The Compleat Plattmaker: Essays on Chart, Map, and Globe Making in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

By Norman J. W. Thrower

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520321021

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The Compleat Plattmaker

PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE

WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Publications from the

CLARK LIBRARY PROFESSORSHIP, UCLA

I.

England in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth

Century: Essays on Culture and Society

Edited by H. T. Swedenberg, Jr.

2.

Illustrious Evidence

Approaches to English Literature of the

Early Seventeenth Century

Edited, with an Introduction, by Earl Miner

3-

The Compleat Plattmaker

Essays on Chart, Map, and Globe Making in England

in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Edited by Norman J. W. Thrower

4-

English Literature in the Age of Disguise

Edited by Maximillian E. Novak

The Compleat Plattmaker

Essays on Chart, Map, and Globe Making

in England in the Seventeenth and

Eighteenth Centuries

Edited by

NORMAN J. W. THROWER

Clark Library Professor, 19I2-1973

1978

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY • LOS ANGELES • LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1978 by The Regents of the University of California

ISBN: 0-520-03522-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-78416

Printed in the United States of America

To Franklin D. Murphy, M.D., Chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, 1960-1968, who breathed new life into the Clark Library, as he did to all parts of the UCLA campus.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CONTRIBUTORS

I GEOGRAPHIE IS BETTER THAN DIVINITIE. MAPS, GLOBES, AND GEOGRAPHY IN THE DAYS OF SAMUEL PEPYS

II MANUSCRIPT AND PRINTED SEA CHARTS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON: THE CASE OF THE THAMES SCHOOL

III MAPPING THE ENGLISH COLONIES IN NORTH AMERICA: THE BEGINNINGS

IV JOHN SELLER AND THE CHART TRADE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

V ENGLISH CARTOGRAPHY, 1650-1750: A SUMMARY

VI EDMOND HALLEY AND THEMATIC

INDEX

PREFACE

The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, is dedicated, particularly, to the study of British culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Within these geographical, thematic, and temporal limits, the period 1640 to 1750 and English literature receive special attention. This emphasis appropriately reflects the strength of the Clark Library holdings in the field. Other subjects that were interests of the Clark family, represented by their collections and largesse, include law, music, art, and science.

William Andrews Clark, Junior, founded the library as a tribute to his father Senator William Andrews Clark, the copper king, whose remarkable house at Butte, Montana, has recently been opened to the public. The Clark Library now honors both father and son. The story of its transfer, with a substantial endowment, to the embryonic Los Angeles campus of the University of California in 1926 and of its subsequent growth can be read in the various published reports of the Clark Library. This growth has paralleled that of the UCLA campus that lies some ten miles westward and oceanward of the Clark Library.

The unrivaled Dryden and other literary collections at the Clark Library are emblematic of the love of its founder for belles lettres. William Andrews Clark, Junior, was a lawyer by profession and gave his alma mater, the University of Virginia, its beautiful Clark Hall, formerly the Law School but now used as an environmental center. A consuming passion of the younger Clark, as of other members of the Clark family, was music. He owned and played Thomas Jefferson’s violin, founded and generously supported the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and built an elegant chamber music room at the Clark Library. The princely gifts of the Clark family to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Clark Library building itself, as well as its oil paintings and murals and collections of prints and fine printing, all testify to the founder’s taste in the visual arts. The Clark interest in science is less well known; it focused especially upon what Joseph Needham has called the sciences of the heavens and the earth—cosmology or cosmography.

In the splendid marble entrance hall of the Clark Library the founder’s interests are expressed by a series of six paintings by Allyn Cox, the well-known muralist. These include, among other symbols, a terrestrial globe and an armillary sphere. These orbs, which occupy central and opposite positions in the series of vignettes, represent respectively, geoscience and astronomy. The concern of the Clarks with earth science is typified by the rich collection of minerals given by the family to the state of Montana. As for astronomy, Mr. Clark built an observatory on his estate adjacent to the library and employed his own resident astronomer. Some years ago the observatory building was razed because it was unsafe. Recently, however, through the kindness of Peggy Christian, a friend of the UCLA libraries, an early illustrated brochure on the observatory was added to the collection of Clark ephemera. This brochure reads in part:

The Clark Observatory, W. A. Clark Jr., 2205 W. Adams St.,

Los Angeles, California.

