“Georgia.” R. W. Seale. In Benjamin Martyn, An Account Showing the Progress of the Colony of Georgia . . . from its First Establishment, London, 1741.

“Georgia.” R. W. Seale. In Benjamin Martyn, An Account Showing the Progress of the Colony of Georgia . . . from its First Establishment, London, 1741.

Benjamin Martyn, the secretary for the Georgia Trustees, published a history of the first nine years of their experiment in social engineering. This volume contained a chronology, reports of the Trustees, letters from James Oglethorpe, and a copy of this map by R. W. Seale. The strength of this map is its delineation of the early settlements. An insert gives a detailed view of St. Simon’s where Oglethorpe established Frederica as an outpost against the Spanish. The information for this area might well have come from Oglethorpe while he was in England trying to recruit troops for the Georgia frontier. This insert map shows the trail between that fort and the barracks to south, where Oglethorpe defeated the Spanish in the Battle of Bloody Marsh in 1742.

The cartographer for this image, hopefully not Oglethorpe, failed to accurately interpret the waterways. The Ogeechee River is shown as parallel and co-equal with the Savannah. A “R Undiscovered” flows from a swamp southwest of Augusta and ends without reaching any other body of water. The Alatamaha splits into two main rivers and the southern branch flows to the ocean at the location of what should be the mouth of the St. Mary’s. Both Talbot and Amelia Islands are shown inside Georgia rather than in Florida, a reality Oglethorpe would have endorsed.

1741