38 



VIRGINIA CARTOGRAPHY. 



When Peter Stuyvesant found Lord Baltimore laying claim to the 

 Dutch possessions on the Delaware he sent Herman and Resolved (or 

 Rosevelt) Waldron to St. Mary's, in Maryland, in order that some sort 

 of treaty might be made with the Englishman. Herman went as the 

 diplomat, Waldron as his interpreter. Herman was so pleased with 

 what he saw of Lord Baltimore's possessions that he wrote to say that 

 if Lord Baltimore would grant him a manor he would make for his 

 Lordship a map of Maryland. Lord Baltimore assented to this, and if 

 Herman could have really made Lord Baltimore the proprietor of all 

 that was included in Herman's map, the price which was paid, 20,000 

 acres of the finest land between Delaware and Chesapeake bays, would 

 have been sufficiently small. Herman's map included not only all of 

 Maryland as it now is, but also all of Delaware and a part of Pennsylvania. 

 It was this map, doubtless, that figured on Lord Baltimore's side in the 

 conflict over the survey of Mason and Dixon's line. 



The noble estate that Herman received for this feat in map-making 

 lay in Cecil County, Maryland, and New Castle County, Delaware. It is 

 still called Bohemia Manor, and when people in the northerly part of 

 the peninsula speak of " the manor " they mean the territory over which 

 Herman ruled. Here Herman built a great house, carried on a large 

 trade with the Indians, dabbled in affairs of State, and exercised a wide 

 hospitality. Here, too, he led a wretched life with a shrewish second 

 wife. Here is his tomb, and one may still see traces of the manor house 

 and the deer park hard by. Herman, two of his sons, a grandson, a great- 

 grandson, and two great-great-grandsons were successively lords of 

 Bohemia Manor. Of the last two lords of the manor, one was killed by 

 a fall from his horse, and the other was an idiot, who was wont to insist 

 upon his title, and drawing a circle about himself in the soil of his 

 domain, would forbid the approach within its circumference of any who 

 denied his lordship. The heirs fell to quarrelling over the estate, and 

 the legal existence of Bohemia Manor ended 128 years after its founding 

 by Augustine Herman. 



Augustine was the only strikingly forceful man of the line. His story 

 reads like a romance, but at this distance of time it is hard to sift out 

 truth from fiction, for the man so impressed those about him that all 

 sorts of wonderful legends touching his adventures have come down in 

 local history. There are conflicting traditions as to the reasons for 

 Herman's desertion of New York. One story is that he and Stuyvesant 

 quarrelled over the map made for Lord Baltimore. Another is that the 

 two were rivals in love, and that Herman was successful. The latter is 

 hardly true, for Herman was married in 165 1, and for nearly ten years 

 afterward he was at times employed in various important missions by the 

 Dutch authorities. He is known to have passed through some sort of 

 bankruptcy proceedings in New York, and possibly out of this fact grew 

 the most astonishing of all the stories preserved in the local traditions 

 of Bohemia Manor. 



