The best contemporary account of the French and Indian War, justly celebrated for its cartography and textual content, and one of the great rarities of colonial Americana.
Complete with all maps and the elusive errata leaf.
Virtually all of Mante's account relates to the war in North America, with detailed narratives of Braddock's campaign and the other frontier and Canadian campaigns of the conflict. The work is particularly desirable for its contemporary descriptions of Pontiac's War, a campaign in which the author participated as Major of Brigade to Colonel Dudley Bradstreet. In addition, the introduction includes an interesting account of the young George Washington's escape in 1753 from assassination by an Indian who acted as his interpreter and guide. Mante evidently took great care to gather information that was both historically and cartographically accurate for the present work.
[Mante] describes with great detail and campaigns of Washington and Braddock, of Generals Abercrombie and Amherst, and of Colonels Bradstreet and Boquet. The last chapter gives the principal incidents of Pontiac's war. The eighteen large folding maps and plans which should accompany the text, are often missing - Field.
The Maps
The maps are praised by all bibliographers as being by far the best relating to the war, and include several seminal maps which are the most accurate produced to that time. They comprise:
1) Fort Beau Sejour, & the adjacent Country Taken Possession of by Colonel Monckton
2) Lake Ontario to the Mouth of the River St. Lawrence
3) [Map of Lake George and vicinity]
4) A Plan of Fort Edward & Its Environs on Hudsons River
5) Communication Between Albany & Oswego
6) Attack on Louisbourg [by Amherst & Boscawen]
7) The Attack of Ticonderoga [by Major General Abercromby]
8) Plan of Fort Pitt or Pittsbourg
9) Guadaloupe
10) Attack on Quebec [by Wolfe & Saunders]
11) A Sketch of the Cherokee Country
12) The River Saint Lawrence from Lake Ontario to the Island of Montreal
13) A Plan of the Attack upon Fort Levi
14) River St. Lawrence from Montreal to the Island of St. Barnaby ... & the Islands of Jeremy
15) A View of the Coast of Martinico Taken by Desire of Rear Adml Rodney
16) Part, of the West Coast, of the Island of Saint Lucia
17) Plan of the Retaking Newfoundland [by Colville & Amherst]
18) Attack of the Havanna [by Albemarle & Pococke]
Sabin writes of this great rarity: "Copies with all the maps are scarce. It is probable that but few were printed, though the large and beautiful plans and military maps (which gave it so great a value), must have made its production a work of much expense."
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.