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Description

Decorative map of the world with the routes of three famous circumnavigators: Magellan, Drake, and Anson

This world map was made to provide a visual reference for readers of one of the most-widely circulated voyage collections of the eighteenth century. The map was part of the nationalistic message of the volume in which it was meant to be bound.

The geography of suggestion

The map is an oval projection of the known and unknown world, allowing the mapmaker to hypothesize suggestively. There is no southern continent, only a tempting label, "Parts Unknown." At the North Pole there is no land again. However, the shore lines of Greenland and North America are unfinished, implying they extend farther north. In the northwest of North America, an unlabeled strait just north of Cape Blanco in California opens into the continental interior. Above that is another label, "Parts Undiscovered."

The geography of suggestion continues in the Pacific Ocean, where islands are scattered below the equator. These include a stretch of shoreline called "Land & Is[land] discover'd by Quiros". This refers to the voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Quiros supposedly discovered a rich, fertile land populated by gentle people open to religious conversion. He rallied European governments to support a return voyage, but he died while preparing for the journey. Geographers and navigators debated the trustworthiness of Quiros' reports for the next two centuries; the mapmaker Emanuel Bowen seems to believe Quiros discovered something, but perhaps not the continent-sized landmass Quiros described. He places Quiros' findings much farther east than is usual.

Farther west, the geography of suggestion continues. On the right edge of the projection, Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea are finished with dotted lines. Australia and New Guinea are thought to connect via Carpentaria, a frequent assumption in the mid-eighteenth century. The Solomon Islands, whose exact location was unknown outside of Spanish archives, are east of Carpentaria. Between Australia and the Solomons is an unfinished shore line, all that was then known of New Zealand.

In the northern Pacific, Japan seems to be the gateway to little known lands in need of exploration. As on many maps of the period, Hokkaido is called Jesso and is exaggerated in size. It trails off to the east, where the Strait of Uries separates it from Compagnies Land. The name was given by Dutch explorers Maerten de Vries and Cornelis Jansz Coen, sent by the Dutch East India Company in search of precious metals in 1643. They found no silver or gold, but they did encounter the Kuril Islands, which they named Staten Land (Kunashir) and Compagnies Land (Iturup). They mapped the former but not the latter, leaving its shorelines unfinished and therefore open to interpretation by mapmakers. Some made Compagnies Land a giant continent extending to America, but Bowen has kept it a much smaller size.

This is because he favored another large mythic landmass in the Pacific, De Gama's Land. Some mapmakers associated Compagnies Land with a coastline that Portuguese navigator João da Gama supposedly discovered in the late sixteenth century while sailing from China to New Spain. The exact length and location of the coastline was debatable, and Bowen has decided to show it as a separate entity from Compagnies Land, a phantom coast stretching tantalizingly to the east.

The politics of circumnavigation

The map was made for John Campbell's Navigantium Atque Itinerarium Bibliotheca (1744). Originally released by clergyman, mathematics teacher, and Fellow of the Royal Society John Harris in 1705, Navigantium was the most authoritative collection of voyage accounts in the eighteenth century. Harris' version emphasized the superiority of English mariners and lauded the benefits of commerce. These points were amplified by Campbell forty years later

Harris' work extended to two volumes; the first contained voyages that occurred prior to 1625, when Samuel Purchas published his own influential voyage collection, and the second had more recent expeditions. Volume I began with the most impressive of all navigational feats, circumnavigations. It also included a world map with three circumnavigations marked with dotted lines, those of Francis Drake, Willem Schouten, and William Dampier.

Campbell was a historian who had worked on travel literature books. Like Harris, Campbell issued his collection in two volumes. He jettisoned the pre- and post-1625 format and instead listed all voyages chronologically by region: circumnavigations, East and West Indies, Spitzbergen and Greenland, Northern parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. Of the circumnavigators, he wrote in his preface, "We treat first of the Circum-Navigators, for this plain Reason, that as the Whole is greater than its Parts, so, among Travellers, those are certainly to be placed in the first Class, who have made the Investigation of the whole Globe their Aim, rather than the Discovery of particular Parts."

