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One of the Earliest American Maps of Nantucket & Martha's Vineyard etc.
This extremely rare sea chart, covering Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, the south coast of Cape Cod, Buzzard's Bay and Barnstable Bay, is one of seven New England charts first issued in John Norman’s American Pilot (Boston, 1791).
The engraving is dense with practical seafaring intelligence. Soundings in feet punctuate every channel; dotted contours trace the outer limits of the Nantucket Shoals and the narrow guts off Wasque; and a bold rhumb-line fan, its center just southwest of Gay Head, projects bearings through Vineyard Sound. Harbors and settlements (Sherburne, Sweseckechi (Siasconset), Falmouth, Barnstable, Harwich, Woods Hole, New Bedford, Edgartown, Nantucket Town, Somerset, Dartmouth, Fairhaven) are named. At lower left a title cartouche frames the legend “From the latest Surveys” and, crucially, Osgood Carleton’s signed certification—an early American guarantee of hydrographic precision.
With the Revolution and American independence, American captains lost ready access to the British Admiralty and British chart supplies, thrusting the task of coastal mapping onto a fledgling domestic press. Mathew Clark’s Complete Set of Charts of the Coast of America (Boston, 1790) was the first such attempt, but its scale and geographic reach proved inadequate. Clark’s engraver, John Norman, a London-trained copper-plate artisan resident in Boston, thereupon announced he would engrave “charts of all the coast of America on a large scale.” The result, issued in 1791 as The American Pilot, was only the second atlas of any kind printed in the United States and the first to give New England mariners a single, integrated sea chart derived from the monumental yet costly Atlantic Neptune and from local pilots’ soundings then circulating in Nantucket and Boston.
Norman’s collaboration with Osgood Carleton (1742-1816), Boston’s pre-eminent teacher of navigation and mathematics, set a new standard: Carleton vetted each plate, adjusted magnetic variation, and added fresh depths taken from Nantucket whalemen and Cape Cod coasters. Thus, the present sheet embodies the moment when American hydrography moved from ad-hoc manuscript sharing to commercially published, scientifically certified charts tailored for the republic’s burgeoning coastal trade.
Printed in small press runs for practical shipboard use, early states of Norman’s plates are today exceedingly scarce. Wheat & Brun locate only two complete 1791 Pilot atlases (Harvard, Huntington); isolated sheets survive in perhaps a dozen institutional collections.
Beyond its scarcity, this sheet is the definitive first American-printed chart of Nantucket and the Vineyard, waters that, by the 1790s, carried an expanding fleet of coasters, cod-fishers, and the first long-voyage whalers.
States
There are 4 states of the map:
- 1791: Imprint of John Norman
- 1794: Imprint of John Norman; sheet added covering the Plymouth Bay area.
- 1798: Imprint of W. Norman
- 1803: Title erased
John Norman (1748-1817) was a pioneering American engraver and chart publisher whose nautical maps and atlases laid the groundwork for an indigenous cartographic tradition in the early United States.
Born in England, Norman trained as a printer in London under William Faden’s family (noted map publishers) before emigrating to America around 1774. He initially established himself in Philadelphia, issuing his first map The Theatre of War in North America in 1777, and by 1781 he had relocated to Bostond. In Boston’s vibrant post-Revolution publishing scene, Norman emerged as a leading figure in map engraving, known especially for producing some of the earliest domestically made sea charts of North American waters.
Norman’s significance is best understood in the historical context of the Revolutionary era. The end of British rule meant the end of Britain’s dominance in mapping American coasts, creating a void that American publishers hastened to fill. Norman was at the forefront of this movement: he contributed to William Clark's A Complete Set of Charts of the Coast of America (Boston, 1790), the first American marine atlas, by engraving two of its charts. Inspired by this work, he launched his own ambitious chart-making enterprise.
In early 1790, Norman advertised a new general chart of the West Indies and declared he was engraving large-scale charts of the entire American coastline. The fruits of this project appeared as The American Pilot (Boston, 1791), a pathbreaking sea-atlas covering North America’s Atlantic coast. The American Pilot was only the second marine atlas published in the United States, and it marked a notable advance over the earlier Clark atlas, offering larger-scale charts and incorporating fresh data from American sources.
Many of Norman’s charts were adapted from proven British surveys yet updated for American needs, and significantly, at least two charts in The American Pilot (Paul Pinkham’s Nantucket Shoals and Daniel Dunbibin’s Carolinas coast) were original surveys by American mariners.
Collaborative work with contemporary cartographers further amplified Norman’s impact. He formed a close partnership with Osgood Carleton, a Boston mathematician and mapmaker, combining Carleton’s surveying expertise with Norman’s publishing acumen. Together they issued A New General Chart of the West Indies in 1789, and Carleton acted as the “cartographic authority” for many charts that Norman engraved for the 1790 Clark atlas. Norman and Carleton continued to collaborate on major publications through the 1790s, including the landmark American Pilot (first edition 1791, with Carleton providing data for later editions) and a supplemental volume, A Pilot for the West-Indies (Boston, 1795), which extended coverage to Caribbean waters. In 1797 the pair also produced An Accurate Plan of the Town of Boston, and its Vicinity, with Carleton as the project’s publisher and Norman as engraver.
Norman’s workshop was thus a nexus for early American cartographic innovation, melding European engraving techniques with New World geographical knowledge. Beyond these atlases, John Norman’s output was diverse and influential. He engraved and published a wide range of material, from portraits and architectural illustrations to important maps in periodicals. He was co-publisher of the short-lived Boston Magazine (1783–1784) and issued Boston’s first city directory in 1789, demonstrating his prominence in the city’s print culture. In cartography, he engraved small maps for the American edition of Rev. William Gordon’s History of the American War and for Jedidiah Morse’s geography texts, and he was responsible for printing Osgood Carleton’s Accurate Map of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1798), the first official state map of Massachusetts.
Stylistically, Norman’s charts tended toward functionality: they emphasized coastal details like soundings, shoals, and harbors critical for navigation, sometimes at the expense of ornamentation. This utilitarian aesthetic, combined with the inclusion of the latest local surveys, gave his maps a distinctly American character in an era when domestic mapmaking was still in its infancy.
![Letters from an American Farmer [with maps:] Map of the Island of Nantucket; Map of the Island of Martha's Vineyard with its Dependencies.](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/91513.jpg)
