1750 A Plan of the Harbour of Chebucto and Town of Halifax
DESCRIPTION
This map shows the one-year-old settlement of Nova Scotia, recording only the small town of Halifax alone in the wilderness. Published in the July 1750 issue of Gentleman's Magazine, it provided the London public their first update on the young colony alongside exotic (if largely incorrect) early depictions of the region's fauna.
Oriented towards the West, this map starts from Cornwallis (now McNabs) Island and moves north up to the tributaries feeding the Winter and Summer Coves. Within this range, three major bodies of water split the harbour along a tripartite scheme: Mouth of the Harbour, Harbour of Chebucto (now Halifax Harbour), and Bedford Bay (recently renamed from Torrington Bay at the time of composition, now Bedford Basin). Along and within these waters, depths and prominent features such as islands, beaches, and points are marked.
Given that this map is based off a survey taken no more than 6 months after the first settlers landed at Chebucto, man-made features are scarce. Apart from a small grid representing Halifax and a label marking "Warburton's Camp," this map is populated by general depictions of natural features and space-filling decorative elements.
Most notable among these are the first depictions of North American wildlife that the map claims to offer to the London public. However, "claims" is the operative word here due to the fact that although its porcupine is imperfect but original, its insects are already-documented European species rather than novel Nova Soctian ones. Though unconfirmed, their plausible artist could be Moses Harris, the prominent entomological illustrator whose initials align with the discrete "MH" signature buried among the foliage on the southern shore of Bedford Bay.
The lower left's ensign of Nova Scotia speaks to the colony's primary identification with Scotland rather than England. This can be seen through a referential inversion of the white saltire on blue design of the Scottish ensign, positioning the ensign's motto above its crest in the Scottish manner, and the inclusion of the the traditional Scottish unicorn.
The seven coats of arms neighboring the ensign each stand for a baronet of Nova Scotia. These were likely included in an effort to simultaneously fill uncharted territory with region-specific content and flatter powerful families in a position to grant the publication a favor down the line.
A New Town in a Forty-Year-Old Province
Halifax was one year old when this plate was struck. Nova Scotia was not. Britain had held the province since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and governed it from Annapolis Royal, and the ground had carried French settlement since the previous century. What changed in 1749 was strategic rather than territorial: the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle had handed the fortress of Louisbourg back to France the year before, and Halifax was the answer — a garrison town planted at Chebucto with some 2,500 settlers recruited by newspaper advertisement, raised to hold a coast Britain owned on paper and could not defend. The plan records not a first landfall but a second effort, and a capital built because the old one sat too far from the open sea.
The Empty Forest
The engraving's most consequential decision is what it declines to show. Chebucto is a Mi'kmaq name, and the Mi'kmaq had rejected the Treaty of Utrecht outright on the grounds that the land was theirs to give; the founding of Halifax at that site broke earlier British undertakings and drew immediate resistance. Mi'kmaq had been living on the island the map labels Cornwallis. Several thousand Acadians farmed the province. None of them appear. What the sheet offers instead is uniform woodland, a scale of miles, and soundings in fathoms — the visual grammar of ground not yet spoken for. That this plate illustrated a dispatch about an armed expedition against those same populations is the tension worth keeping in view. The margins borrowed English insects for want of American ones; the map borrowed emptiness for want of a way to draw a place that already belonged to somebody.
CONDITION
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