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Published in the first edition of Le Neptune Oriental (Paris, 1745), this copper-engraved sea chart covers the principal sailing routes of the northern Indian Ocean.
The chart stretches from Cape Guardafui on the Horn of Africa, past the entrance to the Red Sea and the coasts of Oman and Arabia, across the Arabian Sea to the Malabar coast, around Cape Comorin, and up the Coromandel shore toward the mouth of the Ganges. Offshore detail includes the Lakshadweep and Maldives archipelagos and the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka).
The map is laid out on Mercator projection with a full rhumb-line network radiating from numerous sixteen-point compass roses. Latitude is marked in the borders, while longitude—customary for French charts of the period—is measured from Paris. Coastal place-names, headlands, and anchorages are rendered in clear, evenly engraved italic; interior regions are left blank in keeping with the hydrographic purpose.
Two engraved Avertissement panels alert mariners to known positional errors: one at left corrects the distance between Cape Guardafui and Cape Aden, and another at right notes that several points on the Coromandel coast and at Pedro Point in Ceylon lie 10–15 minutes too far south. The main title block specifies that the chart was “drawn from the best memoirs, rutters, and observations of experienced navigators, verified by a great number of journals of navigation, all compared with the astronomical work of the Académie Royale des Sciences” and is signed “Par M. d’Après de Mannevillette, Officier des Vaisseaux de la Compagnie des Indes.”
Mannevillette’s Neptune Oriental quickly became the standard pilot atlas for French East India Company captains and was prized for its systematic corrections to earlier Dutch sources such as Pieter Goos. This chart embodies his program of improving Indian Ocean navigation through rigorous comparison of manuscript sailing directions with astronomical fixes, making it a landmark in eighteenth-century hydrography.
The 1745 first edition of Le Neptune oriental is genuinely rare. Issued in a limited run for the French East India Company (Compagnie des Indes), the atlas was intended primarily for use by the company’s own captains and was not offered for public sale. Within a few years, the French Admiralty determined that the charts revealed too much to potential enemies and ordered remaining copies withdrawn and destroyed. As a result, separate charts from the 1745 edition seldom appear on the market. Complete sets are held by only a small number of institutions worldwide. In addition to the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, holdings are recorded at the British Library and the John Carter Brown Library.
Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Denis d’Après de Mannevillette (1707-1780) was a French sailor and hydrographer celebrated for his excellently-rendered charts. Mannevillette was born into a maritime family and he joined his father on a French East India Company voyage to India aged only twelve. A clever boy, he returned to France to study navigation, chartmaking, and mathematics with Joseph-Nicolas De L’Isle. At nineteen, he was back at sea, working his way up the ranks of the French East India Company’s merchant fleet.
In his work with the company—he was eventually promoted captain—Mannevillette sailed to the Indian Ocean many times. En route, he was constantly gathering and correcting hydrographic knowledge. He was also skilled at using the latest navigational instruments, like the octant and later the sextant, which allowed him to make his charts especially accurate for their time. He compiled his work into his most significant publication, Le Neptune Oriental, which was commissioned by the French East India Company and first published in 1745. It was released in an expanded second edition in 1775, with posthumous expansions in 1781 and 1797.
The Neptune earned Mannevillette many accolades. The company made him Director of Charts at Lorient in 1762. In 1767, King Louis XV gave him the Order of St. Michael and named him an associate of the Royal Marine Academy.
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