Chartmaking in England and Its Context, 1500–1660
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58 • Chartmaking in England and Its Context, 1500 –1660 Sarah Tyacke Introduction was necessary to challenge the Dutch carrying trade. In this transitional period, charts were an additional tool for The introduction of chartmaking was part of the profes- the navigator, who continued to use his own experience, sionalization of English navigation in this period, but the written notes, rutters, and human pilots when he could making of charts did not emerge inevitably. Mariners dis- acquire them, sometimes by force. Where the navigators trusted them, and their reluctance to use charts at all, of could not obtain up-to-date or even basic chart informa- any sort, continued until at least the 1580s. Before the tion from foreign sources, they had to make charts them- 1530s, chartmaking in any sense does not seem to have selves. Consequently, by the 1590s, a number of ship- been practiced by the English, or indeed the Scots, Irish, masters and other practitioners had begun to make and or Welsh.1 At that time, however, coastal views and plans sell hand-drawn charts in London. in connection with the defense of the country began to be In this chapter the focus is on charts as artifacts and made and, at the same time, measured land surveys were not on navigational methods and instruments.4 We are introduced into England by the Italians and others.2 This lack of domestic production does not mean that charts I acknowledge the assistance of Catherine Delano-Smith, Francis Her- and other navigational aids were unknown, but that they bert, Tony Campbell, Andrew Cook, and Peter Barber, who have kindly commented on the text and provided references and corrections. Other and the Spanish chartmakers themselves were imported acknowledgments are noted in the footnotes. in the fifteenth and in the first half of the sixteenth cen- Abbreviations used in this chapter include: Purchas Handbook for tury. For example, the portolan charts of the Mediter- Loren Pennington, ed., The Purchas Handbook: Studies of the Life, ranean and the charts of the Spaniards, Portuguese, Ital- Times and Writings of Samuel Purchas, 1577–1626, 2 vols. (London: ian, and Dieppe chartmakers were known at least in court Hakluyt Society, 1997); IOR for India Office Records; and TNA for The National Archives of the UK, Kew. circles. The chartmaking trade that later grew up on the 1. I say English because before 1603, when King James VI of Scot- Thames in London, and nowhere else in the British Isles, land ascended the English throne as James I, notions of being British in was part of this European chartmaking tradition and any modern sense were absent. In any case, the English view itself might shows both foreign influence and domestic innovation. be more accurately described as the London view from about the 1550s From the mid-sixteenth century the English began to onward. It was London that became the center of the chart trade in late Elizabethan England. See the discussion in David Armitage, “Making sail regularly beyond the waters of northwest Europe and the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic World, 1542–1707,” Past needed to use some elements of mathematical navigation, and Present, no. 155 (1997): 34 –63, and Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ori- written and illustrated sailing directions, and charts. This gins of Empire: An Introduction,” in The Oxford History of the British use did not come about naturally. They were forced to do Empire, ed. William Roger Louis, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire: British so. For England, the period after 1509 was a time of lost Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Nicholas P. Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–33. continental glories: the loss of France, particularly of 2. See P. D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (London: Public Calais in 1558, and the diminution of the English king- Record Office and the British Library, 1993); Peter Barber, “England I: dom. Rodger dramatically describes the situation: “A Pageantry, Defense, and Government: Maps at Court to 1550,” in Mon- shrunken, post-imperial England faced an uncertain and archs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool vulnerable future on the margins of a Europe now domi- of Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: 3 University of Chicago Press, 1992), 26 –56; and Marcus Merriman, nated by the great powers.” Thus the English had to con- “Italian Military Engineers in Britain in the 1540s,” in English Map- sider the sea as a means to conduct foreign, military, and Making, 1500 –1650: Historical Essays, ed. Sarah Tyacke (London: commercial policy more generally, not merely for sailing British Library, 1983), 57–67. coastal waters and to the fishing grounds of Newfound- 3. N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of land. Britain, 660 –1649 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 175. 