supervision at the express instruction of the officers of the Company (whose corporate records from this period do not survive). Argall was a maritime chartmaker himself who had worked with Richard Hakluyt, William Strachey, and Captain John Smith (Baldwin, 2004; Baldwin, 2007: 1769). London investors had a demonstrated interest in charts: that same summer, the Somers Island Company, which had many overlapping shareholders with the Virginia Company, commissioned Richard Norwood to prepare a survey and map of Bermuda.

Two other ships said to have arrived in Virginia around the same time, the Falcon and the Edwin, could not have brought the mapmaker to or from the colony. One because it did not in fact sail; the other because it did not return to England in 1617. Despite a later mention, the Falcon does not appear to have sailed to Virginia that year, and the Edwin, which was sent by an individual under his own patent, remained in the colony for a year (Kolb, 1980). The contentious John Martin, an early settler, had returned to England and received ten shares of company stock and a generous patent in January 1617, before crossing with his partner Captain John Bargrave. They sailed together on the small bark or pinnace Edwin to the colony loaded with cargo for Martin’s new settlement of Martin’s Brandon (Hatch, Jr., 1957: 75–76).

The Edwin arrived in May, and although it was supposed to return to England sooner, it remained in Virginia until the next harvest under orders from Governor Argall before it was allowed to depart in the spring of 1618 with a large cargo of tobacco. The mariners of the Edwin had ample opportunity to take soundings later in the year, but the chart of 1617 was begun after Argall’s arrival and appears to have been completed by September because it does not include settlements established after that date (Jarvis and van Driel, 1997: 386, 392). The map includes Martin’s Brandon and Argall[’s] Towne (or ‘Gift’), the private plantation the acting governor established on the site of a Native American settlement of the Paspahegh. No chartmaker is known to have been one of the ancient planters who survived and was residing in the colony before Argall’s arrival.

The name of Argall’s second-in-command on the George is not recorded, but it may have been a mariner named Marmaduke Raynor, to judge from his later employment. As he later testified, Raynor had been master of a number of ships and was part-owner of the Marmaduke (McCartney, 2007: 593). Raynor is best known for his later occupation piloting the White Lion, the ship that delivered the first Africans to British North America, the ‘twenty-and-odd’ who arrived in August 1619, four days before the Treasurer (Tyler, 1907: 282–287). It is this work that makes Raynor’s career noteworthy. The White Lion, captained by John Jope, and the Treasurer, captained by Daniel Elfrith, had sailed in concert to attack Spanish shipping in the West Indies in the early summer of 1619. They divided their human booty and unloaded them in Jamestown. The White Lion made land four days before the Treasurer: the first ship was welcomed, the second was not, and Elfrith subsequently sailed south to Bermuda to unload his prisoners there (Sluiter, 1997; Thornton, 1998; Hashaw, 2007, although widely cited, is intriguing but not reliable).

Jarvis and van Driel (1997) tentatively proposed that the map was made by one of the earliest pirates of the Caribbean, the privateer Daniel Elfrith (Elfred, Ellffryth, Elfrey). There is no evidence, however, that Daniel Elfrith had previously sailed the Treasurer to Virginia. [Only one person in Virginia reported that Elfrith had arrived as a passenger on the Treasurer in 1617, recalling events seven years after the fact. Colonists frequently misremembered or misspoke about their transatlantic crossings (Kolb, 1980).] Elfrith was indeed a talented mariner, whose sailing guide or ‘rutter’ from 1636 survives in the Newberry Library. But he cannot be shown to have stayed in Virginia for more than a few weeks in an entire lifetime spent mostly in and around the Caribbean (Pargellis and Butler, 1944; Kupperman, 1993: 40; Kupperman, 2004). A protegee of the Earl of Warwick for many years, the talented and experienced Elfrith was too unreliable to be commissioned for a task of this sort (Pargellis and Butler, 1944: 276 for later reprimands based on his ‘errors’ and ‘indiscretions’; 279 for contemporary comment on his lack of dependability). But by 1619 – if not earlier – one can surmise that he knew the English colleague who deserves the credit for the work.

