Scottish Geographical Magazine

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John Adair: An early map-maker and his work

Harry R.G. Inglis F.S.A. Scot.

To cite this article: Harry R.G. Inglis F.S.A. Scot. (1918) John Adair: An early map-maker and his work, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 34:2, 60-66, DOI: 10.1080/14702541808554887

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Published online: 30 Jan 2008.

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Download by: [University of Birmingham] Date: 09 June 2016, At: 21:30 6O ~CO'FEISH GEOGRAPHICALMAGAZII~E.

JOHN ADAIR: AN EARLY MAP-MAKER AND HIS WORK. By HARRY R. G. INGLIS, F.S.A. Scot. W~SN a wordy dispute arises between two antagonists of fairly equal c~libre, however important the point at issue may be, the onlooker is usually only interested in its amusing side. In no case is this side more observable than in the papers preserved in the Register House, Edin- burgh relating to Slezer, the author of Theat¢'u~n Scoriae, and John Adair, the map-maker. Of Adair's personality or history we know tittle more than that between 1682 and 1688 he drew a series of maps of the Scottish counties, of the fines~ quality, the originals of which are preserved in the Advocates' Library, ; the British Museum, London ; and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Other maps are known to have existed, but these, and a few of his "Sea Maps," are all that have come to light so far. These maps are, in almost every respect, models of workman- ship, being clear, minute, and with an artistic effect in their appearance, quite different from the confused manuscripts of Timothy Pont. But, on the other hand, the Register House papers reveal a not very satisfactory state of affairs for which there is no adequate explanation. Large sums of money were given to Adair from time to time, without any visible result being attained in the way of issuing the maps. From the Privy Council Records we know ~hat in 1682 he got a subsidy of £100 a year, to enable him ~o complete a series of County Maps of which he projected, and although these were actually sum'eyed and drawn by 1686, it was not till long after Adair was dead that the chief maps were engraved and published. As there is no public record of what Adair did, or was expected to do, to understand the earlier course of events between the Privy Council grant in 1682, and the Register House papers beginning 1691, we have to go to the maps themselves, and as they are nearly all dated, we can see the rapid progress made at this period. Assuming that he would begin at Edinburgh, and then do West Lothian (neither map is dated, nor is Ciackmannan), the following is the list of manuscripts extant :-- Date. Map. Manuscript in Midlothi~n Advocates' Library. Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 21:30 09 June 2016 West Lothian" Do. Clackmannan. Do. East Lothia~ . Bodleian and Advocates' L~brary :less complete)3 1683 Forth Do. do. 1683 Strathearn Add-coates' Library. 1684 Eas~ Do. ]685 Stirlingshire . British ~WIuseum and Advocates' Library (less complete)3 1686 Clyde Chart . Bodleian Library. 1686 West of Scotland . British Museum and Advocates' Library (less complete)3. Ettrick Forest Advocates' Library.

See note at end. JOHN ADAIR: AN EARLY MAP-I~IAKER AiND HIS WORK. 61

With the completion of these maps passes what might be called the most satisfactory period of Adair's life, and as the date of the last map came fairly near the political crisis of 1688, it is a natural inference that the advent of William and Mary brought about a new set of conditions, and in the process Adair was dropped and his work unsupported. Be that as it may, Adair was "ready to perish" for want of funds in 1686, and it was not till 1691 that help appears to have been given in some form° As already stated, it is not by any means clear in what relation Adair stood to the authorities, for all along he seems to have been working on the maps, but whether it was through having a little means of his own, or through the help of Sir Robert Sibbald, his patron--the Geographer Royal for Scotland--is so far quite unknown. The Register House papers, however, contain a series of reports, in which Adair, having succeeded in interesting the authorities, informs a Commission, in 1692, that four maps are complete--The Water of Forth, the ~¥ater of Tay, the Water of Clyde, and St. Abb's Head to (~Sunderland Point), land maps of East Lothian, West Lothian, Middle Lothian ; one of Stirlingshire and Menteith ; one of Clackman- nanshire ; two of Fife and Kinross-shire ~ one of Perthshire ; one about Angus ~ one general map of Gallowayshire ~ one of Nithsdale and Ren- frew ; 1 and one particular map of Cunningham and Renfrew. So satisfied were the Commission with his work, and with his pro- posals to go on with a series of "Sea Maps," that a tax of 4s. a ton was lev~ed on all "foreign" shipping at the Scottish ports, and ls. a ton on home shipping, the revenue to be collected and handed to Adair to prepare maps for the use of mariners. All was well so far. But at this point a Captain Slezer--an Artillery officer, described as a "High German "--appears on the scene ; says he is compiling a most important book relating to Scotland, with many pictures ; asserts that his work is of equal national importance to Adair's; and claims a share of this tax. Withdu~ any reason being given, his claim is admitted ; so ~hat one can only imagine that, in the political changes of the time, Siezer had some Court influence through service rendered to William of Orange, and that for this reason his application was successful. Thereupon ensued a continuous wrangle between Slezer and Adair, which lasted for many years. Adair would apply for a grant towards his expenses, and, getting some money, Slezer would immediately apply

Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 21:30 09 June 2016 for his proportion, only to find that, as the funds were low, there was little for him. Then Adair applies for more money, pleads great poverty after heavy outlays, which, when Slezer hears of, he instantly urges the Commissioners not to pay Adair anything more, because he has not done what he undertook to do. After much wrangling, each gets some- thing; but Slezer is never satisfied, while Adair's expenses are always increasing. The unfortunate and inexplicable fact is that Slezer's statements seem perfectly true. We know that by 1686 Adair had drawn and

1 This name, duplicated in the next rnap~ is not lucid, as Nithsdale and Renfrew are not contiguous. 62 SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE.

completed all his "Land Maps," for which he had drawn his salary, and yet they were never issued. He reports that in 1694 ten "Sea Maps " and ten "Land Maps" were finished, four others were almost ready, and still the Commission seem to be quite satisfied. But, alas, in 1695 he is no further forward, and in 1696 they are still not finished. In 1698 Adair gets another £600 1 for a West Coast Survey, and yet, strange to say, the other maps still remained unpublished. Nevertheless, Adair gives a full list of his disbursements; explains that in 1692 he brought an engraver (Moxon)from Holland; in 1695 he says that Mr. Clark, the engraver, has finished several maps; in 1696 he has paid 21101 for engraving, £85 1 for large copperplates, £921 for polishing same, and still the Commission are satisfied, and Adair continues to get his money. Poor Slezer, on the other hand, is ignored, and his requests for money seem either to be held over, or granted only after persistent pleading. App~zently he is not a 2ersona grata. In the later papers the vituperations come to a climax, for Slezer roundly makes the charge against Adair to the Commissioners that he is no further forward in 1695 than he was in 1694, and that Adair is just inventing excuses for not completing the maps, in order to obtain more money° In return for this, Adair in[orms the Commissioners that Slezer is au "illiterat stranger," gathering together a big volume of scraps "only to amaze " the country, attempting a work that would tax the ability of the most learned men in Scotland, and that most of the book consists of scraps from authors as unlearned as himself; that Slezer sits at home in corn[err, while Adair in his surveying expeditions has been three times driven on shore by storms, and has had great hardships and perils. At this period the Register House papers cease, but we know that in the end five maps of the East Coast were issued in a little Atlas in 1703, with descriptions by Adair, prefaced by a Map of Scotland. This latter was apparently copied from one issued a century previously by a French geographer, Nicolay, but no important changes were made in the outline of the less known North of Scotland, such as we would expect if Adair had surveyed the West Coast, as he.claimed, for the outline of the is not changed from that of Mercator of 1564. Only one of the maps in this atlas is dated, that of Montrose Harbour,

Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 21:30 09 June 2016 by Clark, dated 1695. As to the "Land Maps," three were engraved, Claekmannan (sent out to try to get subscriptions for the other maps, and very roughly engraved)~ Stirlingshire (Windings of the Forth), dated 1688, and engraved by Moll; S~]'athearn (undated), engraved by Moxon (whose work is mostly from 1675 to 1692). The other maps were not engraved, apparently, till long after Adair's death, and some have never been issued at all. The Map of Ettrick Forest in the list of manuscripts requires special attention, because in none of his lists does Adair ever mention this map, and from the title on it, and its resemblance to

I Presumably pounds Scots. J-OHN ADAIR: AN EARLY MAP-MAKER AND HIS WORK. 63

Gordon of Straloeh's map of the same district, it would almost appear as if Adair had merely copied this map, for he makes no claim to have surveyed it. The Map of Strathearn referred to above is probably the Map of Perthshire referred to in the inventory of ] 692. The following is the list of printed maps by Adair. The first six appear in Adair's 1)escription of the 5'ca Coast, a work which was intended to have been issued in several parts, but only the first was attempted. 1. Map of Scotland, based on Nicolay's Map of 1583 : engraved by Moxon. 2. Holy Island to St. Abb's Head : engraved by Clark. 3. Forth, Queensferry to St. Abb's : no engraver named. 4. Tay : engraved by Clark. 5. Montrose and Bay : engraved by Clark, 1695. 6. Redhead to Aberdeen : engraved by Clark.

