[Edinburgh Firth]

Description

Edinburgh Castle and the Firth of Forth, Scotland’s Principal Estuary.

This chart of the Firth of Forth from Captain Greenville Collins’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot of 1693 is among the most layered plates in the entire atlas, combining a rigorously practical hydrographic survey of Scotland’s principal estuary with a schematic plan of Edinburgh, the most heraldically elaborate cartouche in the series, and a dedication that by the time of publication had become an inadvertent monument to the fallen Stuart order. The chart is dedicated to James Drummond, fourth Earl of Perth, Lord Chancellor of Scotland under James VII and II, a prominent Catholic convert and Jacobite who had fled into exile at the Revolution. That dedication, unchanged across subsequent editions, stands as what the survey’s original timing makes it: a quiet fossil of the old regime embedded within the atlas.

The Map in Detail

The chart surveys the Firth of Forth from its mouth between Fifeness and the Bass Rock westward to Edinburgh and Queensferry, taking in both the Fife coast, including Kirkcaldy, Burntisland, Kinghorn, and the Isle of May, and the Lothian shore from Dunbar and the Berwickshire border through Musselburgh, Leith, and the approaches to the capital itself. Edinburgh is depicted with a schematic plan of the old town and its castle, giving the sheet an unusual topographic register amid an otherwise explicitly nautical format. A red line traces what appears to be a recommended fairway or tidal channel up the southern shore of the estuary, a practical navigational aid of the kind Collins employed on only a handful of plates. Depths are densely sounded throughout, with particular attention to the notorious Carr Rocks and the banks off the Burntisland and Kirkcaldy roadsteads. A grid of rhumb lines extends from multiple compass roses, one set near the open sea and another within the estuary. The cartouche in the upper left is among the most heraldically elaborate in the series: the Scottish arms, a lion rampant on a golden field, surmounting a trophy of crossed Scottish and English flags, cannon, and drums, flanked by mermaids and set above a seascape vignette.

Historical Context

James Drummond, fourth Earl of Perth, had been one of the most powerful men in Scotland under James VII and II, serving as Lord Chancellor and converting to Catholicism in 1685 in conspicuous alignment with the King’s religious policies. When the Revolution of 1688 brought William III to the throne, Perth’s position became untenable. He fled Scotland and spent the remainder of his life in Jacobite exile, dying in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1716. Collins’s survey had been completed before these events, when Perth was still at the height of his authority, and the dedication was inscribed accordingly. That it was never altered for subsequent editions of the atlas reveals something important about the commercial logic of the Coasting Pilot’s long publishing history: the copper plates were expensive assets, and the Mount firm reprinted them for decades without significant revision. The result is that Perth’s name, and the heraldic apparatus of Scottish royal authority that surrounds it, survived unchanged through all the political transformations that followed, a dedication to a man who had become an outlaw preserved in copper long after the world that produced it had been overthrown.

Publication History and Census

This chart appears as a plate in Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, first published in London in 1693. The plates were reprinted throughout the eighteenth century by the Mount publishing dynasty, first as Mount & Page and later as Mount & Davidson, and surviving sheets are most commonly encountered as individual disbound leaves.