A History of America in 100 Maps

54 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS

In June 1675 English settlers in Plymouth hanged

three Wampanoag Indians who were suspected of

murdering a Christian Indian earlier that year. This

event came after waves of European immigrants had

swelled the population of New England. In response,

the Wampanoag leader King Philip (also known as

Metacomet) allied with the Narragansett Indians to

attack English settlements, launching a vicious war

that gripped southern New England for fourteen

months in 1676–7.

King Philip’s War remains the most destructive

conflict in American history relative to the population.

As such, it spawned several contemporary accounts,

including that of William Hubbard, a minister from

Ipswich. His “Narrative of the Troubles with the

Indians in New-England” circulated widely, and

distinguished itself with a woodcut map that was the

first to be printed in English America. This remains

one of the only surviving images from seventeenth-

century New England.

Hubbard’s map both documents and unwittingly

explains the causes of this brutal war. It is oriented

with north at the right, so that the Connecticut River

flows horizontally along the top of the page. That in

itself is revealing, for the westward growth of English

settlement to the river significantly encroached on

native lands. The new towns—Hartford, Springfield,

and Northampton—indicated just how much was

changing in seventeenth-century New England. By

mapping the expansion of the Massachusetts Bay

colony, Hubbard captured the territorial tensions

that exploded in King Philip’s War. Two dark vertical

lines mark the northern and southern boundary

of the Massachusetts Bay colony, while the lighter

angled line separates out the Plymouth Colony. These

boundaries also demonstrate that colonists brought

their own conceptions of land—to be parceled,

surveyed, and owned—to America.

Hubbard designed the map to document the

Indian attacks on English settlements, numbering

each of the towns to correspond to notes in his

VIOLENCE AND DEVASTATION IN EARLY NEW ENGLAND

William Hubbard and John Foster,

“A Map of New-England, Being the first

that ever was here cut,” 1677

narrative. Yet he omitted those places where the

English attacked the Indians, which left readers

with a curiously one-sided view of the conflict. Just

as revealing is the way Hubbard mapped human

geography. English villages are identified by churches

or houses, icons that signify civilization. By contrast,

native settlements are represented by trees, reflecting

an assumption that they were an extension of nature

and the landscape itself. Ironically, there is evidence

that Indian knowledge influenced Hubbard’s map,

for the stylized and oversized rendering of Lake

Winnipesaukee—littered with islands—evokes native

techniques of representing the landscape in a way

that does not always correspond to scale.

Hubbard’s larger purpose in the narrative

was to argue that the war was caused not by the

declining faith of the Puritans, but by the failure of

the Indians to embrace Christianity. His map shows

us a colonist’s perspective of the conflict, wherein

Christian settlers lived in constant fear of attack.

Yet it was the very success of the colonies—edging

westward into the wilderness—that put them in

tension with indigenous tribes. Natives found

themselves vulnerable and increasingly unable to

protect their land. With little aid from England, the

colonists began to forge a new identity, one grounded

in their particular geography and circumstances.

They became, in other words, less English and

more American.

The terror represented by this map also contrasted

sharply with the relatively peaceful settlement led

by William Penn in the 1680s (see pages 56–59).

The Indian tribes to the south, however, had

been weakened for years by disease and prior

European contact, which made it easier for Penn

to enter into treaties that essentially vacated the

area around Philadelphia. Hubbard’s map of New

England recorded the fundamental conflict and

displacement of natives that accompanied every

instance of European settlement in the New World.

By the nineteenth century, Indians would be hard to

find on American maps: they had been removed to

reservations or completely erased. It seems entirely

fitting, then, that the first map ever made in the

British colonies would document the contest between

natives and whites over control of the land: the first

map made in America was a map of war.