Raynor must have been trustworthy and familiar with Chesapeake waterways, or he would not have been hired to guide the two ships with Virginia’s first enslaved Africans into English colonial waters. Perhaps he was recommended by Argall, who was part-owner of the Treasurer, one of the ships Raynor was hired to guide. Few other experienced mariners who knew the Chesapeake were available for hire. At this time, for example, captains Robert Adams and Christopher Newport, both experienced seamen familiar with the Chesapeake after multiple transatlantic crossings, were employed in the East Indies, where they both died. Other seamen would not have known the latest settlements and fortifications guarding the entrance to the colony, because so few ships had ventured there in recent years.

In testimony from 1623, Raynor said he had lived in Virginia for 16 months, and had previously made three trips there, apparently in 1617, 1619, and 1620, the last two of which are documented (McCartney, 2007: 593). It is plausible, although not documented, that he was an officer of the ship when Samuel Argall sailed on the George to Virginia in 1617 and that he took soundings that summer. Such employment and his friendship with Argall would explain why in 1619 he could so confidently bring a ‘Dutch’ ship with seized cargo into an English colonial settlement that had not previously allowed a foreign ship to land.

Unlike Elfrith, who stayed only a short while in Virginia, Marmaduke Raynor had a longstanding interest in the English colony and apparently settled family there. [Wassell Reyner, possibly Marmaduke’s son or close relative, was settled in Virginia with his wife by 1624, according to a list of the ‘Living and the Dead’ recorded in February 1623 that was sent back to England.] Although the Treasurer’s attack on the Portuguese slave ship and the disposal of its enslaved human cargo in Virginia was to cause a major rift within the Company, Marmaduke Raynor himself remained in good repute. After piloting the White Lion into Virginia waters, he stayed in the colony for a few months, and then sailed first to the Netherlands and then back to England with the report of the first Virginia Assembly. In late 1619, the secretary of the colony, John Pory, dispatched him with a letter to the English ambassador to the Netherlands, Sir Dudley Carleton, in which Pory commented disapprovingly about the Treasurer’s attack on the Portuguese slave ship, fearing a revenge attack by the Spanish on Jamestown. Pory entrusted his letter to one ‘Mr Marmaduke’ (Tyler, 1907: 282–287).

Shortly after Raynor’s trip to the Netherlands, he was back in London seeking employment with the Virginia Company with the support of George Yeardley, the new governor of the colony, who succeeded Argall. At a meeting in London it was reported that ‘Sir George Yeardle desireth of them to the good of the Colony that a navigation might be set up which would produce good benefit to the Plantation, and to that end nominateth unto them one Marmaduke Rayer, who is willing to go if they please to give him his passage, which man being also well known unto Sir Thomas Roe, he gave very good commendation of him whereupon it was agreed upon the terms mentioned he should be sent’ (Kingsbury, 1906: 1:330).

In March of 1620, Yeardley advised the Company to commission Raynor to map the colony, to explore what is now North Carolina, and to seek out the Roanoke colonists if they still survived. Yeardley’s written recommendation from Jamestown may have been based on his appreciation of the map of the James River made in 1617. It would have been a powerful recommendation had Raynor submitted it in 1620 as part of his employment dossier. The Virginia Company officials in London approved Yeardley’s suggestion and commissioned Raynor to explore South Carolina. He left England on 7 July 1620, as master of the Temperance and fulfilled that charge: his report was delivered to the Virginia Company in London before the end of the year (although no copy survives) (Powell, 1974). Raynor’s findings, along with those of others, were read aloud to London officials of the Virginia Company in July 1621 (Kingsbury, 1906: 1:330, 504).

