What does the Lake Map look like? My first intimate encounter with the Lake map – now named after the chief suyveyor –  occurred in August 1994 when I was asked to prepare an evaluation and proposal concerning the restoration of this map in a local collection. I had the opportunity to spend some time  examining and studying it, and gaining a first hand experience of what the map was originally supposed to look like. The Lake Map is a huge lithograph meant to be hung on a wall, and is printed on heavy paper and mounted on two wooden rollers, the top one a plain moulding about 77 inches…

There have been many accounts of the Prince of Wales’s visit to North America in 1860 which caused a frenzy of excitement in the British Colonies and the United States. Most of them are easily available on the internet and I have provided links to some of them in the Resources section. The most complete narrative of the visit I know of is in Pollard’s 1898 book. Fortunately, thoughtful UPEI has scanned this rarity and the relevant chapter is available in the link below. Recently Harry Holman has posted two very interesting essays on aspects of the visit on his Sailstrait blog which I highly recommend. Links to these are…

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…