Plan de la Ville de Boston, 1764
Jacques Nicolas Bellin drew this page-sized plan for a French audience, published in his Petite Atlas Maritime. The legend identifies fortifications, churches, and public buildings. The landmarks a French naval officer or diplomat would want to locate. Hand-colored in warm rose and terra cotta for land, light blue-green for water, it renders Boston and Charlestown as compact European-style settlements. Numbered 'Tome I, No. 31' in the upper margin, this is one page in a systematic French survey of the world's ports, produced a decade before those same ports became battlegrounds.
- The legend identifies fortifications and churches by number, each traceable to its location on the map, revealing what the French considered worth knowing about Boston.
- The French labels throughout the map; 'Ville de Boston' and the surrounding nomenclature frame a familiar city in a foreign language.
- The scale relative to the page. Bellin fit the entire peninsula into a 30-by-23-centimeter sheet, compressing Boston to pocket size.
All prints are high-quality reproductions made from museum-grade scans at 300 DPI. Depending on the original scan dimensions, some prints may include white fill along the edges.