Manatus Map Explained

The Manatus Map is a 1639 pictorial map of the New York–New Jersey Harbor Estuary at the time the area was part of the colony of New Netherland. Entitled Manatvs gelegen op de Noort Rivier (Manhattan situated on the North River) it shows the geographic features of the region, as well as New Amsterdam and other New Netherland settlements. The map was drafted when Willem Kieft was Director of New Netherland.[1]

The authorship of the map is uncertain. Edward Van Winkle of the Holland Society of New York attributed it to the Dutch cartographer Johannes Vingboons, who made many manuscript maps for theDutch West India Company (aka GWC or WIC).[2] Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes did not exclude any of several candidates except for Andries Hudde, due to travel back to Europe for his marriage in that year.[3]

The original drawing is lost and It survives only in two later 17th-century copies made in the same studio with slight differences, as noted in Stokes' The Iconography of Manhattan Island. One of the copies came from the same collection as the Castello Plan at Villa di Castello, and is now held at the New York Public Library.[4] The other was a Henry Harrisse donation to the Library of Congress. The Harrisse copy is twenty-six and five-eighth inches by eighteen and one-fourth inches in size.[5]

The map is oriented with north to the right with New York Bay and North River (Hudson River), the Noort Rivier, at the center. It shows Manhattan Island, Manatus Eylandt, with Westchester and Bronx counties to the north; a good part of Long Island and Coney Island (Conyni Eylant in Harrisse or Konyne Eylandt in Castello) to the east; Sandy Hook (Sant Punt) and Hoogen Hoeck to the south; with Staten Island (Staten Eylant), Achter t' Col, Newark Bay, the Hackensack and Passaic river and Overpeck Creek, to the west. Also identified are Native American settlements in present-day Brooklyn.

Inset Key

Depicted in Manhattan situated on the North Rivier and explained in a numbered key to the main places in an inset are the properties of the company (Dutch; Flemish: Westindische Compagnie or WIC) and early New Netherlanders. Some were bouweries, or homesteads which included dwellings and out buildings, and others were plantages, or plantations, sometimes worked by company slaves.[6]

See also

References

  1. Web site: Manhattan, 1624-1639. Edward. Van Winkle. Joan cn. Vinckeboons. Kiliaen van. Rensselaer. September 23, 1916. New York. Internet Archive.
  2. Book: Van Winkle, Edward. Manhattan, 1624-1639. The Knickerbocker Press. 1916.
  3. Book: Stokes, Isaac Newton Phelps. The iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909. Robert H. Dodd. New York. The Manatus Maps.
  4. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-7c01-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99#
  5. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3804n.ct000050/
  6. News: Earliest known Manhattan map made in 1639 . The New York Times . March 25, 1917 . September 18, 2023.

External links

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