An oceanic image that is a map, not a chart

Snow day project! I’ve just been browsing the OML website, looking for a map to illustrate the distinction drawn by eighteenth-century British geographers between map and chart (or in France between carte géographique and carte marine, etc.), and I found a fun little item of which I was not previously aware. The uncertainties about this work’s production help illuminate the entrenched attitudes of catalogers and dealers, and the need to pay more attention to the material nature of works.

Here's the work:

Bowen, Map of the King of Great Britain’s Dominions; Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine (Osher Collection)

Emanuel Bowen, A Map of the King of Great Britain's Dominions in Europe, Africa, and America ([London], ca. 1740), hand-colored copper engraving, 37 × 44cm (neatline).

I like this map because it is a self-described map of the territories claimed by the British around the Atlantic Ocean; although dominated by the ocean, it is not a chart. It thus agrees with definitions of maps as properly geographical works that differ from charts that focus on the marine environment. As Bradock Mead/John Green wrote,

MAP, a plain Figure, representing the several Parts of the Surface of the Earth, according to the Laws of Perspective: or a Projection of the Surface of the Globe, or a part thereof, in plano. …

Each kind [of Map] are frequently call’d Geographical or Land-Maps, in contra-distinction to Hydrographical or Sea-Maps, representing only the Seas and Sea-Coasts, properly call’d Charts. (in Chambers 1728, 2:495–96, also 1:201)

But in seeking more information about this work, I ran into some interesting questions. For the catalogers and dealers, the key question is its date. For me, the key question is how and why it was published.

Several other impressions popped up in a Google search, in both library and dealer collections. The hand-coloring varied significantly, although generally following Bowen’s stated color scheme (yellow for British territory, green for former British territory, etc.). The impressions vary according to their consistency of matching colors to territories (one colors Portugal as a former British territory) and whether the color is original or late. Other library copies are Florida Memory, Stanford University’s Ruderman digital collection, Yale’s Beinecke Library, Princeton University’s special collections, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Dealer images and texts include Boston Rare Maps, Librarie Loeb-Larocque, Curtis Wright Maps, and Argosy Books.

Most of the commentaries dealt with dating. The commentary in the four corners references a 1720 treaty, which establishes a terminus post quem. The description of the map by Argosy Books noted that a better terminus post quem is suggested by the depiction of Georgia, which was established as a colony in 1733. The limited extent of British territory in North America further suggests a terminus ante quem of 1759–63 and the British conquest and annexation of New France. So, the map is variously dated to between 1720 and 1763.

There is another map with the same title, reduced from Bowen’s map and with the addition of a large and ornate cartouche filling the negative space of the Atlantic Ocean, published by George Bickham in 1749 in the second volume of his The British Monarchy. This suggests a more refined terminus ante quem. Online images offered by dealers of Bickham’s map include Barry Ruderman Rare Maps (with full commentary) and Alexandre Maps.

On the generally valid principle that the eighteenth-century British public was interested in the empire’s geography primarily (and only) at times of war, I think that Bowen issued the map in conjunction with the outbreak of the War of Jenkin’s Ear (1739–48) and the larger conflict it soon blossomed into, the War of the Spanish Succession (1740–48; known in the USA as King George’s War, 1744–48). The latter is perhaps more appropriate, given the map’s attention to the French territories claimed by medieval kings of England. So let’s say, along with OML’s catalog record, that the map was published circa 1740.

update 15 Feb 2025: a date of 1739–40 is reinforced by John Senex’s issue of a similar map, dated 1739; this one has all the hallmarks of a chart, this one on Mercator’s projection, and is ostensibly of the northern Atlantic Ocean, but it is really about the territories bounding the ocean and is therefore called a map.

John Senex, A New Map, or Chart in Mercators Projection, of the Western or Atlantic Ocean, with part of Europe, Africa and America. 1739 ([London], 1739).

Online at https://oshermaps.org/map/642.0001. In this impression, the word “Chart” was partially obliterated in the title, suggesting a late state. The BnF has an impression with the word intact.

In the original issue of this work, Senex fudged the kind of work, called it a “map, or chart.” This reflects the complexity of contemporary practice, in that geographers made maps for the public market, often in the form of marine works, and given their watery subject matter, they could use either term.

How was Bowen’s map marketed and sold?

Mike Buehler at Boston Rare Maps was the only commentator to wonder the form in which the map was published. It’s hard to see on most of the online images, unless it is noted in the catalog record that folds have been smoothed out, but the several impressions seem to have been folded. This led Mike to write:

The relatively thin paper, vertical folds and narrow margins suggest the map was issued in a volume of some sort, but this writer has found no record of such publication.

It seems, as far as I can tell, that the folds are actually different from map to map. This is certainly the case with the Beinecke’s uncolored and rather tatty impression, which reveals several folds marked by marginal lines in the following image; there is also a hole where a corner of the folded map wore away (at the junction of the two primary folds marked in red); other folds are marked in blue. The location of that map’s vertical folds is markedly different from the prominent vertical folds in OML’s impression.

Folds and creases on the Beinecke Library’s impression of Bowen’s map; see link in the text above for the original work

Most impressions, other than those at Yale and the JCB, are neatly trimmed. The JCB impression perhaps shows signs of having indeed been bound into a book along its right-hand edge, but otherwise there is a marked lack of binding stubs.

Mike’s conclusion is countered by the fact that British maps of eighteenth-century North America have been assiduously traced and discussed by several generations of map and book historians: there would almost certainly be a record in Sabin or some other bibliographical work to the book in which it appeared. I write “almost” because such a map-in-book relationship might have been missed by bibliographers, especially if the parent work is itself fugitive, but I think the odds are against it.

Apparently supporting the idea that Bowen’s map appeared within a book is its lack of a copyright statement (“published according to act of parliament…”). Maps published as separate works generally carried such statements after the 1735 Engravings Act extended copyright to copper-engraved prints. But not maps in books. However, 1740 was still relatively soon after that act and map and print sellers were still adjusting to the idea of copyright and developing the formula (Alexander 2023, 59–65).

So, it looks to me that Bowen—or someone who contracted with Bowen to produce the map—issued the map as a separate sheet, that owners treated each in their own way, folding it as they saw fit.

A note on the projection: just to be precise, this looks to be a 110° segment from a north-polar centered azimuthal stereographic projection (the meridians to either side, of extended to the pole, seem like they make a 110° angle, so an azimuthal and not a conic; the southward increase in the separation of the parallels eliminates the constant interval of the azimuthal equidistant and the shrinking interval of the orthographic, while the magnitude of the increase is too small for the gnomonic).

References

Alexander, Isabella. 2023. Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge. London: Bloomsbury.

Chambers, Ephraim. 1728. Cyclopædia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: Containing the Definitions of the Terms, and Accounts of the Things Signify’d Thereby, in the Several Arts, Both Liberal and Mechanical, and the Several Sciences, Human and Divine. 2 vols. London: J. and J. Knapton et al.