Patrick Comerford
The Trump regime’s petty insistence on labelling the Gulf of Mexico as the ‘Gulf of America’ is both mendacious and egregious, imposing a name that has been concocted to mollify a petulant man who continues to pursue imperious gestures and to sign egregious edicts for no other reason than to compensate for his inner insecurities and his low self-esteem.
Executive Order 14172 on 20 January tried to the change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in US federal government usage, despite the fact that it has been known as the Gulf of Mexico since the 1550s, a name derived from Mexica, the Nahuatl word for the Aztecs.
Associated Press journalists have been banned indefinitely from the Oval Office and Air Force One because AP decided to continue using Gulf of Mexico. The White House accused AP of ‘commitment to misinformation’ and ‘irresponsible and dishonest reporting’, and Trump says AP continues to be barred ‘until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America.’
Historians, geographers and cartographers, as well as journalists, have produced maps that are centuries-old using names such as the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Bay of Mexico, or simply the Bay of Mexico. No historical map names the place the Gulf of America. Why? Simply because there was no USA back then.
The names Gulf of Mexico and Bay of Mexico appear on maps long before Jamestown, before Plymouth Rock, and over 200 years before the Declaration of Independence, and more than 250 years before the Louisiana Purchase, which was the first time the US controlled any land even bordering the Gulf.
The name Mexico refers to the people later referred to as Aztecs, when what is now Mexico was part of Colonial Spain. The name ‘Golfo de Mexico’ first appears in 1550 on a map now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and in an historical account in 1552.
Europeans have used the name the Gulf of Mexico, and the corresponding terms in Spanish and French, Golfo Mexicano and Golphe du Mexique, with consistency from the mid-17th century, although Spanish geographers continued for a time to also use the name of Golfo de Nueva España.
In recent days, I have come across two versions of the earliest English-language maps to refer to the Bay of Mexico or Gulf of Mexico. They have been dated to the 1630s or, more likely, the 1640s or the 1650s, and the cartographic historian and antiquarian Philip D Burden has recently identified Nicholas Comberford (ca 1600-1673) of Stepney, the 17th century Kilkenny-born map maker as the creator of these maps.
One version of the map with the name ‘Bay of Mexico’ is a manuscript map of North America in pen and ink and watercolour on parchment. It is in the Yale Center for British Art, thanks to the Paul Mellon Fund, and it has been dated to the late 1630s.
Another version, recently sold by Clive A Burden Ltd of Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, has been labelled ‘Map of the Bay of Mexico &c’, has been dated to London ca 1650, and has been identified as the work of Nicholas Comberford.
This second map measures 220 x 430 mm on a sheet measuring 250 x 465 mm, and is in ink with green and yellow watercolour wash on parchment. It is in good condition and has an ink notation, ‘This vellam and paper I brought with me out of England as I remember about 18 yeares past the vellam decay’d through the moisture of the place’.
It was sold recently as stock number 9601 by Clive A Burden Ltd rare map dealers. The business was founded by the late Clive A Burden in 1966 and is one of the longest established dealers in antique maps, atlases, books and rare decorative prints, with a particular focus are the British Isles and North America.
Nicholas Comberford’s works have been catalogued in the British Library and are found in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the New York Public Library, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, and some other museums and libraries. He is a widely-acclaimed, leading and important member of the London group of chart-makers, who used similar colours, patterns and techniques, worked on vellum, and lived close to the dockyards at Stepney and Wapping on the Thames. They have come to be called the Thames School.
He was born in Kilkenny ca> 1600, and, according to his own account, his father was Nicholas Comerford, the ‘King’s Gaoler’ at Kilkenny, and his grandfather was Garret Comerford (ca 1550-1604) of Inchiolohan or Castleinch, the Queen’s Attorney-at-Laws for Connaught, MP for Callan, Second Baron of the Exchequer and Chief Justice of Munster.
Nicholas was a life-long member of the Drapers’ Company in London and his maps charted the world from the East Indies and India to Brazil and the coast of North America. He may well have been the first person to create English-language maps that show Borneo, including the area that is now Sarawak and the place where Kuching would later develop.
However, unlike the other members of the Thames School, Nicholas Comberford was not an Englishman, but a Kilkenny-born Irishman, who, as well as being overlooked until recently by cartographers and art historians alike, has been overlooked too in his native county.
Philip D Burden joined his father in the business in 1979. He wrote and published in 1996 and 2007 a definitive two volume work, The Mapping of North America. It was the first work to list all known printed maps relating to North America up to the year 1700.
Burden argues convincingly that this remarkable English manuscript map of North America was probably prepared ca 1650, in conjunction with a proposal to establish a colony in North Carolina (‘Carolana’). The fact that the manuscript was drawn on costly vellum, as opposed to paper, strongly suggests it was prepared as an official document for a key figure involved in the proposed settlement.
He says the idiosyncratic detail of the map strongly suggests a connection with John Farrah, mapmaker, and former Deputy Treasurer of the Virginia Company, who was very active in ‘Carolana’ affairs at this time.
The English colony of ‘Carolana’ originated in a grant by Charles I in 1629 to Sir Robert Heath, Solicitor General of England (1621), Attorney General (1625) and a member of the council of the Virginia Company.
Charles I named the new territory ‘Carolana’ after himself. Heath had no success in attracting settlers and in 1638, he assigned his rights to Henry Frederick Howard (1608-1652), Lord Maltravers and from 1640 Earl of Arundel, and MP for Callan, Co Kilkenny, Edward Comerford in the Irish Parliament in 1634-1635; Edward Comerford was MP for Callan again in 1639-1649
Lord Maltravers had many interests in the American colonies. He was a member of the New England Company and sought royal support for the English West India Company in 1637. Interest in North Carolina expanded after the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649.
