There be By Jack E. Fryar Jr. N OT FAR FROM the historic Fayetteville Arsenal inside a quiet hillside home, a wood-paneled den is lined with books and a cozy fireplace, comfortable chairs, and some of the rarest of North Carolina collectibles. On paper hundreds of years old, under UV-resistant glass, sea serpents warn mariners of dangerous waters on antique maps charting the history of the Tar Heel State from its earliest settlement to the post-Civil War era. From the oldest printed map of the Carolina Coast, to a Civil War-era chart depicting 300 miles of inlets, capes and sounds that were the scenes of some of the fiercest battles in the deadliest of American wars, the collection is one that would be coveted by any museum. The owner of this remarkable private collection is a resident of both Cumberland and New Hanover counties. He came to the avocation by chance, when a friend willed him a gem of a historic map in 1983. The 1590 de Bry map, titled Americae pars, Nunc Virginia dicta… (“That part of America, now called Virginia…”), is based on the drawings of Governor John White. In 1585, White led a British expedition that settled on Roanoke Island, the first English settlement in North America. The gov-ernor catalogued the Carolina coast — part of Virginia, as it was known then — and the flora, fauna and natives he found in the surrounding countryside. That series of watercolors remains one of the best sources of knowledge about what life was like when Europeans first set foot in Carolina. Theodore de Bry published the drawings in 1590, along with accompany-ing descriptions by Thomas Harriot, the surveyor to the Roanoke Island colony. Copies of the map were made, some were hand tinted. It is the earliest depiction of the North Carolina coast. “I don’t know much about art,” the collector says, “but maps like this are forever.” He is right. Historic maps were works of art as much as they were navigation instruments. Embellished with elaborate caricatures and other decorative elements and flourishes, each of the maps in this collection tells something about the artist who drew it and the times they represented. One has minia-ture versions of the Native Americans encountered by Theodore DeBry’s 1590 print of Gov. John White’s 1585 map of what was at the time considered southern Virginia was the first exposure most Europeans had to what eventually became North Carolina. 48 WBM march 2014
2014-3
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