Since the native Americans had nothing to show that they owned the land, the new Americans could take it freely, and New England, like the Old, would belong to those who could measure it and enclose it. Thus the answer to the question, who owned America? was another question: who would measure America?
FROM THE ROYAL PALACE at Whitehall, the answer was simple: the king or the king’s representatives would measure the new-found land. The limits of British America were defined by map references given in the king’s charters, and the boundaries of its colonies were drawn in the soil by surveyors appointed by the proprietors and companies to whom the king had granted the land.
Accordingly, King James I’s 1609 charter to the two companies who had put up the money for the Virginia plantation specified that the London company was to plant its colony ‘in some fit and convenient Place, between four and thirty and one and forty Degrees of the said Latitude’, and the west of England company based on Plymouth was allocated ‘some fit and convenient Place, between eight and thirty Degrees and five and forty Degrees’. The four-degree overlap was reduced in 1620 when a new charter gave the Plymouth company all the land, to be known as New England, ‘from Fourty Degrees of Northerly Latitude, from the Equnoctiall Line, to Fourty-eight Degrees of the said Northerly Latitude’. Similar charters delineated the geographical limits of all the Atlantic colonies from Nova Scotia to Georgia, often with a final phrase extending their width ‘to the South Sea’, in other words to the Pacific Ocean. A few, like Maryland and Pennsylvania, had western boundaries fixed in lines or meridians of longitude.
It was the responsibility of the proprietors, until their charters were revoked, to have those degrees of latitude, so easily described in the Privy Chamber in Whitehall, marked out on the ground. The task provoked a sustained wail of complaint from the surveyors who ran the boundaries between the colonies. It was one thing to follow the lie of the land, as the settlers did, zigzagging up from the coast, following rivers and valleys into the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains or the Alleghenies; it was quite another to run a straight line up the hills, through the swamps and into the unending forest until it emerged into the savannahs of the piedmont. Nevertheless, if the companies and later the royal and aristocratic proprietors named in the charters were to establish their rights of ownership, the boundaries of their colonies and plantations had to be marked westward from the coast.
The most formidable obstacle was the Great Dismal Swamp, a nine-hundred-square-mile expanse of stagnant water, dense bamboo groves and crowded, vine-choked trees lying on the border between Virginia and Carolina. In his account of marking out that border in 1728, The History of the Dividing Line, William Byrd II, one of the boundary commissioners, described the surveyors’ approach to the swamp: ‘The Reeds which grew about 12 feet high, were so thick, & so interlaced with Bamboe-Briars, that our Pioneers were forc’t to open a Passage. The Ground, if I may properly call it so, was so Spungy, that the Prints of our Feet were instantly fill’d with Water. But the greatest Grievance was from large Cypresses, which the Wind had blown down and heap’d upon one another. On the Limbs of most of them grew Sharp Snags, Pointing every way like so many Pikes, that requir’d much Pains and Caution to avoid.’
Undeterred, the lead surveyor, William Mayo, pushed through the reeds and disappeared from sight. On the far side of the swamp, Byrd and the other commissioners waited anxiously. After a week, they started to fire off muskets to guide the surveyors, but with no success until on the ninth day the mud-stained party at last emerged, having run the boundary through fifteen miles of swamp.
In his acerbic memoir, Byrd pictures the surveyors as either clowns or heroes. ‘Neither the unexpected Distance, nor the Danger of being doubly Starved by Hunger and excessive Cold, could in the least discourage them from going thro’ with their Work,’ he remarked of the leaders of the survey party, ‘tho’ at one time they were almost reduced to the hard necessity of cutting up the most useless Person among them, Mr. Savage, in order to Support and save the lives of the rest. But Providence prevented that dreadfull Blow by an unexpected Supply another way, and so the Blind Surveyor escapt.’
The equivalents of Mr Savage were hired to run the line between North and South Carolina in the 1730s after the state split apart. Carolina surveyors, according to John Love, eighteenth-century author of Geodaesia, were either corrupt or inept, and the challenge of marking out the boundary, which was to extend from the coast thirty miles south of the Cape Fear river up to the thirty-fifth parallel and then due west along the parallel, defeated the first two parties within a few miles of the coast. Complaining of the ‘Extraordinary fatigue [of] Running the said Line most of that time thro’ Desart and uninhabited woods’, and over rivers and marshland which were breeding grounds for snakes and clouds of vicious mosquitoes, the surveyors refused to return even at the royal salary of £5 a day, five times as much as Mayo was paid for going through the Great Dismal Swamp. Thirty years later, James Cook from North Carolina took on the task but, distracted by ‘the rains, the hot weather and the insects’ – or so he claimed – ran the boundary eleven miles south of the thirty-fifth parallel and thus took 660 square miles from South Carolina for the benefit of his own state.
Nevertheless, whatever hardships the wilderness threw up, the line had to be run if ownership were to be established. In 1746, Lord Fairfax employed Thomas Lewis and Peter Jefferson to mark off the boundary of his five-million-acre property, virtually a state within a state, that stretched to the Blue Ridge mountains. On 5 October, Lewis wrote of their descent of a mountain in the dark: ‘Setting off, we fell into a place that had precipices on either [side], very narrow, full of ledges and brush, and exceedingly rocky. A very great descent. We all like to been killed with repeated falls, and our horses were in a miserable condition. The loose rocks were so [dangerous] as to prove fatal. We at length got to the bottom, not much better, there being a large water course with banks extremely steep that obliged us to cross at places almost [vertical]. After great despair, we at length got to camp about 10 o’clock, hardly anyone without broken [bones] or other misfortune.’
Ten days later the line cut across a swamp: ‘Wednesday, October 15th … The swamp is full of rocks and cavities covered over with a kind of moss [to] considerable depth. The laurel and ivy are so woven together that without cutting it is impossible to force through. In what danger must we be, all places being obscured by a cloak of moss! Such thickets of laurel to struggle through, whose branches are composed of iron! Our horses and ourselves fell into clefts and cavities without seeing the danger before we [fell].’
When they finally got out of the swamp, Lewis wrote in heartfelt relief, ‘Never was any poor creatures in such a condition as we! Nor ever was a criminal more glad of having escaped from prison as we were to Get Rid of those Accursed Laurels! From the Beginning of Time, when we entered this swamp, I did not see a [dry] place big enough for a man to lie nor a horse to stand.’
By comparison Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had only the occasional attack by hostile Indians to fear when they were hired in 1763 by the proprietors of Pennsylvania and Maryland to sort out the disputed boundary between the two provinces. There were grades of expertise in surveying, and the equipment provided the best guide. Everyone carried a 16½-foot rod, or Edmund Gunter’s invaluable chain, but for professionals a circumferentor, which by the eighteenth century had developed into a theodolite or transit with cross-hairs in the lens of the telescope, and built-in compass and plumb-line, was also necessary. The experts brought along a quadrant or sextant as well for making sun-sights to check their position; in addition to all that, Mason and Dixon had with them a zenith sector built by John Bird, London’s foremost instrument-maker. This was a telescope almost six feet long, exactly calibrated and pointing vertically, beneath which they lay flat on their backs to take sightings on particular stars as they passed precisely overhead. Star-charts showing the positions of those stars at different dates and latitudes then enabled them to calculate their latitude with great precision. At the crude end of surveying, anyone able to