These circumnavigators are celebrated in this map that was to be placed in the first section of volume I, as indicated in the upper right corner. Bowen, on behalf of Campbell, chose to update the circumnavigations he included on the world projection. Rather than Schouten, who had co-lead an expedition that discovered the Strait of Le Maire in Patagonia, Bowen inserted the most famous navigation expedition, that of Ferdinand Magellan. Instead of Dampier, who would ultimately circumnavigate the world three times at the turn of the eighteenth century, Bowen traced the voyage of Commodore Anson, who had just returned to England in 1744 with a ship full of Spanish treasure.

These choices underline the nationalistic rhetoric that is overwhelmingly evident in Campbell's editorial introduction to the collection. Schouten was a Dutchman and therefore not to highlighted in a British book. Magellan's Victoria laboriously circled the globe from 1519-22. His track is included here seemingly because he was the first to circle the world, but this assumption is countered by the text at the bottom of the map:

The Reader is desired to observe, that Sr. Francis Drake was the first navigator who made the Circuit of the Globe: For tho' Magellan was First in that Design, yet as he was unfortunately killed at one of the Ladrone Islands, he cannot properly be intitled [sic] a Circumnavigator.

Magellan's failure is underlined on the graticule, as the island of Matahan has the label, "Here Magellan was Killed." Magellan was actually killed by a Filipino indigenous group on Mactan Island, but Bowen's point is to discredit the Portuguese navigator in favor of the English. Not only are circumnavigators the first class of travelers, but the English are paramount among those vaunted few who had managed the feat.

Drake, therefore, is to be understood as the first "who made the circuit of the Globe," something he accomplished on a marauding voyage from 1577 to 1580. If Drake was the first, Anson was the most recent. Anson completed his own circumnavigation as part of a bellicose voyage to harass Spanish trade in the Pacific from 1740 to 1744. Although he lost 1,500 of his 1,900 men and five of his six ships, Anson managed to capture the Acapulco treasure galleon off the coast of the Philippines. He returned a rich man and was quickly promoted to rear-admiral and was appointed to the Admiralty Board. Many of his contemporaries compared him to Drake, explaining how Bowen came up with the pairing.

The political geographer

Bowen's map for Campbell's Navigantium is a prime example of how maps which are ostensibly meant to convey objective information also impart a political message. This world map is unabashedly pro-British and therefore reveals much about the time in which it was made. In the 1740s, Britain was locked in battle with perennial enemies Spain and France. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) was a global conflict over who would succeed the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI. It encompassed a series of smaller wars including the War of Jenkin's Ear, a struggle about British objections to Spanish harassment of its shipping in the Caribbean, the First and Second Silesian Wars, and ongoing debates about French and British holdings in India. It was a time of heightened nationalistic sentiment, a sentiment on display in this map.

Emanuel Bowen (1694?-1767) was a British engraver and print seller. He was most well-known for his atlases and county maps. Although he died in poverty, he was widely acknowledged for his expertise and was appointed as mapmaker to both George II of England and Louis XV of France. His business was carried on by his son, Thomas Bowen. He also trained many apprentices, two of whom became prominent mapmakers, Thomas Kitchin and Thomas Jeffreys.

Reference
John Campbell, Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, 2 vols. London: T. Woodward et al., 1744-48.
Francis Espinasse, rev. M. J. Mercer, “Campbell, John (1708–1775),” ODNB, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/article/4514.
John Harris, Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca. London: Thomas Bennett, John Nicholson, Daniel Midwinter, 1705.
Larry Stewart, “Harris, John (c.1666–1719),” ODNB, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/article/12397.
Emanuel Bowen Biography

Emanuel Bowen (1694?-1767) was a British engraver and print seller. He was most well-known for his atlases and county maps. Although he died in poverty, he was widely acknowledged for his expertise and was appointed as mapmaker to both George II of England and Louis XV of France. His business was carried on by his son, Thomas Bowen. He also trained many apprentices, two of whom became prominent mapmakers, Thomas Kitchin and Thomas Jeffreys.