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Aitken’s plan captures the freshly built British works that throttled the narrow isthmus connecting Boston to the mainland during the opening months of the Revolution. Drawn with north to the right, it traces the causeway that would become Washington Street, flanked by salt marshes and the “Shallow Bay West of Boston.” Two successive lines of earthworks, bomb batteries, numbered redoubts, and guard houses block the approach, while a quarter-statute-mile scale at the foot underscores the slenderness of “the Neck.”
Issued only weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, this was the earliest American-engraved battle plan to reach readers outside New England. Its appearance in the Pennsylvania Magazine, then edited for much of the year by Thomas Paine, gave a Philadelphia audience an immediate visual grasp of the standoff that would hold until the British evacuation in March 1776.
![The Theatre of War in North America, with the Roads and a Table of the Distances [with] A Compendious Account of the British Colonies in North-America.](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/111029.jpg)
