Henry Cundall’s Map of Prince Edward Island Henry Jones Cundall (1833 – 1916) was an extraordinary man during a period when loud blusterers dominated the social and political scene. He came from a good, well-to-do family and, by all accounts, had a reserved personality. He remained a bachelor all his life and filled his time with his various passions, chief of which were surveying and photography, in which he was a pioneer. His parents were English and had extensive landholdings which never really paid off. He was apprenticed to a surveyor at the age of 16 and began to work for the Cunard brothers, and by 1853 had become their…

In my view the history of Prince Edward Island in the Nineteenth Century is powerfully connected with intellectual, artistic, and political events in Europe. Most of its leading citizens had been born in Britain and would have been quite familiar with that art, literature, and shocking events. The 1830s and 1840s experienced the crest of the Early Romantic period which affected and transformed art, literature, and music. The spirit of independence and desire for freedom from suffocating social and political repression would migrate from the arts into politics, leading to rebellion and revolt in Europe, and, by extended reverberations, across the world. Prince Edward Island would not escape this new…

Henry Wolsey Bayfield (21 January 1795 – 10 February 1885) The British Navy produced an impressive list of surveyors, some of whom, like Samuel Holland, we have visited in earlier posts. Henry Wolsey Bayfield (21 January 1795 – 10 February 1885) was another great hydrographer who produced charts of extreme clarity and accuracy for the Saint Lawrence River and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence that were still in use in the early Twentieth Century. Bayfield was born in Kingston-upon-Hull, a port city in East Yorkshire, to a family with ancient antecedents in nearby Norfolk.  Little is known about his early life and education, how many years of schooling he had…

Just as the Eighteenth Century gave humankind some of the greatest thought, architecture and art, so did it give us the name by which our beloved home is known across the world – Prince Edward Island. I discussed how this happened in my previous post, and in this one, I want to explore the maps that were produced up to the 1840s to see what new information about the Island they presented, and to look at some of the great changes that were taking place in the world during those years. As Prince Edward Island began to be settled, and began to face the issues of living in a mediaeval…