A rare ‘proof’ state, one of only a very few known, showing the rare ‘Restitutio view’ of New York.

Allard’s version of the Janssonius Visscher map was originally published in 1656. The short-lived Dutch reconquest of Manhattan in 1673 led Allard to reissue the map, replacing the famous view of New Amsterdam by Nicolas Visscher with the current ‘Restitutio view.’ It shows a greatly expanded city, indicative of the widespread prosperity during the first English occupation of 1664-1673. At far right is the Dutch wall which later became Wall Street. The city is already beginning to spread beyond the wall to the north. The fort, at the foot of Bowling Green, can be seen at left. At center, the new canal that cut into the city from the harbor is shown complete for the first time. Also shown are Cornelius Evertsen’s Dutch fleet, which re-captured New York in 1673, off the south coast of Long Island. The next year, the Dutch permanently ceded New Amsterdam to England by treaty.

A blank medallion above the view was probably intended to contain the arms of the House of Orange. The fact that it was left blank suggests that the map was still unrevised when New Netherlands was reconquered by the English in October 1674. On this second state the name of the publisher, Hugo Allard, has not yet been added in, and the letters to the key previously wanting on the map are now present. The main body of the map, depicting the Dutch and English colonies in the Northeast, (from the Dutch point of view) derives from the manuscript by an unknown mapmaker that accompanied the famous Remonstrance that Adriaen van der Donck took to Amsterdam in 1649. The map served as the source for Dutch maps of the region for nearly a century. One of van der Donck’s hopes had been that more Dutch people would be enticed by an attractive rendition of vast unsettled Dutch American lands teeming with game that stretched from the Delaware River to the Connecticut. Life was too comfortable in the Netherlands however, and the small, very diverse, population that settled New Amsterdam and Fort Orange was soon overwhelmed by the ever swelling tide of hopeful English immigrants.

The Visscher and Allard maps played a major role in the Penn – Lord Baltimore boundary dispute, in which king divided the Delmarva Peninsula between Maryland and Pennsylvania from the 40th degree of latitude in the north and a latitudinal line drawn from Cape Henlopen in the south. Unfortunately for Maryland, Cape Henlopen was incorrectly positioned on this map 25 miles too far south – consequently land that ought to have been Maryland went to the Penn family.