Title: Noua Terrae-Mariae tabula. [cartouche, center top margin]

Scale: Bar scale indicates 20 Sea Leagues.

Engraver: Unknown

Publisher: London, John Ogilby. 

Dimensions: Sheet 40.5 x 45.7 cm.; image 29.5 x 37.7 cm. Engraving. Hand colored.

In: John Ogilby, America, London, 1671.

Noua Terrae-Mariae tabula, 1635

In 1632 King Charles I of England granted George Calvert, 1st Baron of Baltimore, a slice of Virginia land lying between the 40th parallel and the southern bank of the Potomac River. The area would become Calvert's personal property and be named Maryland after Queen Henrietta Maria. George Calvert died while the charter was being processed and his son Cecilius (1608-1675) inherited it.

In November 1633 two ships, the Ark and the Dove, left England with 128 colonists under the command of Cecilius' brother Leonard. The Calvert family intended to found a colony that would restore and support their fortune and provide a refuge for English and Irish Roman Catholics, their coreligionists. On March 25th, 1634 the colonizing party reached St. Clement's Island in the Potomac River. Unlike the first Virginia ventures, Maryland's fared well. The colony raised enough food to support itself and relations with the neighboring Indians were friendly.

The first map of the colony, commonly known as the Lord Baltimore map, accompanies a pamphlet entitled A Relation of Maryland, published by William Peasley, Calvert's brother-in-law. It is the first map, since that of John Smith, to present new information on the Maryland area. The Lord Baltimore map is often compared with the John Smith map and generally the comparison is favorable to the earlier map. The delineation of the land is less skillful and the depiction of trees, rivers and mountains is less carefully executed on the Lord Baltimore map. Its value lies mainly in its more complete and up-to-date nomenclature and in its depiction of the boundaries of the Calvert land grant with dotted lines.

However, the map is an improvement in two other points: the line of the Potomac River is more accurate than Smith's "z" shape and the delineation of the Atlantic coastline is better and now even includes the Delaware Bay. The first Maryland colonists had not explored the Eastern Shore peninsula by 1635, but the maker of this map possibly had access to information obtained by Dutch, English and French explorations of the Atlantic coast.

A second edition of this map was published in London under the same title by John Ogilby in 1671 in his atlas America.

References:
E. Baer, 1949, no. 22; E. Matthews, 1898, pp. 360-363;  The World Encompassed, 1952, no. 242.

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