Augustin Heřman Bohemialis

1605 - 1686 (Czech-American emigrant, merchant and politician). He left Bohemia with the exiles who fled after the Battle of White Mountain and settled first in Holland. The first mention of him on American soil dates from 1633, when, in the service of the Dutch West India Company, he negotiated with the Indians over the purchase of land near present-day Philadelphia. It is documented, however, that from 1643 he was already living in New Amsterdam (New York), where he owned no fewer than three properties and where he worked his way up to an outstanding position. He became a member of the highest council of Governor Peter Stuyvesant, the so-called Council of Nine. He was one of the first to take up the growing of indigo on Manhattan, and he began trading in it as well. Smokers will surely be pleased to hear that he was also a pioneer of the tobacco trade, exporting tobacco together with indigo across the ocean to Europe. He was known as the first man to establish tobacco growing in Virginia. But a governor is a governor, and that is why the cigarettes were later named Stuyvesant and not Heřman! Besides that he was active as a merchant and privateer in the Caribbean region (his voyage to Curacao in 1659, for example, is well known).

He gained his real fame, however, above all as an outstanding cartographer. Around 1670 he produced for Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, the very first and very high-quality map of Virginia and Maryland. He added his own portrait to the map and, pleasingly, had his name proudly and patriotically engraved around it: "Augustine Herrman Bohemian". The map is said to have been of such quality that even seventy years after it was printed in 1673 it was still regarded as the most accurate map of that territory. It was valued even by George Washington - originally a cartographer himself. For the map he received extensive lands in Maryland (3000 acres) and the right to use the title of lord. He named his lands "The Bohemian Estate" - Bohemia Manor - and built a large house on them as well. Bohemia Manor gradually grew into a town, which in 1839 was renamed Chesapeake City. This happened at the time when the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal was built, which Augustin Heřman also designed.

And as if that were not enough, it turned out that one of the very first depictions of New York, dating from 1650 and discovered only in 1992 by staff of the Austrian National Library in Vienna, is also Heřman's work. He died on 11 November 1686.