Cards of admission are freely granted and the services of an instructor provided to those who apply in person at the downtown office of the Curator… Mars F. Baumgardt.

Interesting Features

Telescope … Brashear refractor of exquisite workmanship with six-inch objective.

Radium Maps of the principal constellations and the Milky Way. Model of the Solar System.

Meteor Collection, principally from Canyon Diablo, Arizona. One of the meteors weighs 357 pounds.

Globular model of the Moon, 40 inches in Diameter.

Accordingly, it is appropriate that scientific subjects in addition to literature, law, music, and the visual arts should be included as part of the Clark Library program. Indeed, facets of early science, as well as other aspects of culture, have been discussed in several Clark Library Saturday Seminars, as perusal of the growing list of these events will reveal. Also, significantly, a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton graces the paneled walls of the North Reading Room at the Clark Library, while John Dryden presides over the South Reading Room. Further, the writings of the Honourable Robert Boyle, among other seventeenth-century spirits of the Scientific Revolution, are well represented among Clark materials. Although Mr. Clark’s observatory no longer exists, its large telescope is now in the Department of Astronomy, and the collection of meteorites at the Institute of Geophysics at UCLA.

As a result of increased support from UCLA and its chancellors, the programs of the Clark Library have been considerably expanded in recent years. Thus the Saturday Seminars have grown from one (or less) per year in the 1950s to an average of about four per year at the present time. Similarly the Summer Seminar is now a regular program in which half-a-dozen young postdoctoral fellows spend six weeks under the tutelage of a senior scholar. Also the award of a yearlong Clark Graduate Fellowship enables at least one advanced student from UCLA to work at the Clark on a doctoral dissertation. In addition, the Senior Research Fellowship brings one or two scholars to the Clark Library for several months each year. These activities have been in progress for some time, but recently have moved at a quickened pace or have been considerably enlarged.

An entirely new feature was added to the program when the chancellor at UCLA instituted the Clark Library Professorship in 1968. The intention is for the position to be held by a professor of English for one year, alternating annually with a professor representing some other discipline appropriate to the Clark Library. Among his duties the Clark Professor is expected to hold a series of talks, in effect a continuing seminar. Funds are available so that speakers from any part of the country and even from overseas may be invited to address the seminar. Usually the talks are given in a series, the audiences consisting of scholars and graduate students from UCLA and various southern California institutions, with a sprinkling drawn from as far away as the San Francisco Bay Area. Typically the talks are held on Friday afternoons and a visitor may give a single presentation, or several over a period of a few weeks. The Clark Library Professor is encouraged to assemble and edit a series of essays arising from the Friday or Saturday Seminars or other special Clark Library occasions.

The present volume contains six essays that resulted from various Clark Library activities. Two are by speakers of the Friday Seminars that were held when the present editor was a Clark Library Professor and three were Saturday Seminars that he arranged and moderated. The final essay is based on a Seminar paper that he delivered in 1968; it is the only one of the six previously published under Clark Library auspices, but it is now out of print.