A promotional tract was published in May in a London newspaper, The Moderate Intelligencer, entitled ‘A Description of ‘Carolana’ by a ‘Well-Willer’. A similar tract, William Bullock’s Virginia Impartially Examined, was published a few weeks earlier and was dedicated to Lord Maltravers and Lord Baltimore.
Lord Maltravers, was MP for Callan with Edward Comerford, and planned to colonise Norh CarolinaBy far the most important of the ‘Carolana’ promotional tracts came in 1650 as Edward Williams’s Virgo Triumphans, or Virginia richly and truly valued; more especially the South part thereof: viz. The fertile Carolana … (London: John Stevenson, 1650).
Williams’s publication was associated with John Farrar of Geding, Huntingdonshire, formerly Deputy Treasurer for the Virginia Company. He was the author of a number of maps of Virginia at this time, when ‘Carolana’ was often regarded as South Virginia.
Farrar’s map in 1651 uses the name ‘Carolana’ to the region between the Roanoke and the Chowan Rivers. His map is most famous for its inclusion of a great ‘The Sea of China and the Indies’ immediately beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This detail would have been of great interest to Lord Maltravers, who held nominal title to all the land included in the original grant, which extended far beyond those mountains. Farrar’s map claims any successful colony in ‘Carolana’ would have access to ports on this western sea, and with trade with ‘China and the Indies’.
The English manuscript map includes a much vaster area than Farrar’s map – virtually all of North America. However, on the Englishman manuscript, the great trans-Appalachian sea is called ‘The South Sea’, not ‘The Sea of China and the Indies’.
Both the Farrar map and the English manuscript map include the Nansemond River, in Southside Virginia. The Nansemond is one of only four placenames given for Virginia on the English manuscript, along with Chesapeake, Jamestown and ‘Accomack. Burden says all the evidence points to the English manuscript as having been prepared in conjunction with the 1649 proposal to establish a permanent colony in ‘Carolana’.
The fact that there is no sign of the English colonies of New York and New Jersey (founded 1664, and the entire region between the Hudson from the Delaware is labelled the New Netherland helps Burden to be even more precise in dating the map. Fort Orange (founded in 1624), the Hudson River and Helgate are named. Long Island is shown divided by a channel and is similar in form to Sir Robert Dudley’s map of New England (1647), while Delaware (‘De la Warr’) Bay and River are given their present name, first introduced on Lord Baltimore’s map (1635).
He points out too that name ‘Carolana’ was used consistently in England for the region south of Virginia until 1663, when a new grant from Charles II used the spelling Carolina.
In conclusion, Burden suggests the map is no earlier than 1634, the date of the founding of Maryland, and no later than 1664, when the English conquest turned New Netherland into New York.
Burden also believes that the map’s calligraphy was the work of ‘two distinct hands’. He a ‘major chart maker’ would have been a logical choice for such a seemingly important map, and says: ‘A study of the Thames school reveals that it is not uncommon for charts to be unsigned or undated … Chartmakers tended to have geographical areas of expertise and a study of the time frame and region would tend to point to Nicholas Comberford. He was the only map maker identifiable during this time frame who produced charts of North America. There are similarities of lettering also, particularly noticeable with the ‘R’ and ‘A’.’
Nicholas Comberford, however, was known for being decorative, so this would not have been a major production of his, and seems to suggest the map may date ca 1649 to 1651.
‘The South Part of Virginia’ (Nicholas Comberford, 1657)The connection that Lord Maltravers shared with the Comerford family and with Callan may partly explain the commissions Nicholas Comberford received for maps associated with Carolina, and subsequently he completed two further maps showing Carolina.
His map of the ‘The South Part of Virginia’ was produced in 1657. It is a single sheet of vellum, measuring 38 x 50 cm is mounted on two hinged boards, each 39 x 25 cm.
This chart is in the Heathcote collection. Another copy with slight differences but of the same date is in the New York Public Library.
‘The south part of Virginia now the north part of Carolina’ (Nicholas Comberford, 1657)Another map of ‘The south part of Virginia now the north part of Carolina’ was made by Nicholas Comberford in 1657. This map in the New York Public Library, is similar to his map, ‘The south part of Virginia’ (1657) and is in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, but the signature reads: ‘Nicholas C[o]mberford fe[c]itt anno 1657.’
These two maps record for the first time many names that are still in use. Some of them, such as ‘Battis Ponte’ on Pamlico River, were probably given by Captain Nathaniel Battis, an early explorer, landowner and settler.
In the title of the New York map, the words ‘now the north part of Carolina’ were added in a later hand some time after the grant of Carolina in 1663.
Nicholas Comberford is a key figure in 17th century art in England, but he is also an important figure in explaining how we came to understand the way the world was explored, mapped, charted and named by Europeans and by English-speaking travellers and adventurers in the mid-17th century.
Only the foolhardy ignore the facts of history, and only the deluded ignore the reality of geography. As I continue to learn more about how his work was so influential as a mapmaker, cartographer and geographer, I can only muse if the name ‘Bay of Mexico’ was good enough for Nicholas Comberford and the Comerford family almost 400, thn thee name ‘Gulf of Mexico’ should be good enough today for an upstart like Donald Trump, his acolytes and sychophants in the Oval Office and his MAGA minions.
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