Neptune's Needle

Merchant, attorney, ambassador, and mapmaker.

Based in New Amsterdam, Herrman shipped furs to Europe; salt from Curacao to New Amsterdam; and, in 1634, cattle, horses, pottery, glassware, wines, and African slaves to Virginia for tobacco. He successfully defended himself in a suit over delivery of spoiled tobacco and later claimed to have started the Virginia tobacco trade. The Dutch often sued one another, providing excellent training for Herrman in the law. By 1649 he owned shares in two privateers that preyed on Spanish, but not English, ships.

Herrman offered to map the province in return for a land grant and was granted 26,000 acres over the next twenty-five years. His map, ''Virginia and Maryland As it is Planted and Inhabited this present year 1670 Surveyed and Exactly Drawne by the Only Labor & Endeavour of Augustin Herrman Bohemiensis,'' was published in London in 1673, but the result displeased him as being ineptly done and ''slobbered over.'' However, the king of England and Lord Baltimore praised the map, and George Washington described it as ''admirably planned and equally well executed.'' The map was the authority for accurate and detailed information on the Chesapeake Bay area for seventy years.

Sources

Images

Public Domain Source

Compiler

Peter Richards