A high point of the academic year in which the history of cartography was especially emphasized at the Clark Library, was the two-week visit of Dr. Helen Wallis. Her present post is one that has been held by a succession of eminent map librarians going back to the establishment of an independent Department of Maps in the British Museum in 1867. Dr. Wallis, a trained geographer and historian, has specialized in the history of cartography and globe making, and in the history of European exploration and settlement. In a happy combination of her interests, she spoke on Saturday morning, 10 February 1973, on the subject of English Globes and Geography in the Days of Pepys and Swift. The large and distinguished audience included, appropriately, the late Dr. William Matthews and Mrs. Matthews. William Matthews, Professor Emeritus of English at UCLA, was the principal editor (with Robert Latham, librarian of the Pepys Library at Cambridge University) and Lois Matthews was the text assistant of the California edition of Pepys’s Diary. Helen Wallis in her essay for the present volume has emphasized the earlier period—that of Samuel Pepys who, as the energetic secretary of the Royal Navy and fellow and president of the Royal Society, was much concerned with matters relating to charting and mapping. His observations on these subjects were as perspicacious as his remarks on many other aspects of culture in seventeenth-century England. Directly or indirectly the influence of Pepys provides a continuing thread throughout these essays.

On Saturday, 3 March 1972, Miss Jeanette Black and Dr. Thomas R. Smith gave talks at the Clark Library in a seminar under the general title, Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Cartography. Such a seminar at the Clark Library has been charmingly described by Professor Miner in the preface to the series of essays that he edited, and so the format need not be detailed here.

In his essay, Professor Smith provides us with a very insightful look at the final phase, in England, of the portolan chart trade. This cartographic genre had its shadowy beginnings in Italy c. 1300, after the development of (and presumably related to) the magnetic compass in Amalfi, Pisa, and Genoa. The early portolan chart trade also flourished in the Balearic Islands under the patronage of the kings of Aragon and was transmitted thence to Portugal where it underwent significant change. In its altered form the portolan chart both facilitated and served as a record of the geographical discoveries of the Iberians after 1415. The Thames School, discussed by Professor Smith, represents a continuation of this tradition from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century with the English chartmakers attempting through their manuscript delineations, to compete with the more successful Dutch printed sea charts of this period. Eventually in England, as elsewhere, the manuscript sea chart gave way to the printed form and some of the later Thamesmen aided in this transition. Professor Smith has not only established the professional relationship between the various practitioners of the Thames School in his essay but regales us with a picaresque fragment that sheds light on the personal life of a member of the guild and his family.

It is to the author of the third essay, Jeannette Black, as Professor Smith informs us, that credit is due for the appellation Thames School, a term approved by the late R. A. Skelton. In her own essay, Miss Black is more concerned with the English surveyors and mapmakers who went overseas than those who stayed at home and compiled, engraved, and published the original material supplied to them from the field. The English were very much dependent on the Dutch for maps of Europe, including even those of the coasts of Britain in this period, as was more than once remarked upon and deplored. However, there was frequently more originality in mapping endeavors in the colonies than in the homeland. This has often been the case in the history of cartography, witness the innovative British cadastral and thematic mapping in Ireland, or their epic topographic mapping accomplishments in India. It appears that in remote stations, distant from centralized control, engineers and others were equal to the great opportunities afforded them in many fields including mapping. Sometimes they produced manuscript materials that only became well known through compilation, reproduction, and publication on the Continent where engraving techniques were better developed at this time. Later on, some surveyors, like James Cook, who Degan his professional charting career in what is now eastern Canada, were to spend part of the year overseas in mapping and part at home working up the results of the previous field season. It was only after this development that British mapmakers really outdistanced the continental cartographers in general mapping, as they had earlier in some aspects of tnematic mapping.

Dr. David A. Woodward and Professor Coolie Verner were senior research fellows at the Clark Library during the spring of 1973. They each gave four lectures in a series on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cartography, the former emphasizing surveying and printing techniques, and the latter publishing and cartobibhography. Coolie Verner has worked extensively on the history of cartography in the Clark period, and in his May 197 3 presentations, drew upon this long acquaintance with the field. In his essay in the present volume Professor Verner focuses on the important figure of John Seller. However, as Professor Verner informs us, perhaps Seller’s contributions may be overrated in comparison with those of some of his contemporaries, especially John Thornton. Seller was in a position to have his name attached to many maps and atlases, to which others may have claim to an important share of the credit. This situation is not unknown today but the cartobibliography of modern maps must be different from that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because, as Richard Gardiner has suggested, of the anonymity of many modern cartographers, especially those employed by commercial houses and government departments. Institutional or company names only are printed on many, perhaps most, contemporary maps, globes, and atlases.

