A place to discuss North Carolina's cartographic history
Minchiate? I had never before heard the term. A previous post described several miniature maps of Carolina, each measuring four inches or less. We have one more to add to the list. Minchiate is an early 16th-century card game, originating in Florence, Italy, and played with a deck of 97 cards.
The old axiom, “good things come in small packages”, certainly holds true in maps. There are some miniature maps of Carolina that are adorable. Let’s take a look at a few maps of the Carolinas that measure no more than four inches.
Carolana, the original name for what is now North Carolina, wandered on maps from present day NC, to Mississippi, and finally to upstate NY.
John Lawson published a map of Carolina in A New Voyage to Carolina in 1709; most people familiar with Lawson know of this map. However, virtually unknown is Lawson’s map of Ocracoke Inlet, titled “Ocacock Inlet No. Carolina”, with an engraved date of August 22d, 1709. Read more about it via the linked pdf.
Priority of the 3 first edition issues of Blome’s “A Description of the Island of Jamaica…” can be determined by the state of the map of Carolina.
If asked to name 18th Century North Carolina surveyors, the top three names that come to mind, in chronological order, are John Lawson, Edward Moseley, and William Churton. There are a lot of mysteries pertaining to Churton’s life, death, and his manuscript map of North Carolina. Some of those mysteries are discussed here.
Henry Mouzon contributed very little, if anything, to the famous 18th century map of the Carolinas that bears his name. This is the story behind the map.
Henry Mouzon, Jr. receives undue credit for the map entitled An Accurate Map of North and South Carolina…the whole from Actual Surveys by Henry Mouzon and Others. So does Henry Mouzon, Jr. Say what? Turns out, there were two persons… Read moreHenry Mouzon, Jr., one a mapmaker, one a captain
Published cartographic reference works have described a single state of Richard Blome’s 1672 map of Carolina. The PDF linked below describes three states of the map.
The two separate states of John Collet’s 1770 map, A compleat map of North-Carolina from an actual survey / by Capt’n Collet, are described.