Description

Panorama of the Waters Between Two Kingdoms.

This chart of St George’s Channel and the Irish Sea, from Captain Greenville Collins’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot of 1693, is among the most geopolitically charged plates in the atlas. Oriented toward the west, it presents the entire body of water separating Ireland from Great Britain in a single commanding panorama, from the Lizard to the Solway Firth on the British side and from Kinsale to Belfast on the Irish. Its dedication to Sir Richard Rooth, Knight, late Governor of Their Majesties’ Fort Castle-ny-Park near Kinsale, frames the chart as something more than a navigational document. It is an implicit assertion that the Irish Sea, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite Wars, was not a divide between two kingdoms but a managed corridor of military and commercial communication under British authority.

The Map in Detail

The chart includes the whole of Wales and the coasts of Devon, Somerset, Lancashire, and Cumbria in a single composition. The Bristol Channel, the Irish coastline from Wexford northward through Dublin and Carlingford Lough, and the deeply indented bays and headlands of South Wales are all rendered with Collins’s characteristic care, while the open water is animated by radiating rhumb lines from multiple compass roses. Depth soundings and hazards such as rocks, shoals, and sandbars are distributed across the navigable channels, reflecting the extraordinary range of Collins’s original survey work. The name St George’s Channell was historically used interchangeably with Irish Sea or Irish Channel to encompass all the waters between Ireland and Great Britain, and Collins’s use of it here lends the sheet a geopolitical ambition appropriate to its scale. The cartouche is comparatively restrained, a foliated oval frame bearing a coat of arms, but the dedication it carries is pointed: Sir Richard Rooth’s appointment as governor of a military fort at the strategically vital southern tip of Ireland conceptually links this wide-angle sea chart directly to the armed infrastructure of British power in the region.

Historical Context

The Irish Sea in 1693 was still a contested space in the aftermath of the Williamite Wars. The Siege of Kinsale and the broader campaign of 1689 to 1691 had decided the question of who controlled Ireland, but the memory of how quickly a hostile fleet could cross these waters, as William of Orange’s armada had demonstrated in 1688, remained vivid. Fort Castle-ny-Park at Kinsale commanded the southern approaches to Ireland and served as one of the principal British military installations on the island. The dedication of a chart covering the full extent of the Irish Sea to its governor was a statement of strategic intent as much as personal patronage, framing the waters between the two kingdoms as a space under British military supervision from the Solway Firth to the Old Head of Kinsale. Collins’s use of the name St George’s Channel for the entire sea reinforced this framing, invoking the patron saint of England over waters that had so recently been the highway of invasion and counter-invasion. The pairing of this dedication with such a wide-angle view of both coastlines is hardly incidental, and the chart stands as one of the clearest expressions in the Coasting Pilot of the political vision that underwrote the survey as a whole.

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.

Cartographer(s):

Captain Greenville Collins

Captain Greenville Collins (c. 1643–1694) was an English naval officer and pioneering hydrographer whose work laid the foundation for systematic coastal charting in Britain. Serving in the Royal Navy during the late seventeenth century, Collins gained practical experience in navigation and surveying at a time when reliable nautical charts of British waters were scarce. Recognizing the strategic and commercial importance of accurate maritime information, the English crown commissioned him in the early 1680s to conduct a detailed survey of the coasts of England and Wales.

Between roughly 1681 and 1688, Collins directed an extensive hydrographic survey of the English coastline, measuring depths, mapping shoals and sandbanks, and documenting harbors and navigational hazards. His work represented one of the first coordinated national charting efforts in England. The results were compiled into Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, first published in 1693. The volume combined detailed engraved charts with sailing directions and coastal views, providing mariners with far more reliable guidance than previously available.

Collins’s atlas became the standard reference for navigation around British waters for decades and marked an important step in the professionalization of hydrography in England. His methods and charts influenced later surveying practices and helped improve maritime safety during a period of expanding naval power and overseas trade. Collins died in 1694, only a year after the publication of his landmark work, but his contributions established him as one of the earliest significant hydrographers of the British Isles.