An excellent example of a fragile map depicting the sinking of the American steamer Caroline in the Niagara River on 28 December, 1837. This was a flashpoint in the Rebellions of 1837 and 1838, which were important steps to Canadian independence in 1867.
Led by William McKenzie, a group of Canadians fought for independence from British rule. Having suffered several defeats, McKenzie and company decamped to Navy Island and were provided for by sympathetic Americans. The owner of the Caroline was (rightly) accused of supplying the insurgents and so the ship “was captured, burned, and sunk near Niagara Falls by Canadian volunteers under the command of two British officers at nearby Chippewa, Colonel Allan McNab of the militia and Captain Andrew Drew of the Royal Naval. Immediately, Americans along the New York-Canada border demanded war with England” (Jones).
This map of the incident was an early creation by Nathaniel Currier published at the office of the Sun newspaper, almost certainly in early 1838. The map shows the boundary region between New York and Canada around the area of Grand Isle, site of the destruction of the Caroline. It incorporates “Lewistown” (i.e. Lewiston) New York and “Queenstown” (i.e. Queenston) Canada in the north to Buffalo in the south. Niagara Falls is simply identified as “Falls,” and nearby Goat Island is shown as well as the location of Fort Schlosser. A few nearby Canadian settlements are also located, including Chippewa, Beaver Dams, and St. Davids, as well as Black Rock and Grand Niagara in New York. The center of the map is dominated by Grand Island and the smaller Navy Island, upon which the camp of the “Patriots” is located, just across the Niagara River from the “Royalist” camp. A small boat is shown on the river at the place of the “destruction of the Caroline by the Royalists Dec. 29th 1837.”
This map was created by the lithographer Nathaniel Currier near the start of his long and prolific career, decades before his partnership with James Ives. After a brief apprenticeship, Currier began his solo career as a lithographer in 1835 at just twenty-two years old. He found success in those early years creating pictures of sensational current events, such as a fire in New York City in 1835 and the sinking of the steamship Lexington in Long Island Sound in 1840. These so-called “Disaster Prints” were extremely popular. While not a disaster print as such, this broadly conforms with the genre.
Extremely rare: not in OCLC, we locate a single copy at the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts.
Currier & Ives: A Catalogue Raisonné, 4309; Jones, H., “The Caroline Affair” in The Historian, Vol. 38, No. 3 (May, 1976), pp.485-502; Shepley, G., “By Which Melancholy Occurrence: The Disaster Prints of Nathaniel Currier, 1835-1840,” in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, (Fall, 2015); ANB 5, pp.875-76. Peters, Currier & Ives, pp.19-23.