Raynor made several subsequent trips to Virginia and was living there in 1629, when he served on a jury (Kingsbury, 1906: 2:385; McCartney, 2007: 593). His later career as colonist and mariner is better documented, especially his falling out with Will Sakar, the owner of the Temperance, over Raynor’s voyage of 1626 (Calendar of State Papers Colonial 4:87; Kingsbury, 1906: Vol. 2: 529).

Where the mapmaker was born and where he gained his education and experience are uncertain. There appear to have been a few men named Marmaduke Raynor in early–seventeenth century England. The proposed mapmaker may have been the Marmaduke Reyner of Hull in east Yorkshire, a major port and centre of English maritime trade with the Netherlands. This Marmaduke apparently went to sea when his father sold land in Barkisland in 1594 after a number of family feuds. The hearty approbation of Sir Thomas Roe, mentioned in the Virginia Company records, suggests that as a young man Raynor may have accompanied Roe on his exploratory voyage to the West Indies and Guiana in 1610 in an attempt to establish a colony on the Amazon before Roe was sent in 1615 as ambassador to India: ‘one Marmaduke Rayner […] which man beinge also well knowne unto Sir Thomas Roe, hee gave very good comendacons of him […] ’ (Kingsbury, 1906: 1:330). Roe served on the Virginia Company council in London beginning in 1607. Three years later, Roe set out on his own transatlantic venture, travelling 300 miles up the Amazon and visiting various settlements on the coast, and communicating his findings to Robert Cecil in London. Roe built a ship and a pinnace and left Plymouth, February 1610, spent 13 months exploring and returned July 1611. A number of excellent charts survive from that effort (Tyacke, 1980: 73). If indeed Raynor had accompanied Roe, observing others or participating in gathering information, such experience would have worked in Raynor’s favour when he applied for work with the Virginia Company.

It is admittedly speculative to attach Marmaduke Raynor’s name to the missing map. There is no proof, only circumstantial or suggestive evidence that he worked with earlier chartmakers or served as a ship’s officer.

The hypothesis that the James River map should be attributed to Marmaduke Raynor takes on special significance when one considers that it ended up in Dutch hands. The map became part of a global corporation’s cartographic archive and encouraged Dutch captains from the 1630s onward to trade directly in the Chesapeake. Speculation about the identity and nationality of the mapmaker forces us to consider the nature of international competition in this period; to recognize that there was not a Dutch trade with Virginia in these early years; and to consider that – if the map was made by an Englishman under the auspices or with the encouragement of the Virginia Company – it was acquired or copied surreptitiously. The question reminds us of the importance of maps in the struggle for mastery of the New World. The Spanish ambassador in England, for example, secretly sent a map of the new Popham colony to the King of Spain; Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch, had his maps confiscated when he was detained in England; likewise, this map may have been acquired for the Dutch through espionage, if not commercial enterprise. Whether or not Marmaduke Raynor deserves the attribution, as suggested here, the mapmaker was in all likelihood someone working with corporate encouragement, rather than a privateer like Daniel Elfrith. At issue here is the question of international involvement, specifically early Dutch interest in the potential exploitation of the Virginia colony.

The map of 1617 is one of only four known to have been made of the James River before 1650. The first was drawn by Robert Tindall when Jamestown was established in 1607 and was sent to his patron Prince Henry. The second was drawn by John Smith, and later widely reproduced; the third was found in the Spanish royal archives, having been copied and surreptitiously sent to Spain. A copy of the one under discussion appeared in an atlas put together by one of the noted cartographers of the Vingboons family, who worked for several decades for the Dutch West Indies and East Indies companies (the WIC and the VOC) (references in Jarvis and van Driel, 1997). ‘[T]he map probably guided dozens of Dutch ships’ masters upriver to trade with Virginia planters for tobacco – much to the annoyance of both the English crown and the Virginia colonial government. The chart may also have aided the Dutch navy […] during the Anglo-Dutch Wars’ (Jarvis and van Driel, 1997: 380).

