The River of Thames from London to the Buoy of the Noure.

Description

This large and spectacular chart of the Thames Estuary is among the most ambitious plates in Captain Greenville Collins’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot of 1693, and the one most directly indebted to the City of London’s patronage of the surveying project that produced it. The Corporation of London had been among the principal supporters of Collins’s survey, and the dedication cartouche — centered on the sheet and framed by ships of war flying red ensigns, with the City arms at their heart — acknowledges that debt in the most visible way possible.

The Map in Detail

The chart covers the Thames from London through the full extent of the estuary and out into the southern North Sea, capturing the most heavily trafficked and most navigationally complex stretch of water in Britain. In the upper left, the Thames curves upstream toward London, its banks labeled with the names of the riverside parishes, wharves, and landmarks that a pilot working the upper river would need. As the estuary widens, the chart becomes primarily hydrographic: soundings fill every navigable reach, and the great sandbank systems of the outer estuary: the Goodwin Sands, the Long Sand, the Gunfleet.

The Kent coast runs along the lower margin, and the coast of Essex and Suffolk along the upper, while to the right the coast of the Low Countries comes into view. A compass rose sends rhumb lines radiating across the full sheet. In the upper left, a cartouche frames the title, with a reclining river goddess, draped in red and holding a cornucopia, presiding over the composition.

At top right, a detailed inset town plan presents a Dutch or Flemish port, likely included to assist mariners navigating the approaches to the Continental side of the North Sea. At the center, the dedication cartouche rises from the water, framed by three warships and surmounted by the City of London arms.

Historical Context

The Thames Estuary in 1693 was the commercial and naval center of the world’s most rapidly expanding maritime empire. More shipping passed through its waters than through any other estuary in Europe, and the sandbanks of its approaches had claimed more ships than perhaps any other hazard on the English coast. The need for an accurate survey was acute, and Collins’s Coasting Pilot addressed it with this, the largest and most detailed chart of the estuary yet produced from an original English survey.

The Corporation of London’s support for the project reflected the City’s direct economic stake in the safety of the river: every ship wrecked in the estuary approaches was a loss to the merchant houses of the City, and every pilot who navigated safely by Collins’s soundings was a dividend on their investment. The chart was also a political statement. The Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot was the first comprehensive hydrographic survey of the British coasts undertaken under royal authority, and the dedication of its Thames plate to the Corporation placed London at the symbolic center of Britain’s maritime sovereignty.

Publication History and Census

This chart appeared as a plate in Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, first published in London in 1693. The plates were reprinted over the course of the eighteenth century by the Mount publishing dynasty, initially as Mount & Page and subsequently as Mount & Davidson, with individual sheets most commonly encountered as disbound leaves.