As of August 2024, Andrew Middleton has owned the Map Center, the oldest map store on the East Coast, for nine months, on his quest to introduce cartography enthusiasts to a new generation of maps. 

You can find this map all over Rhode Island. It's a cornerstone of that old New England regional pride in our history, but it's also usually misunderstood.

This is a weird pick for something with which Rhode Islanders are so obsessed. 

The title - "A Topographical Chart of the Bay of Narraganset... with all the Isles contained therein, among which Rhode Island and Connonicut have been particularly Surveyed" - brings us to our first point of weirdness. 

This doesn't show Rhode Island as a political division--a state or a colony--but as the literal islands of Rhode Island and Connonicut.

For the cartographer, "Rhode Island" meant what is today Aquidneck Island.

 

Connonicut is not a misspelling of Connecticut.

In 1777, a British cartographer, Charles Blaskowitz, drew this map up for the Royal Navy, which attacked Newport a year later. 

Rhode Islanders today are putting an invasion map up on their dining room walls.

These numbers (or soundings) measure the depth of the channels in fathoms (a fathom is about six feet). The water needed to be deep enough for British warships.

While Blaskowitz fills in the topography around the islands and coasts, he leaves places farther inland blank. 

The Navy only cared about the places from which those pesky American rebels could fire on their ships: high ground close to the water. 

Image from Somerset House. 

A copy of Blaskowitz's map was stolen, translated into French, printed into folio, and, in 1780, sent to Ben Franklin.

Every red-blooded, America-loving Rhode Islander should discard their British invasion map in favor of the map from our French allies. Vive la France!

Maybe this map is all over the state because it answers the question: "Who are Rhode Islanders?"

This map is not a record of victory. This map is a record of a successful British invasion in which the American forces lost handily. But I think it does reflect our attitudes toward authority and maybe a sense of solidarity within the state itself in the face of outside influence and opposition.

For maps like this, the physical place itself might be less important than the story we tell about it.

You can visit Andrew at the Map Center at 545 Pawtucket Ave, Pawtucket, Rhode Island and at https://www.mapcenter.com/. 

Pictured: the Map Center.

To explore more of Rhode Island's origin myths, check out the other DOT story for this image.

To learn more about the stories that maps tell, Andrew recommends All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey by Betsy Mason and Greg Miller.

Created and presented by Andrew Middleton.

Scripted and edited by Andrew Gu, Summer 2024 Pixeum Intern.

"Gaspe Point" is Blaskowitz's nod to one of Rhode Island's most treasured origin stories: Rhode Islanders love to say that they kicked off the American Revolution.

To help pay for the French and Indian War (1754-63), the British government imposed taxes and sent the HMS Gaspee to Rhode Island to make sure that they were actually paid. 

Now at the time, Rhode Island had two big industries: piracy and tax evasion (smuggling). The locals set up fake lights along the shoreline, led the Gaspee into running aground, and set fire to the ship. This all took place a full year before the Boston Tea Party and three years before Lexington and Concord.

Above: Possibly Rhode Island's greatest memorial to the Gaspee Incident. Picture by Andrew Middleton.

Providence serves as a reminder of another core story in Rhode Island's identity. 

The colony of Rhode Island began life in the 1630s as Providence Plantations, founded by the English preacher Roger Williams.

For the most part, Williams was a surprisingly tolerant Puritan. He did not hate Quakers, Jews, and Catholics. He learned Narragansett and wrote the first English-language book on a Native American language. 

After being kicked out of Massachusetts by the Puritan leadership there, he purchased the land at Providence from the Narragansett and founded his new community on the basis of religious freedom.

Today, Rhode Island has the oldest synagogue in the United States. The colony welcomed Catholics and foreigners when few others did, and the state remains incredibly diverse to this day.

Before you start to like this Roger Williams fellow too much, there's a real discomfort in the end of his story. 

In the 1670s, King Philip's War tore through New England, killing a greater proportion of the population, both colonists and Native Americans, than any other war in American history. It was a war that the indigenous peoples lost. 

As governor, Roger Williams decided to sell the Rhode Island colony's many Native captives into slavery, mostly to the near-death-sentence of the Caribbean. In the following decades and centuries, Rhode Island became a nexus of the slave trade, and it was by buying and selling human beings that the colony paid for, among other things, Brown University, shown here. 

We can and should take pride in Rhode Island's history of tolerance, but like the United States as a whole, our idealism has always exceeded how history has actually played out.