1759 Nautical Chart of Cork Harbour, Dedicated To George Anson.
A New and Correct Chart of the Harbour of Corke by the Revd. J. Lindsay.
$650
1 in stock
Description
Cork Harbor, Mapped for the Age of Naval Power.
This is an eighteenth-century nautical chart of Cork Harbour surveyed by the Reverend John Lindsay, late of His Majesty’s Ship Fougueux, and published by W. Mount and T. Page at Tower Hill, London. It was dedicated to the Lords Commissioners for Executing the Office of Lord High Admiral of Great Britain, an unusually institutional patronage that reflects the mid-century shift toward Admiralty-sponsored hydrography. The chart’s self-description as New and Correct was an explicit and pointed claim of improvement over all earlier surveys of this strategically vital anchorage.
The Map in Detail
The main chart, oriented with north tilted approximately fifteen degrees, covers the outer harbor from Roche’s Point and Weaver’s Point at the entrance through the sheltered waters of the Great Island roadstead to the inner reaches toward Cork city. Soundings and shallows are carefully noted throughout, with two compass roses governing the composition. An inset titled A Continuation of Corke Harbour from a smaller Scale extends the survey further inland, capturing Little Island, Barry’s Point, Black Rock, and the tidal approaches to the city itself, giving the sheet an unusual two-register depth that serves both the ocean-going vessel and the coastal trader working up to the quays. The towns of Cobh (then Cove), Passage West, Monkstown, and Carrigaline are labeled, and the positions of Spike Island and the fortifications of Camden and Carlisle are carefully noted. A coastal recognition profile running along the lower margin shows a view of the land from the Old Head of Kinsale to Hawks Rock, with the entrance to Cork Harbor marked, an aid to the approaching mariner in identifying the coastline from offshore. The dedicatory cartouche in the upper right bears the arms of the Admiralty and the red and white banner of St. George.
Historical Context
Cork Harbour had long been recognized as one of the finest natural anchorages in the British Isles, deep, sheltered, and capable of accommodating fleets of considerable size. Its military and commercial importance made accurate hydrographic knowledge essential. The standard reference for Irish coastal waters had been Captain Greenvile Collins’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot of 1693, a landmark work that nonetheless carried the limitations of late-seventeenth-century survey methods. By the mid-eighteenth century, as naval operations in the Atlantic expanded and the volume of Atlantic trade through Cork grew, the need for more reliable charts was pressing.
Lindsay’s survey addressed this directly. The dedication to Lord George Anson, 1st Baron Anson, one of the most celebrated naval figures of the age and First Lord of the Admiralty during the 1750s, situated the chart firmly within the emerging culture of institutionally supported hydrography. This was the period in which the Admiralty began to take a more systematic interest in accurate charting, a process that would eventually lead to the founding of the Hydrographic Office in 1795. Lindsay’s New and Correct Chart was a product of that transitional moment: more precise and more comprehensively detailed than its predecessors, and backed by the prestige of the highest naval authority in Britain. Cork’s dual significance, as the departure point for Atlantic convoys and a major provisioning port for the Royal Navy, and as the commercial gateway for the trade of Munster, made such a chart both a practical instrument and a statement of imperial confidence.
Publication History and Census
This chart was published in 1759 by W. Mount and T. Page at Tower Hill, London, a firm with a long history of publishing navigational charts and coastal pilots for the British maritime trade. Institutional holdings of this chart are recorded, but it is scarce on the commercial market.
Cartographer(s):
John Lindsay entered the Royal Navy as a chaplain in 1755. By 1757, he held that post aboard HMS Fougueux, a 64-gun ship of the line, and it was during the vessel’s stay in Cork Harbor that year that he began the survey on which this chart is based. The Fougueux was originally a French prize — her name a reminder of the capture that had added her to the British fleet — and Lindsay’s assignment to her placed him at one of the most important anchorages in the Atlantic approaches to Britain and Ireland. The resulting chart, published in 1759, was substantial enough to displace Collins’s longstanding survey of Cork from the pages of Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, the principal navigational reference for British coastal waters.
The firm of Mount and Page was founded at Tower Hill, London in 1701 by Richard Mount and Thomas Page, in premises near the docks that placed them squarely in the world of working mariners. Their landmark publication of The English Pilot in 1732 established their name as a global imprint of nautical authority. Over the following decades they systematically acquired the copper plates of defunct rival publishers — among them Greenvile Collins, Jeremiah Seller, Charles Price, and John and Samuel Thornton — effectively consolidating the British commercial chart trade under a single roof. By the mid-eighteenth century they were the dominant publisher of English navigational charts, a position they held until the firm, by then trading as Mount and Davidson, wound down in 1794, just one year before the founding of the Admiralty’s own Hydrographic Office rendered the commercial chart trade largely obsolete.
Condition Description
Overall very good; minor wear along centerfold and at edges.
References
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