A map of the most inhabited part of Virginia containing the whole province of Maryland

This image (engraved as the title cartouche of a mid-eighteenth century map of Virginia), depicts a tobacco warehouse and wharf in Virginia, North America. Three white men, presumably tobacco merchants or colonial administrators, are served drinks by a young enslaved African, while another white figure oversees enslaved African men who are packing, moving and loading barrels of tobacco leafs onto boats, ready to be shipped to Britain and Europe.

The engraving is one of the earliest printed images of the Virginia tobacco trade. It accompanied a map of Virginia and Maryland commissioned in 1751 by George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax and the president of the Board of Trade and Plantations. The map, drawn by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson with Francis Hayman’s accompanying illustration, demonstrated British ownership of plantations in Virginia and mapped the colonial road system.