French Mapping

The French mapping of the colonial period has a distinctly different flavor from Dutch or English mapping. The Dutch, with their water-born trading empire, produced excellent charts of coasts and major rivers. Their maps also showed the names and locations of their Indian trading partners, but they provided little reliable information about inland areas. The English were much more interested in gaining control of the land and using it for farms or estates, and much of their mapping reflects their preoccupation with boundaries and land ownership. The French focused on fur trading, missionary activities, exploration, and building their vast empire. Consequently they were much more involved in exploring and mapping unsettled areas than either the British or the Dutch, and they necessarily paid more attention to the Indians. French maps provide particularly detailed information on native settlements, waterways used for trade, fortifications, and military routes. The high quality of French cartography owes much to the policies of the French crown. The French colonial enterprise was much more centralized and under state control than its British and Dutch counterparts. Large-scale mapping requires extensive governmental resources, and the French crown made them available at a relatively early date. The map makers themselves were almost always either government officials, Jesuit missionaries, or military cartographers. These groups worked closely together, and their manuscript maps were collected at the French colonial office. . . .

Below are two maps of the Finger Lakes region. Map A is a French map, and Map B is a British map. How do they differ?

Map A

Map B

The extent of French knowledge of the geography of central and western New York stands out in contrast to British mapping of the same area. Compare the French maps of the Finger Lakes region to Guy Johnson’s map of the country of the Six Nations, which was produced nearly a century later.[Map B] ¹ Johnson’s map was made by a British official who lived in the Mohawk Valley and was the son-in-law of the leading British expert on Indian affairs, Sir William Johnson. In spite of these advantages, a glance at his map shows that he was unaware of many of the basic features of the geography of the area, which he described as “having never been surveyed or even thoroughly explored.” He would have done much better to have copied from contemporary (mid-eighteenth century) French maps, which were available to him, and whose depiction of western New York was based largely on seventeenth-century manuscript maps, particularly those of Franquelin.

_{¹ Johnson, Guy, Map of the Country of the Six Nations (manuscript, 1771). The full (and fulsome) title is: To His Excellency William Tryon Esqr. Captain General & Governor in Chief of the Province of New York & &, this map of the country of the VI. Nations proper, with part of the adjacent colonies, is humbly inscribed by his Excellency's most humble servant. The original of this map was destroyed in a fire at the New York State Library. A facsimilie was published following p. 660 in volume IV of E.B. O'Callaghan, ed., Documentary History of the State of New York (Albany: Weed Parson & Co., 1849-51) Available on the Internet from the Three Rivers website (http://www.threerivershms.com/tryonmap.htm).}

^{Source: Allen, David. French Mapping of New York and New England, 1604-1760. http://purl.oclc.org/coordinates/a1.htm. Published: January 31, 2005. Revised: October 9, 2005.}