Saint John’s Island, which I believe might well have been given that name by the Basques in the Fifteenth Century, had become a source of confusion in the Early British Colonial Period. There was Saint John’s in Newfoundland and also the new Loyalist settlement of Saint John New Brunswick which had been established in 1785. The Island administration and politicians began to look for a new name and very wisely rejected Governor Patterson’s passionate plea for renaming it New Ireland. It was Governor Edmund Fanning’s government which, in November of 1798, selected the name of Prince Edward Island in honour of the Duke of Kent, who had established himself in…

In the history of mapmaking the Eighteenth Century is without doubt one of enormous progress in the techniques of cartography and equally enormous significance in the importance played by maps in the areas of exploration, colonisation, and ultimately war. Beginning in September 2020 we have looked in some detail at this process, as it concerned Ile Saint Jean, in five separate blog posts, and now we are beginning our last quarter of the century. It will lead us to the disappearance of the Island of Saint John as a geographical entity, to be replaced on the maps as Prince Edward Island. The last quarter of the Eighteenth Century, far from…