7. Strathearn : engraved by Moxon. 8. Forth (Stirling and Menteith) : engraved by Moll; dated 1688. 9. Claekmannanshire : no engraver named. 10. Map of Clyde, published 1731 : engraved by Cooper. 11. Map of East Lothian : engraved by Cooper. 12. Map of Midlothian : engraved by Cooper. 13. Map of West Lothian : engraved by Cooper. (Cooper's work is mostly about 1730-42, but his name appears as late as 1753 as an engraver.} These are all the published maps issued as Adair's, but in an Inventory of Maps in his widow's hands, a number of others relating to the West Coast are mentioned, and it would almost appear as if access had been obtained to these about 17 ] 0, for a change in the shape of the Hebrides appears on Moll's Map of Scotland (1714), as if a new geo- grapher had made a survey. Adair's maps of the Lothians were again used by Elphinstone in 1744 (engraved by Smith), but Andrew Millar appears to have got this plate, scraped out the title and engraver's name, and issued it in ] 745, showing the Battle of Prestonpans, and with Kitchen's name small beside the title, as if he had engraved the map, whereas it could only be the title that was his. The two maps only differ in title, and in

Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 21:30 09 June 2016 small details. (]~ is, perhaps, opportune to mention that in 1739 the ~ev. J. Jaffray surveyed the Peterhead coast, and thus continued Adair's work, the map being engraved by Cooper; in 1744 the l~ev. A. Bryce sur- veyed the Pentland and North Coast, and this map was also engraved by Cooper ; while in 1750 Murdoch Mackenzie completed the survey of the Orkneys and Lewis, thus, with Adair's West Coast sur- veys, practically completing the best outline of Scotland that had been attained. The intervening portion of the Moray Firth was well surveyed for Collinds Coasting Pilot, 1693.)

* , o • It is not easy to say exactly what was the sum of Adair's contribu- 6~ SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE.

tion to geographical science, for his maps, as a rule, do not show any lines of longitude or latitude. The marks up the margins are miles, not degrees, while he is credited with reckoning 72 miles, in place of the 50 or 60 of the older geographers and the modern 69{ miles to a degree. Looking to the character of his work, and the delicacy and beauty of the detineatiou of the original drawings, one imagines Adair must have been one of those painstaking, finical workers with the artistic temperament, to whom time was no object, and accuracy of detail of such importance that it was sought after, regardless of its actual value, or of any finality to putting on finishing touches. He spent ten months in Holland and London getting instruments, trying the engravers, and seeing their ways of printing maps. He paid £50 for a quadrant--at which Slezer scoffs; £72 for a sixteen-foot telescope ; he goes to the Binn Hill above Kilsyth to calculate the joining of the East and West Coast maps ; he spends six months in a fishing-boat surveying the West Coast ; he takes a boat specially to find the bearing of a newly discovered rock between Inehkeith and the "Ledy Beacon." Then he buys copperplates in London, on which to engrave maps (probably old map plates), and pays Moxon £98 for the engraving only of the Map of Scotland (11½ × 15~) for his Atlas. He buys ten reams of Imperial paper at a cost of ~300--probably £25 sterling--but where all these copperplates and paper went to is a mystery. He also bought a small rolling press--probably what we now call a copperplate press--and some printing presses, which latter would be presumably those wooden screw devices we see in the pictures of early printing houses. Slezer, on the other hand, appears to have been a man of some push, with a fine appreciation of the elegant Dutch pictorial works, but with some traits that did not commend him to his superiors, for his pay of 12s. per diem, as an artillery officer, was reduced to Ss., and when he petitioned for it to be restored--seeing no other officer had been so dealt with--while his petition was granted, rLominally, no instructions were given to pay it, so he had to take refuge in Holyrood Sanctuary from his pressing creditors. With all these matters before us, what position can we say that Adair holds in the development of Scottish Geography? It would appear that his work was highly appreciated by the Commission of the

Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 21:30 09 June 2016 time, yet, looking to the fact that so little was accomplished in the way of publication in his lifetime, there must have been some very serious drawback, which even Sir Robert Sibbald was unable to overcome, and to which we have no clue. For when one reviews the progress made from, say 1681 to 1686, compared with the indefinite results of the next twelve years, coupled with the fact that Sibbald appears to have dropped his patronage of Adair about 1688, and thereafter appears to have had no more to do with him, the impression is left on us that we are here dealing with one of those clever men who are disabled from doing great work by a physical inability to come to a decision to conclude their work--it is always waiting for still another" detail to be perfected. It would almost seem as if Sibbald had trans- JOHN ADAIR: AN EARLY NAP-M.4KI~R AND HIS WORK. 65

