Smith’s 1612 Map: Uncanny Accuracy

Smith’s famous 1612 Map, Virginia Discovered and described

In March 2009, I delivered a report to Charlie Stek. I had prospective sites for 5 crosses representing the May 1607 expedition to Richmond and the December capture route of the same year; 18 from his voyages of 1608, mostly in the upper Chesapeake; one cross from the year 1609 on the James River—all with GPS coordinates.

  False accuracy? Between latitudes 36 and 40, where we worked, one second of arc or 3/10,000 of a degree equals 100 feet. A reading always represents the middle of a guess. Our certainties within uncertainty ranged from one acre to one mile, but the majority of guesses came closer to the acre. Many locations “cried out” due to some prominence that answered to the Smith map or fulfilled several hints and details of the journal in combination with it or with modern maps. 

  The next thing to emerge and continued to emerge throughout the project was that Smith had really done this. The 1612 map, distorted from satellite perspective, was a veritable photograph of eye-level, horizontal perspective of detail, unique among old maps, once you arrived and looked around down low and close in. 

So we were off and running. Not exactly. Once the numbers were gathered, the project crawled as I went from one party to the next asking for permission to install. The 400th anniversary went by. Charlie moved on.  Joel Dunn took Charlie’s place in the Friends’ successor, the Chesapeake Conservancy. The project languished until …