"In
thy map
securely saile" by Alice Hudson But thou at home without or tyde or gale. Canst in thy map securely saile. n these lines 17 th-century poet Robert H errick alludes to the role maps play in the exploration and navigation of un fam ili ar territo ry. The exciting visual stories revealed in maps and charts come not just from the beaury of the images and the evidence they show of advances in techn ology and wo rld-awareness, but also th rough evidence of where they took those who read them and how they were used. T he maps and charts shown here focus on the New World as it was viewed by the British in the 1600s and 1700s and how such documents provided information o n nat ural reso urces and settlements in the New World and reAected the expansion of the British empire across the globe. T hey are part of a spectacular collection of approximately 600 maps, 100 atl ases and 50 books collected by Lawrence H . Slaughter over more than 20 years and donated to the New York Pub li c Library's Map Division by his estate. Whi le he primarily co ll ected E nglish pieces, many are from Europea n countri es where an earlier and more sophisticated gras p of mapp ing o r chartin g technique had developed.
I
The English Mapping Scene Maps are amo ng the oldest of the graphic a rts, evolving from cave art illustrating hunting gro unds and holy sites, to ea rly Babylonian maps on clay, to ancient Egyp22
Pieter Goos, "Pas Caerte van Nieu Nederlandt en de Engelsche Virginies . .. " [New Netherland and Virginia]; from De Zee-Atlas ofte Water-Weereld . . . Amsterdam, J 666. Dutch tricolors proudly wave from ships in a sea ofmixed control. By J 666, the English had claimed New England, not mentioned on the map, and Virginia. For 40 years, New Netherlands cut the English plantations into two separate, weakened entities, or so the Dutch thought. But on this map, published two years after the English took New Amsterdam and renamed the colony New York, for James, Duke a/York and brother to King Charles II, Dutch cartographic malaise does not recognize the change. Exquisitely colored and highlighted in gold, this is a superb example ofthe beauty ofDutch charts, which makes them very collectible. The putti, merman, and sailor hovering over the scale indicator in the lower right and grasping the rhumblines, display a variety ofnautical instruments. This plate is in one ofthe earliest and best-known Dutch sea atlases.
tian properry maps of the Nile's annually Aooded fields. Mapping in England, in so me detail, probab ly dates from the 1200s, with maps drawn by Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk. In the 1300s, the so-called Gough map, named after its discoverer, delineated
blossomed with the "Thames" school of manuscript chart makers in the 1600s. As London's port grew in world importance, its corps of cartographic technicians developed. With Henry Y1II's bold move toward independence from continental Europe, and the publication in 1589 of Richard Hakluyt's Diverse Voyages touching the
By the 1770s, however, the glorious Atlantic Neptune charts of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts ofAmerica bowed to no nation in the skill of their presentation.
Discovery ofAmerica and the Islands adjacent, England's vision expanded to include
with so me accuracy road distances, walled and unwall ed towns, ecclesiastical si tes and forests. Property surveys first appeared in England at abo ut the same time. Two ce nturies later, C hristopher Saxton created a mass ive 2 1-sheet m ap of England at a scale of eight mi les to the inch. Coastal pilot books and nauti cal charts ofEnglish shores, the Channel and beyond
possible direct trade routes to the riches of Asia and, later, to colonies in North America and the Indies. Maps and charts provided a visual means of recording, understanding and contro lling this worldwide empire. Navigation and English Charting The earliest nautical sailing directions were oral instructions passed from pilot to pi lot. These instructions develo ped into written descriptions of coastal navigation, from which evolved beautiful portolan charts, painted and drawn on vellum. In 158485, the Dutchman Lucas Waghenaer pulled
SEA HISTORY 87, WINTER 1998-99