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Chapter 6
SEA CHARTS & ATLASES
It requires no great effort to imagine that sea charts of some kind must have been in use in the Mediterranean from the earliest times and Ptolemy wrote in AD 150 that, half a century before that date, Marinus of Tyre was drawing charts based on Rhodes, then the focal point of the Eastern Mediterranean. Beyond that, we really have only the scantiest knowledge of methods of navigation, until the invention in Italy in the early years of the thirteenth century of the compass, at first consisting of an elementary iron needle and compass stone from which the magnetic compass soon evolved. The discovery was decisive in the development of sea charts, then known as portulan charts, a term based on the word 'portolano', which was an Italian pilot book or seaman's guide containing written sailing directions between ports and indicating prominent coastal land-marks and navigational hazards. These were also known to English seamen in the Middle Ages as 'rutter' from the French 'routier'. Essentially, the charts showed only the detail of coastlines with place-names written on the landward side at right angles, prominent ports and safe harbours usually being shown in red and other names in black. In the sea areas there were compass roses from which direction or rhumb lines extended over the chart enabling a navigator to plot his route, whilst other open spaces were embellished with flags and coats of arms of the coastal states and vignettes of cities and ports. By their very nature and usage comparatively few have survived and the earliest, thought to originate in Genoa, date from the beginning of the fourteenth century. The finest collection, drawn on skin, known as the Catalan Atlas, was prepared for Charles V of France in 1375 by Majorcan pilots, the leading navigators of their day, whose voyaging ranged from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Their navigational skills and practical application of the use of sea charts were major influences on the development of Italian cartography and, in particular, o~ the projects of Henry the Navigator in Portugal where, in the early years of the fifteenth century, the first tentative voyages down the west coast of Africa were being made.
In Venice, about 1485, the first printed book of sea charts of islands in the Mediterranean compiled by Bartolommeo dalli Sonetti was published. In this Isolano, or island book, and in others of a similar type which appeared in later years, islands were shown in stylised outline, embellished only with compass points. Otherwise they were left plain, sometimes even without place names. It is thought they were printed in this manner so that names and navigational detail could be inserted by hand. Surviving copies are frequently annotated in this way. No doubt these books were useful in their day but by the middle of the sixteenth century the development of commerce, especially in North West Europe, called for better aids to navigation in the seas beyond the Mediterranean. Not surprisingly the Dutch provided the answer. Their seamen had acquired a virtual monopoly of the coastal trade of Western Europe, trans-shipping the wealth of the East and the New World from Lisbon and Spanish ports to Holland, the Baltic and the British Isles. To meet the demands of this trade a pilot in Enkhuizen on the Zuider Zee, Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, compiled and had published in Leyden, in 1584, a collection of charts entitled Spiegel der Zeevaerdt, which was greeted with immediate acclaim and many editions in Dutch, English, French and German were issued in the following thirty years. The English edition translated by Sir Anthony Ashley, with entirely re-engraved charts, was published in London in 1588, the year of the Armada. So great was its popularity that the name, anglicized to 'Waggoner', came into use in English as a generic term for sea charts of all kinds.
Also in 1588 there appeared a series of charts drawn by Robert Adams showing the engagements, almost day by day, between the English and Spanish fleets and the subsequent destruction of the Armada. Reproductions of these charts were made about 150 years later in a book entitled The Tapestiy Hangings of the House of Lords representing the several Engagements between the English and Spanish Fleets in the ever memorable year of 1588. Issued in 1739 by John Pine, this was possibly the finest English book of eighteenth-century engravings.
In 1569, a few years before the issue of Waghenaer's charts, Gerard Mercator published in Germany a world map using for the first time his new method of projection, which was to mark the greatest advance in map making since Ptolemy. In fact, for ordinary seamen of the time, Mercator's new ideas were too advanced and difficult to apply in practice and it was not until Edward Wright, an Englishman, provided the necessary mathematical formulae in a book entitled Certaine Errors of Navigation, followed by a world chart in 1600, that the merits of the new system were generally recognized and appreciated by navigators.
In the early years of the seventeenth century the Blaeu family in Amsterdam published a number of marine atlases, now extremely rare, based largely on Waghenaer, but the first such atlas wholly based on Mercator's projection was the Dell' Arcano del Mare (Secrets of the Sea) by Sir Robert Dudley. A skilled mathematician and navigator, Dudley, after exile from England, had settled in Florence where the atlas was published in 1646. The charts, beautifully engraved by an Italian, Antonio Lucini, are now greatly valued. With this single exception, however, Dutch domination of the seas for the greater part of the seventeenth century enabled them to maintain their position as the leading and most prolific cartographers of the time; in particular Anthonie Jacobsz (Lootsman), Pieter Goos, de Wit, Hendrick Doncker and, above all, the van Keulen family, are famous names in this sphere.
Although there were few printed sea charts from English sources to rival the Dutch there was no scarcity of manuscript charts by Englishmen. From about 1590 onwards the demand for such charts, arising out of the seafaring developments of the late Elizabethan period, was met by a group of draughts-men who have become known as the Thames School, named from their obvious association with London and the river. This group, active over a long period until the early years of the eighteenth century, embraced about thirty to forty names including Gabriel Tatton (c. 1600), John Daniell (1614-42), Nicolas Comberford (1626-70), John Burston (1638-65), John Thornton (1667-1701) and William Hack (c. 1680-1700) Of these, the most active were William Hack, who is credited with about 1,600 charts, Nicholas Combefford and John Thornton: the last named, of course, also published printed maps and charts.
