Port Royal, 1692

Creating a map as a final project, despite the size of the overall final product, was a momentous task. The first issue was that I was traversing into the unknown, my experience both of cartography and of reading 17th century manuscripts had been very minimal up until this point. My goal was to create two maps ultimately, one identifying the places where buildings (primarily commercial) had been and one identifying who owned what land.
Before either of these maps could be started, I first needed to trawl databases identifying people who had been residents of Port Royal in this period (up to and including 1692). After that I had to go through several volumes of patents identifying the people and transcribing the individual patents awarded to them. The transcription was in itself very interesting as well as very difficult, not only did it show the data of the land awarded, allowing me to draw it out, but it also revealed other interesting facts such as people's jobs, statuses and a little of their history.
This was also aided by further transcribed manuscripts of wills and probate inventories provided by The Port Royal Project, which in turn allowed me to create a further database using corroborating evidence to build up the image of some of the residents of Port Royal and bulk out their character to lift them off the page and allow them to stop being just a name in history, a key aspect of social history that I am particularly interested in and would have liked to do further research on given the time and available resources.
The other two databases I created specifically from the volumes 1,4 and 6 of the Patent Books 1b/11/1. The first is a transcription focussing on the circumference and directions of the land awarded and the second was created by auctioning the directions and drawing out the individual plots awarded to people. These both contained limitations due to the fact that some manuscripts were illegible or incomplete meaning neither full directions could be given or a complete plot drawn.

In creating the Building map I relied on a continuation of original manuscripts and secondary source publications to provide me with the place names. Given that several sources provided me with the same name information I then compared the physical placement of that building across sources in order to best identify which placement was most likely, and then applied it to the map. Before creating an online version I first sourced a map of Port Royal that whilst very sparse was as accurate to the period as possible and then drew every building each source gave me onto it, systematically applying and removing buildings when they received, or didn't receive, corroboration.

In creating the land ownership and street map, I first had to complete all my drawing of the individual plots and then try and piece them together. Unfortunately it quickly became clear that it was almost impossible to fit them directly together to create a complete land map due to the frequent changing of land. If someone were to take this task on in the future I would suggest ordering the plots of land and transcriptions and doing an individual map per year, however I didn't want to do this as I didn't have the volume of resources I would have needed to make a significant impact. Instead I used a combination of the drawn out plots and the transcriptions to give an educated estimation as to where an individual's piece of land would have been, using the directions given towards neighbours, geographical landmarks and neighbouring streets. Again this held a certain amount of complexity as many instructions were very vague such as 'alley', 'sea' or 'towards the fort', seemingly forgetting there were many of each of these. However, what I finally produced is I believe a land ownership map that is as accurate to my ability and research as possible. Although it appears very dense in some areas, this is simply due to the crowded nature of housing within Port Royal due to the limited land available, I was in fact not able to apply everyone's land to the map due to the vagueness of directions given and instead their land and plot live solely in the database. I was most disappointed about not being able to apply as many of the street and alley names as possible to the map due to the vagueness of the transcriptions. As you can see in my databases, a number of individual little back lanes and alley ways are mentioned as bordering an individual's land. However, due to the vague nature of the directions within the transcriptions and the sparseness of the base map I was using, it was not feasible to be able to identify which of these smaller lanes were which or if they were even in the map at all.

Throughout this project it has been clear that there was always going to be a level of feasibility in achieving a wholly successful result. Both the complexity and vagueness of the sources, plus the varying limitations of using manuscript sources as discussed in the previous page, mean it was impossible to create a complete and clear picture. To use an analogy,it was instead like putting together the pieces of a puzzle with no edge pieces and half the central ones missing! However, I am not basing the success of my project on whether I was able to achieve a complete and clear result but instead of the use of manuscript materials and corroboration where necessary to create as clear a picture as feasible with the resources available.