4. The consideration of maps as texts—that is, not as just geograph- This trend was further reinforced by their wars with ical artifacts or images, but as objects to be read and explained in a sim- Spain in the late sixteenth century, and later, in the sev- ilar but different way to word texts—has been developed by a number enteenth century, knowledge of the oceans and coastlines of writers. In the book world, the late D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and 1722 Chartmaking in England and Its Context, 1500 –1660 1723 concerned here with the production of charts, both man- (1561) and such seminal attempts at listing mathematical uscript and printed, for and by the English in the period and hydrographical works as John Dee’s General and from about 1500 until the 1660s. It is important to rec- Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navi- ognize that the English not only used foreign chartmak- gation (1577).7 Later in the next century there were at- ers in England but that their own chartmaking trade de- tempts at maritime bibliographies, and of particular in- rived from other European traditions in terms of style, terest is that of Samuel Pepys’s unpublished “Bibliotheca construction, and sometimes content. The charts de- Nautica,” based extensively on the work of his book- scribed here and their context give us a picture of the En- seller, Richard Mount. It included a list of sea atlases dat- glish worldview in the same way that the first collector ing from The Mariners Mirrour translated by Anthony and editor of travels, Richard Hakluyt, does in prose.5 Ashley (1588) to atlases contemporary to its compilation about 1695.8 categories of charts and other During the eighteenth century a number of collections marine representations of travels were published, including A Collection of Voy- ages and Travels, by the London publishers Awnsham As we are dealing with a period before the modern view Churchill and John Churchill in 1704 and a rival publica- of a “chart,” I have included not only those items that are recognizable in modern terms as navigational charts, but the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986), sought to use also those that have features more in common with views the word “text” to embrace not only books but “verbal, visual, oral, or land maps—for example, coastal profiles and per- and numeric data, in the form of maps, prints, and music” (p. 5). Blake- spective views. Together these categories may be called more and Harley and others have been concerned to advance the idea collectively “marine representations.” They show various that the “concept of maps [and of charts by inference] as language offers the most appropriate underlying structure for the history of car- maritime subjects, such as river mouths, coasts, and har- tography,” Michael J. Blakemore and J. B. Harley, Concepts in the His- bors, as well as large tracts of coastline and ocean. They tory of Cartography: A Review Perspective, Monograph 26, Carto- may be rough sketches, draft surveys, or fair copies of graphica 17, no. 4 (1980), 87. Here I am using the term in a very wide draft surveys or copies of a particular chart, perhaps re- sense, recognizing that cartographic language is distinctive, like musical vised in some way. The use of these categories is an at- and numerical language. Like them it can transcend verbal language barriers: maps and charts are visual, spatial, and can convey informa- tempt to elucidate the processes of chartmaking and the tion simultaneously as Robinson and Petchenik observed in their semi- use of charts at this period rather than developing a strait- nal work, Arthur Howard Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik, The jacket typology into which all depictions must fit.6 Nature of Maps: Essays toward Understanding Maps and Mapping We also need to consider what the sources of marine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). See also Sarah Tyacke, representations might be if we are to understand their sig- “Intersections or Disputed Territory,” Word & Image 4 (1988): 571– 79, and idem, “Describing Maps,” in The Book Encompassed: Studies nificance. They might be a primary survey, where little or in Twentieth-Century Bibliography, ed. Peter Hobley Davison (Cam- no previous cartographic knowledge was available to the bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 130 – 41. For obvious rea- sailor or chartmaker. Other sources could be a compila- sons, historians have frequently used contemporary charts for the illus- tion of surveys already at hand in the chartmaker’s work- tration of particular voyages or for works on exploration and discovery. shop or merely another chart delivered to the chartmaker Although some, such as David B. Quinn, have appreciated the charts as historical and cartographic documents requiring analysis in their own to have a copy made.