Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 3 (of 8): English Explorations and Settlements in North America 1497-1689
History
Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 3 (of 8): English Explorations and Settlements in North America 1497-1689
America -- Discovery and exploration; America -- History; United States -- History
We are indebted for the photograph used by the engraver to Dr.
Kohl’s successor in the librarianship of the Public Library at
Bremen, Dr. Heinrich Bulthaupt. No name ranks higher than Kohl’s
in the investigations of our early North American geography. “From
my childhood,” he says, “I was highly interested in geographical
researches in connection with history.” Having gathered much material
on the early cartographical history of America in the archives and
libraries of Europe, he came to this country, and receiving an
appropriation from Congress to enable him to make copies of his maps
for the Government, he undertook that work, the results of which are
now in the State Department at Washington. All that he desired to do
was not provided for by the order of Congress, and he returned to
Europe disappointed in his hopes, but leaving behind him, besides
the collections in Washington, a memoir with maps on the discovery
of the western coast of America, which is now in the library of the
American Antiquarian Society. In Europe he annotated and published at
Munich in fac-simile the two oldest general maps of America, those
known as Ribero’s and Ferdinando Columbus’s, and a treatise on the
history of the Gulf Stream, as well as a condensed popular history of
the discovery of America. In 1868 he undertook, what proved to be his
chief contribution to American historical geography, his _Discovery of
Maine_. He did not feel that he had accomplished all in this that he
would; but it still remains the most important essay since Humboldt in
that peculiar field. See Charles Deane’s notice of Kohl in _Mass. Hist.
Soc. Proc._, Dec. 1878, and the memoir in the _Beilage zur Allgemeinen
Zeitung_, Augsburg, July 9, 1879.]
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