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Robert Sayer’s chart of the Atlantic Ocean offers an up to date depiction of the waters which bound together Britain, its American colonies, West Africa, and the Caribbean on the eve of the Revolutionary War.
Printed from a large copperplate on Mercator’s projection, the sheet extends from the Davis Strait to the River Plate and from the Barbary Coast to the mouths of the St. Lawrence, its neat‑line graduated at half‑degree intervals for both latitude and longitude referenced to London. A lattice of rhumb lines radiates from a master compass rose highlights the map's depiction of navigable seas.
The map illustrates the lands under imperial control: the British mainland colonies and the West Indies, Spanish territories from Florida to La Plata, and the Barbary coast and Senegal littoral. Sayer enhances the chart’s practical utility with a set of coastal profile views, all grouped along West Africa, carefully sketched in side elevation.
More than a navigational aid, the chart delineates the geography of the eighteenth‑century Triangular Trade. The rhumb‑line grid reinforces the clockwise conveyor belt: manufactured goods depart Bristol, Liverpool, and London for the Senegambia and Gold Coast; vectors arc westward on the equatorial counter‑current—the infamous Middle Passage—to Jamaica, Barbados, and the Lesser Antilles; and homeward arrows ride the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift toward the Western Approaches, heavy with sugar, rum, tobacco, and rice. The concentration of profile views on the African side betrays the particular anxieties of captains making slave‑trading landfalls where reefs, bars, and seasonal surf could wreck a voyage before its grim cargo was taken aboard.
Issued less than a year before the Declaration of Independence, Sayer’s chart straddles a pivotal moment in Atlantic history. While it still presents the coastline of “British Colonies” in a single ochre sweep, the political unity implied by that wash was already dissolving. Within a decade, new editions would need to mark the United States, Saint‑Domingue’s revolutionary turmoil would threaten the plantation nexus, and abolitionist pressure would mount against the trans‑Atlantic slave trade whose tracks are silently inscribed in this sheet.
Robert Sayer (ca. 1724-1794) was a prominent London map publisher. Robert’s father was a lawyer, but his older brother married Mary Overton, the widow of prominent mapmaker Philip Overton and the proprietor of his shop after his death. Mary continued the business for roughly a year after her marriage and then, in early 1748, it passed to Robert. Robert became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company later that year; his first advertisement as an independent publisher was released in December.
Sayer benefited from Overton’s considerable stock, which included the plates of John Senex. In the 1750s, Sayer specialized in design books and topographical prints, as well as comic mezzotints. In 1753, he, along with John Roque, published a new edition of Thomas Read’s Small British Atlas, the first of several county atlases that Sayer would publish.
Sayer’s business continued to grow. In 1760 he moved further down Fleet Street to larger premises at 53 Fleet Street. In 1766, he acquired Thomas Jefferys’ stock when the latter went bankrupt. In 1774, he entered into a partnership with John Bennett, his former apprentice. The pair specialized in American atlases, based on the work of Jefferys. They also began publishing navigational charts in the 1780s and quickly became the largest supplier of British charts in the trade.
Bennett’s mental health declined, and the partnership ended in 1784. As Sayer aged, he relied on his employees Robert Laurie and James Whittle, who eventually succeeded him. He spent more and more time at his house in Richmond. In 1794, he died in Bath.
![and [ Scandinavia, Baltic, etc ]](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/105724.jpg)
