Letters from Benjamin Welles to John Henry Tudor, 1799-1801

Benjamin Welles wrote these six letters to his friend and classmate, John Henry Tudor, between 1799 and 1801. Four of the letters are dated, and the dates of the other two can be deduced from their contents. Welles wrote Tudor four times in September 1799, at the onset of their senior year at Harvard, in an attempt to clear up hurt feelings and false rumors that he believed had caused a chill in their friendship. The cause of the rift is never fully explained, though Welles alludes to "a viper" and "villainous hypocrite" who apparently spread rumors and fueled discord between the two friends. In one letter, Welles asserts that "College is a rascal's Elysium - or the feeling man's hell." In another he writes: "College, Tudor, is a furnace to the phlegmatic, & a Greenland to thee feeling man; it has an atmosphere which breathes contagion to the soul [...] Villains fatten here. College is the embryo of hell." Whatever their discord, the wounds were apparently eventually healed; in a letter written June 26, 1800, Welles writes to ask Tudor about his impending speech at Commencement exercises. In an October 29, 1801 letter, Welles writes to Tudor in Philadelphia (where he appears to have traveled in attempts to recover his failing health) and expresses strong wishes for his friend's recovery and return to Boston. This letter also contains news of their classmate Washington Allston's meeting with painters Henry Fuseli and Benjamin West.

Gold Company Claims, Witwatersrand, South Africa, 1895 (Raster Image)

This layer is a georeferenced raster image of the historic paper map entitled: Bacon's new map of the Witwatersrand goldfields in the districts of Pretoria and Heidelberg, Transvaal, S. A. R. : shewing the main and other reefs, with the farms, gold mining company's claims and concessions : from information in the Surveyor-General's Department. It was published by G. W. Bacon & Co. in 1895. Scale [ca. 1:88,992].The image inside the map neatline is georeferenced to the surface of the earth and fit to the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM Zone 35S, meters, WGS 1984) projected coordinate system. All map collar and inset information is also available as part of the raster image, including any inset maps, profiles, statistical tables, directories, text, illustrations, index maps, legends, or other information associated with the principal map. This map shows features such as drainage, roads, railroads, cities and other human settlements, administrative boundaries, farms, homesteads, main reefs, other reefs, probable connections, and mills. Includes also notes and inset: "Enlarged map of the farms Lanlaagte, Turffontein, Dornfontein & Elandsfontein, shewing the boundaries of the principal deep level gold mining coys. on the Witwatersrand goldfields" and a geological profile of the area north of Magaliesberg to the south of Witwatersrange.This layer is part of a selection of digitally scanned and georeferenced historic maps from the Harvard Map Collection. These maps typically portray both natural and manmade features. The selection represents a range of originators, ground condition dates, scales, and map purposes.