farted his patronage from Adair to the more pushful Slezer, probably because he was tired of Adair's methods and procrastin£tion. All the work that Adair did was splendidly done, but one feels a sense of mystification, when one finds that after 1686 everything seems to have gone to pieces, for no really effective work, beyond the maps of Toy, Montrose, and Kincardine Coast (and apparently some West Coast maps), appears to have come from his hands in the next twenty-five years. As to Adair's age, no details are known, but if we assume that the average man exhibits his best talents about the age of twenty-seven, a~d note that AdMr's first work appears to have been finished about t681, it might be fair to assume the date of his birth as about 165~-56. Then, as his best work was done by ]686--five years later--this would bring out that his county maps were drawn when he had reached thirty-two or so. The setting out to survey the West Coast in 1698 would bring us, on this reckoning, to the conclusion that he had reached forty-five, when he had passed his prime. Thus, when his Atlas was issued five years later, in 1703, he would be about fifty. We hear of him a little later, when an Act of tonnage for his benefit was made in 1705, but after that nothing is known of him, and he passes out of cur ken as silently as he entered it. But for the fact that a payment was made to his widow in 1723, on her handing over the unpublished manuscripts which she bad, the period of his death would have been absolutely unknown, and it is only inference that suggests that his death might have taken place in the previous year. There is, of course, as much likelihood that he might have died many years before, and that only necessit~y compelled his widow to part with the manuscripts, at the date given. As to Adair's status in life, it is not easy to hazard a guess. He calls himself a "mathematician," and as he was admitted to the Royal Society (London)in 1688 (the entry in the Royal Society books gives ao clue as to his qualifications), and as his disbursements in connection with his maps were on a fairly large ssaie be'fore he got back his outlays, one cannot but think he was of good family and education, with a small income, sufficiently large to enable him to go on with his work, without thinking wholly of the remuneration, like Slezer. In the Canongate gegister of Marriages, Jean Adair, daughter of John Adair, Geographer, was married to John Ramsay, writer, :Edinburgh, on 30th July 1715,

Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 21:30 09 June 2016 so that an entry of this kind testifies to some social standing. The name of Adair also seems to be associated with Wigtownshire, so that one would be inclined to look to that county for his early history. There is one circumstance, generally overlooked, which must have had considerable effect on the prospect of his "Sea Maps " (though not his "Land Maps"), in the publication of Captain Grenvile Collins's Coasting 2ilo~ in 1693. This splendid book.of Maps of the Coast of Britain was begun in 1686, and Collins completed his work in seven years, and, even although the maps are not of such exquisite detail in Scotland as are those of Adair, the issue of fifty-three maps in seven years seems fine work, in comparison with Adair's eighteen or nineteen maps in twenty-five years. It is rather interesting to notice that 66 SC01~rlSH GEOGRAPHIGAL MAGAZINE.

Moxon, Clark, and Moll, who were at work engraving Adair's maps, were employed by Collins in engraving the maps for his book also. There is no evidence that Collins used any of Adair's outline for his work, yet it must have had a deterring effect on the publication of a set of maps of the coast for Scotland only.

• a D In collating ~he above material, I have to express indebtedness for the very friendly assistance given by the Keepers of the British Museum, Bodleian Library, and Advocates' Library in affording every facility to photograph and study the maps, so that the one could be compared with the other, and the facts brought together.

Note on the Manuscripts i~t the Advocates' Library. ]it will be noted that four of the manuscript maps are in duplicate, and in each case the Advocates ~Library copy is less complete. The title is shorter, there is no dedication~ and the outlines towards the edges are not filled in. At this stage it is impossible to say which is the original and which the copy, because the pin- marks indicate that the duplicate was reproduced by laying a completed map on the top of a blank sheet and pricking through the paper. The outline was then inked in between the pin marks. With the exception of Clackmannan and Mid- lothian~ the watermark on the paper, an L, with a small loop at the top indicating a D or P, shows that the same paper has been used on all the ~flanuseripts.

JAMES GEIKIE: HIS LIFE AND WORK. 1

T~s members of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society will welcome this brief but interesting memorial of the life and work of their former President, whose devotion to the interests of. the Soeiety, from its earliest inception, did so much to ensure its successful inauguration and its continued welfare. In happier times we might have looked for a fuller account of James Geikie's many activities; yet, although the exigencies of war conditions have compelled condensation of their material, the authors have succeeded in bringing together within a comparatively few pages the leading facts of his life, and the essential features of his work as teacher and geologist.

Downloaded by [University of Birmingham] at 21:30 09 June 2016 For her description of his earlier years Dr. Newbigin has naturally been dependent upon the letters, diaries, and- personal recollections placed at her disposal by the members of his family, and his old friends and colleagues. This material she has used with discrimination, and the portrait that she presents is life-like and appreciative. From his family history we learn that his musical and artistic tastes were derived from his father's family, while to his maternal grandfather, the adven- turous sea captain, we may trace his love of travel and delight in the sea :--it is perhaps more than a coincidence that two of his sons are now

1 de.rues Geikie.. The Man and tl~e GeoZoglst. By Marion I. Newbigin and J. S. Flett. Edinburgh : Oliver and Boyd, 1917. Price 7s. 6d. "~et.