The charts of the Thames School covered practically every part of the known world and although most of them were not noted for originality, usually being based on Dutch prototypes, m total they probably exercised an important influence on the later charts printed by Thornton himself and on those by John Seller and others associated with the preparation of the later volumes of the English Pilot. Before that appeared, however, the English suddenly awakened to the dangers of the Dutch monopoly in map and chart making. In 1667 the Dutch sailed up the Thames and destroyed a great part of the British Navy in the Medway and bombarded Chatham. Already occupied with the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire and with an outbreak of plague, the Government was shaken still further by the realization that the Dutch knew more about the coastline of England than the English themselves, and their confidence was not increased when it was found that John Seller, in producing the first volume of his marine atlas, the English Pilot, in 1671, was still using Dutch plates and often very old ones at that. As now, government was tardy in action and it was not until 1681 that Samuel Pepys, as Secretary of the Navy, instructed Captain Greenvile Collins to carry out a survey of British coasts and harbours. In due course, after a seven-year survey, Captain Collins issued in 1693 the Great Britain's Coasting Pilot, an outstanding work consisting of 48 charts, the first complete Pilot Book in English of all the coasts of Great Britain and the surrounding islands with special attention, of course, to the ports. At about the same time as the publication of the Coasting Pilot, Edmund Halley was preparing his thematic charts of the Oceans which were issued in the years 1700-02. Although it has to be agreed that England's contribution to marine cartography in the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth was short in quantity and often quality, there can be no doubt that Halley's charts, linked with Edward Wright's Certaine Errors of Navigation, published just a century earlier, and John Harrison's perfection of the chronometer in 1772 were the most important scientific contributions to the art of navigation in the whole period.
In France during the later years of the seventeenth century the ambitions of Louis XIV had awakened his countrymen 5 interest in the sciences. After the establishment of the Paris Observatory in 1667 a survey by triangulation of the coasts of France was put in hand and the resultant charts appeared in Le Neptune Francois in 1693, published by Hubert Jaillot and the elder Cassini. These were beautifully produced maps, much superior to those of Captain Collins, and the French maintained their lead in this field, following the foundation of a National Hydrographic Service in 1720, until well into the eighteenth century. A revision of Le Neptune Francois was completed in 1753 by J. N. Bellin and many charts of other parts of the world were published during this time.
Towards the end of the century Britain began to play a leading role in chart making, influenced by the invention of Harrison's timepiece, which solved the problem of calculating longitude at sea, and by the voyages of Captain Cook and the growing supremacy of the Navy as a world force. Sea charts issued in this period are too numerous to mention individually but of particular note were the charts of Cook's voyages published between 1773 and 1784, the North American Pilot and West Indian Atlas by Thomas Jefferys (1775); the North American Atlas (1777) and General Atlas (1778) by William Faden, successor to Jefferys; the Atlantic Neptune (1784) by J. F. W. des Barres, a Swiss serving with the British Army in North America; and charts of all parts of the world by Sayer and Bennett, Laurie and Whittle and Aaron Arrowsmith over the turn of the century.
In 1795, no doubt influenced by the establishment of the Ordnance Survey Office four years earlier, the British Admiralty set up a Hydrographic Office to coordinate the production and issue of sea charts for the Royal Navy, appointing as Hydrographer, Alexander Dalrymple who had held the same post with the East India Company since 1779. As in the case of ordnance maps, the charts produced under the authority of the Office gradually superseded those printed by private enterprise and by 1850 vast areas of the oceans of the world had been officially surveyed and charted.
COMPILERS & PUBLISHERS
The following list includes, in chronological order, names of the best-known compilers or publishers of sea charts (ms = manuscript).
Italian
B. dalli Sonetti ,B. Bordone, G. A. di Vavassore, T. Porcacchi, G. Rosaccio, V. M. Coronelli
Spanish & Portuguese
Diogo Homen, Vincente Torfino de San Miguel, Jose' de Espinosa
Dutch
L. J. Waghenaer, W. Barentsz (Barentzoon), J. H. Linschoten, B. Langenes, Blaeu family, H. Gerritsz, J. Jansson, J. A. Colom & A. Colom, Anthonie, Jacob & Caspar Jacobsz (Lootsman), P. Goos, F. de Wit, H. Doncker, P. van Alphen, J. van Loon, A. Roggeveen, Van Keulen family, J. Robijn, Covens & Mortier, Joh. Loots, R. & J. Ottens
French
N. de Nicolay, A. H. Jaillot, L. Renard, L Bremond & Michelot, G. L. le Rouge, J. B. d'Apre's de Mannevillette, J. N. Bellin, J. Roux, R. Bonne, C. F. Beautemps-Beaupre', J. S. C. Dumont d'Urville
British
Edward Wright, Gabriel Tatton (ms), John Daniell (ms), Nicholas Comberford (ms), John Burston (ms), Robert Dudley, John Seller, Greenvile Collins, John Thornton, William Hack (ms), Mount and Page, Edmund Halley, John Adair, Murdoch Mackenzie, James Cook, Thos. Jefferys, William Herbert, Sayer and Bennett, Joseph Speer, Alexander Dalrymple, Wm. Faden, J. F. W. des Barres, Robert Laurie & James Whittle, A. Arrowsmith (& Sons), William Heather, Capt. George Vancouver, Matthew Flinders, J. W. None, James Wyld (& Son)