David Woodward has been very close to the topics he presented at his March and April Seminars at the Clark Library which are summarized and condensed in his essay for this volume. Both Coolie Verner and David Woodward, as senior research fellows, were able to make particularly good use of the UCLA Special Collections and Clark Library map resources. These include the newly acquired Clark Library Collection of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century distance maps by John Adams and his successors which, among many other materials, Dr. Wood ward discusses and illustrates in his essay. He also treats the technical matters of engraving and surveying, giving credence, when considered with the other essays in the volume, to our main title —The Compleat Plattmaker. In this title, in place of Plattmaker, the alliterative term Cartographer was avoided. Although, as Cornelis Koeman has told us recently, the term cartography was apparently coined as early as 1557, popularization of this general designation for a maker of maps followed the inspired moment when the second Visconde de Santarém in a letter from Paris to Lisbon reinvented the word (f artogr aphid) in 1839. As John Wolter informs us, "the word ‘Cartographie’ was first printed in the Bulletin de la Société de Geographie de Paris, in December 1840 … and first appears in English in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society for 1843."

Any consideration of English mapping in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which pretends to completeness must take into account the beginnings of thematic mapping and pioneer work in this field of Edmond Halley. Curiously, though, Halley’s signal contributions to cartography have been neglected in the past by historians of cartography, including that indefatigable researcher, E. G. R. Taylor, who was more interested in the lesser men than in the great scientists and philosophers. The final essay, on Halley, was presented at the morning session of a Clark Library Saturday Seminar held on 27 April 1968. In the afternoon, Professor Clarence J. Glacken of the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk entitled On Chateaubriand’s Journey from Paris to Jerusalem, 1806-07 and the two essays were published under the title, The Terraqueous Globe. In the present reprinting of my earlier paper there are some minor revisions, resulting from further research on Halley. At a time when only little progress was being made in cartography in England by others, Halley developed mapping techniques that were later adapted by such scientists as Alexander von Humboldt and have since been universally adopted. As well as being one of the greatest of English scientists, Halley was a cartographic innovator of the very first rank. Happily for the editor, Halley’s dates (1656-1742) are bracketed by the Clark Library period.

In the prefatory remarks to his Clark Library presentation, Professor Smith acknowledged the support of Franklin D. Murphy, formerly chancellor of UCLA, and of Robert Vosper, formerly university librarian at UCLA, the continuing director of the Clark Library and now professor of Library and Information Science at UCLA in these words.

xvi PREFACE

Library collections of this sort stand as monuments to the collaborative meshings of interests, abilities and resources of numerous individuals. There is the collector—usually a bookman, sometimes a benefactor. The librarian, in addition to being an efficient and discriminating conservator, should be a perceptive sensor, even stimulator of the scholarly activities within his community. The dealer is the purveyor of good things which excite the mind and stimulate the senses. These individuals need not know each other and, in antiquarian matters, often do not even share the same century. But it is the active and personal collaboration of builders and patrons of collections that bring the excitement and satisfaction of development. In this context and in these days of structured university systems, public funds and private endowments, the university administrator can do much to stimulate interest and thus supplement the amenities available to the librarian and scholar. The annals of American librarianship record several instances of particularly fruitful cooperation between librarians and their chancellors, and a particularly notable example has characterized this university. But my own university was ahead of UCLA in this particular, because it was at the University of Kansas in the 1950s that the felicitous collaboration of Robert Vosper as Librarian and Franklin Murphy as Chancellor first began. There, as here, the university, its library and its scholars benefited and momentum was established which has continued in these more difficult times.