How and why the chart of 1617 got into the hands of the Dutch is not clear. Marmaduke Raynor was in the Netherlands in 1620 and seeking employment that year – but there is no indication he met with any Dutchmen, only the English ambassador. Since the 1617 chart disclosed not just information of commercial interest, but also that of strategic importance, including a possible way to elude the Jamestown forts, it seems more likely to have been acquired surreptitiously than in an aboveboard manner (Jarvis and van Driel, 1997: 383).

It is equally plausible that the map was copied by a Dutchman in Virginia at a later date than in the years immediately after the original was created. The three-gabled building drawn by Vingboons on Jamestown Island is the site on which Governor Berkeley later erected a building that served as the State house (William Kelso, pers. comm.); this might hint that the map of 1617 was copied in Virginia in the 1630s, by which time Dutch ships were a frequent sight along the James River (Hatfield, 2005 on the mariner-merchant exchanges in that period).

The institutional patronage of the Virginia Company is as significant as it was short-lived. It should be placed in the context of the Bermuda land survey and the appointment the same year in Amsterdam of Hessel Gerritzoon as chief cartographer for the VOC with responsibility for collecting and collating maps and charts from around the world. It was in these very years that Dutch mapmaking became institutionalized: ‘Crucial steps toward the formal creation of such a mapmaking agency were taken in the years 1614–1619’, with ‘the aim of controlling crucial knowledge of a commercial and political nature’ (Zandvliet, 1998: 86).

The Virginia mapmaker had few successors among his countrymen; his name was lost to posterity, his painstaking work attributed to others. After the imprisonment of the leaders of the Virginia Company in 1621 (during which time Raynor’s subsequent report was submitted) and the dissolution of the Company in 1624, there was no longer any institutionalized corporate effort to create useful maps of the New World: ‘Until the end of the seventeenth century, English mariners depended on Dutch publishers for their charts and sailing directions, even of the coasts of England itself’ (Verner, 1978: 127). The commission of the James River chart indicates that the situation might have been different.

The suggestion that Marmaduke Raynor took the original soundings that were the basis for the later Dutch map, acting in the service of English colonial and commercial interests, enriches our picture of the early Virginia settlement. It highlights the importance of the mapmaker as well as of the chart in the exploitation of the colony. It raises a further question: about why John Jope and Marmaduke Raynor were welcomed, and why Raynor was praised and promoted by the colony’s governor while Daniel Elfrith was turned away in 1619. It also suggests that some of the people dispatched by the Virginia Company were far more talented than one might suppose in light of their later ignominious reputations. Map making played an important part in colonial commerce. It is therefore significant to understand when, how, by whom, and under whose patronage the chart of the James River and the settlement in 1617 was carried out, even though the original map no longer survives and is recalled today only through later copies.

Acknowledgements

These observations emerged during research the author conducted in the spring of 2017 as Visiting Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC)/Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation at Historic Jamestown and when Dr Rose was a Visiting Fellow, Department of History, Harvard University. I thank Michael Jarvis, Stephen Johnston, William Kelso, James Marrow, Sara Schechner, Christopher Thompson, Sarah Tyacke, and anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, College of William and Mary.

Notes on contributors

E.M. Rose

E.M. Rose is an award-winning scholar of Medieval and Early Modern Europe, who has taught at five universities and was Visiting Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC)/Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation at Historic Jamestown and participated in the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Harvard University. Rose’s first book, The Murder of William of Norwich (Oxford University Press, 2015) was named one of the ‘Ten Best History Books of the Year’ by The Sunday Times of London and described by the Wall Street Journal as ‘a landmark of historical research’. Rose’s articles on the early seventeenth century have appeared in Parliamentary History and the Huntington Library Quarterly among others. Rose is a graduate of Yale, Oxford, Columbia, and Princeton universities.