|
||
|
|
|
|
A scarce and graphically rich British military map of Chignecto Bay and the Isthmus of Chignecto, illustrating the successful 1755 assault on Fort Beauséjour (later Fort Cumberland) by British forces under Colonel Robert Monckton, a key early episode in the French and Indian War. This map was engraved for Thomas Mante’s History of the Late War in North America, one of the finest contemporary accounts of British military operations in the Americas during the Seven Years’ War.
The map captures the strategic corridor between Nova Scotia and Acadia, the focal point of Anglo-French rivalry over the Isthmus separating the Bay of Fundy from the interior of the Canadian Maritimes. The topography is rendered in exquisite detail: shaded relief and stippled vegetation mark out the landscape, while carefully ruled fields indicate settled farmland. Roads, villages, rivers, and fortifications are marked throughout, including Fort Lawrence, Fort Beauséjour, and a French blockhouse along the Missaguash River. British encampments, artillery batteries, and troop movements are clearly labeled, reflecting the operational phase of Monckton's siege.
The inset title cartouche, ornately engraved with military and botanical motifs, anchors the composition. The map’s coverage includes such key locations as Le Planche River, E. Point St. Croix, Shipody River, and the surrounding marshlands of Memeramkok Bay, long recognized as tactically valuable for both movement and defense. To the north, the map depicts lands labeled “French Settlements” and “Abounding with Good Marshes,” an allusion to Acadian farming communities that would soon be forcibly deported in the tragic events of the Grand Dérangement.
Issued as part of a suite of battle maps in Mante’s History, the present image stands out for its balanced visual drama and topographic clarity. The campaign at Fort Beauséjour was critical: it solidified British control of Nova Scotia, removed the last significant French foothold in the region, and provided justification for the British expulsion of the Acadians, whose settlement patterns and loyalties were deemed suspect. Monckton’s victory, though overshadowed by later battles, was thus instrumental in reshaping the population and geopolitical structure of the Canadian Maritimes.
Thomas Mante (bapt. 1733, d. c. 1802), army officer, historian, and sometime intelligence agent, was baptized Thomas Mant on 3 December 1733 at St Faith’s, Havant, Hampshire. He was the eldest of eight children born to Thomas Mant, an estate manager, and Mary Bingham, daughter of the church historian Joseph Bingham and his wife Dorothea Pococke. Nothing is known of his early education or training, but he began his military career on 25 June 1756 as a senior second lieutenant in the Royal Marines.
During the Seven Years’ War, Mante transferred to the 56th company of Marines in 1759 and participated in the major West Indies campaigns of 1759 and 1762. He served as one of seventeen assistant engineers under the Earl of Albemarle during the siege of Havana in 1762, and by June of that year had obtained a commission as a lieutenant in the 77th Regiment of Foot. That regiment departed Havana for New York in August 1762, but was disbanded the following year as part of postwar reductions. Mante, however, remained in North America: in 1763 he joined Colonel Henry Bouquet’s campaign against the forces of Pontiac, and in 1764 served as brigade major in Colonel John Bradstreet’s expedition to the western Great Lakes.
Placed on half-pay in 1765, Mante spent the next eight years in London. He sought appointments—most ambitiously, as lieutenant-governor of a proposed colony in Detroit—but failed to secure political support. He relied increasingly on borrowed funds and fell out with both John Bradstreet and Sir Charles Gould. During this period, he was employed by John Robinson at the Treasury to provide intelligence in anticipation of a renewed Anglo-French conflict. On 29 June 1769 he married Mary Silver at North Hayling, near his family’s home in Havant.
Mante’s literary career began in this first London period. Between 1770 and 1772 he completed four military works: three translations of treatises on tactics from the French school of Joly de Maizeroy—A Treatise on the Use of Defensive Arms (1770), Elementary Principles of Tactics (1771), and the two-volume System of Tactics (1781)—and his major historical achievement, The History of the Late War in North America (1772). This last work, issued with a suite of folding maps, drew on his own military experience and is still regarded as a valuable contemporary account of the Seven Years’ War. He changed the spelling of his name from “Mant” to “Mante” between 1770 and 1772, and used it consistently thereafter.
In 1773, Mante moved permanently to Dieppe, Normandy, where he had lived intermittently since 1769. He had been recruited by the Jacobite exile Jean-Charles-Adolphe Grant de Blairfindy to provide military intelligence to the French ministry of war. Though on the French payroll for a time, his payments ceased in 1774 amid suspicions that he was a double agent. Nonetheless, he remained in France, serving briefly as an excise officer and then attempting to operate an estate for raising British sheep. This project failed, and in 1778 he was imprisoned for debt. That same year, he published Traité des prairies artificielles, des enclos, et de l’éducation des moutons de race angloise, a treatise on English methods of sheep husbandry, which received formal approval from Louis XVI and was dedicated to Benjamin Franklin, then serving as American ambassador in Paris.
Released from prison in early 1781, Mante returned to London in poor health and near destitution. Rejected by his former associates, he found support from the publisher Thomas Hookham, who issued two of his novels, Lucinda and The Siege of Aubigny, in 1781–82. These were paraphrases of French originals. His final project was an ambitious Naval and Military History of the Wars of England, published in multiple volumes between c.1795 and 1807. He personally authored the early volumes and most of volumes five and six, which covered the wars of 1714–1771. Volume seven was only partially completed by him and finished by another hand; volume eight was written posthumously by an anonymous editor. Between 1800 and 1801 he also contributed nineteen essays, titled “Retrospect of the eighteenth century,” to The Gentleman’s Magazine. He died around 1802, still at work on his history.
Substantially based on the ODNB entry.
![[ Louisbourg ] A Plan of the City & Fortifications of Louisburg, from a Survey Made by Richard Gridley, Lieut. Col. of the Train of Artillery in 1745 [on sheet with] A Plan of the City and Harbour of Louisburg, with the French Batteries that Defended it . . .](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/69378.jpg)