I would like to add my deep appreciation to these scholaradministrators and to their successors. They and other members of the Clark Library Committee undergirded the scholarly endeavors represented by this volume and those of my predecessors in the Clark Library Professorship, aptly called a celestial experience by Professor Swedenberg, the first incumbent. I would also like to thank William E. Conway, Librarian, and Edna C. Davis, formerly Associate Librarian, and other members of the friendly and always helpful staff of the Clark Library. The authors of the first five essays who came as visitors to the Clark Library deserve special thanks for their presentations, which are now available to a larger audience in published form. All of us are indebted to William Andrews Clark, Junior, who lamented that his professional and business affairs took him too often away from the things he really loved but who, through his gifts, made it possible for others to work in and enjoy the cultivated atmosphere which he created.

N. J. W. T. The Clark Library i March 1975

CONTRIBUTORS

Jeannette D. Black, retired, formerly Curator of Maps at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A.

Thomas R. Smith, Professor and formerly Chairman of the Department of Geography-Meteorology at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, U.S.A.

Norman J. W. Thrower, Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

Coolie Verner, Professor in the Adult Education Research Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Helen M. Wallis, Map Librarian, the Map Library of the British Library (formerly Superintendent of the Map Room of the British Museum), London, England.

David A. Woodward, Curator of Maps and Program Director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

I

GEOGRAPHIE IS BETTER THAN DIVINITIE.

MAPS, GLOBES, AND GEOGRAPHY IN THE

DAYS OF SAMUEL PEPYS

Helen M. Wallis

On 13 June 1660 the mathematician William Oughtred, then eighty-six years old, cried out for joy at the news of the Restoration of the Monarchy and the accession of King Charles II: ‘And are yee sure he is restored? Then give me a glasse of Sack to drinke his Sacred Majestie’s health.’ His spirits were then quite upon the wing to fly away. He died with the toast of the Restoration on his lips (as John Aubrey records), severing with his death the last link with the Elizabethan mathematicians.1 Many such toasts must have been drunk in the course of that summer. Men like Samuel Pepys who had grown up with Puritan leanings and connections, shared the general relief that the rigors of the Interregnum were over.

The conditions of the previous twenty years had not favored the development of the geographical arts and sciences. In the days of King Charles I when the court at Whitehall was celebrated for its patronage of the arts, there had been no comparable royal sponsorship of mathematics, science, or cosmography. During the Interregnum printing had almost ceased. Map making and globe making had been in decline for many years, and by the 1640s the neglect of mathematics had become a matter of public concern. Alasse! what a sad case it is that in this great and opulent kingdome there is no publick encouragement for the excelling in any Profession but that of the Law and Divinity, exclaimed Dr. Sanderson, the Lord Bishop of Lincoln, to the Cambridge mathematician Dr. John Pell, c. 164o.2 Pepys, educated at St. Paul’s School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, felt it necessary in July 1662, when nearly thirty years old, and clerk of the acts, to take arithmetic lessons from a Mr. Cooper, mate of the Royall Charles (my first attempt being to learn the Multiplication table.)3 In geography too he found his education defective. When a contract for the Forest of Dean had to be negotiated with Sir John Winter, secretary to the Queen Mother and principal entrepreneur in the Forest, Pepys, turned to the forrest of Deane in Speedes mapps; and there he [Sir John Winter] showed me how it lies … and many other things worth my knowing; and I do perceive that I am very short in my business by not knowing many times the geographical! part of my business.4 John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Brit aine first published in 1611 [-1612], and the earliest published atlas of the British Isles, ran through a series of editions up to 1676. Pepys acquired the edition of 1625, bound up with the companion world atlas, A Prospect of the most famous Parts of the World (1631).

Geographical studies were of three kinds: first, the use of the globes, terrestrial and celestial, a subject mainly mathematical in treatment; secondly, cosmography and geography, whose descriptive literature covered a wide range of topics; and collections of travels. In the second class, Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie, published in 1652, remained by far the most popular work for fifty years or more, running to some six editions before 1700, a revised second edition appearing in 1703. The Cosmographie provided a model of seventeenth-century descriptive geography. Of the anecdotes that enlivened it, one of the best known is Heylyn’s account of a pretty accident that befell him in January 1640