John Smith & William Hole, Virginia (1624)

In 1608, Captain John Smith and a small crew of colonists, sailed the Chesapeake Bay, writing notes, making sketches, and using navigational equipment to record approximate locations. In 1612, he published a map of the Chesapeake Bay region that became a cartographic resource on the region for nearly seven decades. This copy of the map was published with Smith's 1624 edition of Smith's The generall Historie of Virginia. Sailing up the major rivers flowing into the bay from the west, Smith and his party encountered numerous Native American villages and recorded their names and populations. The legend and symbolization of the map differentiate between areas and features that have been discovered by the English and those learned about by Indigenous informants. The Maltese crosses on each river indicates the extent of the party's actual personal knowledge, versus the remainder taken from instructions provided to them by local Indigenous Peoples. A detailed analysis of the map can be found here.