Early Maps of Long Island

 

View here: Map of Long Island, New York 1609. Location of Long Island Indian Tribes when European settlers arrived.

View here: Anonymous, The Country Twenty-five Miles Round New York, Drawn by a Gentleman from from That City, 1777. Shows western Long Island at the time of the Battle of Long Island. (Library Company of Philadelphia.)

View here: J.F.W. Des Barres, A Sketch of the Operations of His Majesty's Fleet and Army under the Command of the Rt. Hble. Lord Viscount Howe and Genl. Sr. W,. Howe, K.B., in 1776, [1778]. Shows movement of troops at the Battle of Long Island. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library.)

View here: Simeon De Witt, A Map of the State of New York, 1802 [southern Sheet]. First American map of Long Island to improve on British revolutionary war era maps. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.)

View here: State University at Stony Brook Library, Special Collections Department
Dutch cartographer William Janszoon Blaeu based this 1635 map on charts drawn after the 1613-14 journey of Adrian Block. The map is notable for its illustrations, such as the Indian canoes in the ocean. Blaeu also depicted Long Island as a series of islands, not a large landmass. The Algonquian word ``Matouwacs'' is not easily translated today, but a 19th Century linguist believed it meant ``Island of the Periwinkle.'' The map is unusual to today's eye because it is oriented with west at the top. (courtesy www.lihistory.com)

View here: Long Island Studies Institute
This is a Dutch map; the cartographer was Nicholaes Visscher. The detail seen above prominently features the Dutch words Lange Eylandt, for Long Island, over the Algonquian word Matouwacs. The map reflects the growth of Dutch and English settlements on Long Island, including "S. Holt'' on the North Fork, for Southold, and "Garner's Eylant,'' for the island owned by Englishman Lion Gardiner. It also shows the island as a land mass and not a series of islands divided by channels, as on the Blaeu map. The map is the first to feature the evidence of the Hempstead Plains, according to cartography scholar David Allen, author of ``Long Island Maps and Their Makers: Five Centuries of Cartographic History'' (Amereon Ltd.). The plains are designated here by the words "Gebroken Landt,'' for broken land.