English Sea Chart of the Singapore Straits, The Straits of Sincapore, Thomas Jeffrys, Indies Gallery

Singapore Sea Chart, London 1787

INDIES GALLERY

English Sea Chart of the Singapore Straits

The Straits of Sincapore with

by Thomas Jeffrys “Geographer to King George II”

those of Durion, Sabon and

An extremely rare navigational chart printed in London in the year 1787 for those who were traversing the waters of the Singapore Straits. The map features depth soundings and ocean hazards to aid sailors in their journey. The map includes two sea tracks, the track from Malacca to Pulo Aore, and the track of the East Indiaman The Bute in 1764-65.

The shallow waters of the Straits made it dangerous for large ships to sail without navigational aids. At the time that this map was published, Singapore had yet to become a British possession.

We have been unable to find an example of the present chart appearing at auction or in a dealer’s catalogue. We only found a different edition of this Thomas Jeffreys chart in the collection of the national library of Australia, and the National Library of Singapore holds a 1794 edition. This chart is believed to be printed as a single sheet chart, and it is conceivable that it was intended to be part of a new maritime atlas or pilot which never came to fruition, making it one of the rarest and most collectable charts

of the Singapore region to exist.

M a n d o l . B y T h o m a s Jeffreys, geographer to the King.

Publication London, 1787 Condition Good, some minor spotting, study images carefully. This chart is of utmost rarity, and no records are found of it appearing on the market.

Dimensions 382 by 460 mm.

(Framed ca. 65 by 55 cm. )

Price Upon request.

The map extends from Sumatra in the southwest to just north of Singapore in the north. Numerous islands including Batam ("Pulo Battam"), Bintan ("Pulo Bintan") and Lingga ("Pulo Lingan or Linging") are depicted.

The map includes two sea tracks, the track from Malacca to Pulo Aore, and the track of the East Indiaman The Bute in 1764-65. Interestingly, the map shows an anchorage at "Governors Island", just north of St. John's Islands, no doubt denoting a nascent Singapore Harbour at the spot where Singapore Town would later be founded.

The Singapore Straits would not be systematically surveyed for another 65 years, with the task finally being completed by Thomson and Congalton in 1844. Until that point, this chart and its derivatives represented the state of the art in

cartographic knowledge of the vital and difficult to navigate straits.

Thomas Jefferys (1719–1771) Thomas Jefferys was probably the most important English map-maker at a transitional point in European publishing. At the start of his career, creative English mapmaking was in the doldrums, deprived of the talents and innovation present at the turn of the century, while European publishing was dominated by French mapmakers and publishers. At the end of his life, the British were ascendant, even if it took the next generation to establish that pre-eminence.

Jefferys was apprenticed to Emanuel Bowen in the Merchant Taylors’ Company in 1735; Bowen was a noted engraver and mapmaker, so the young Jefferys had an excellent grounding; he was made free on 7th November 1744, and established his own business, with some early success; in 1746 he became Geographer to Frederick Prince of Wales and in 1757 to George Prince of Wales, and then Geographer in Ordinary to George III, when George became king.

His first years in trade are notable for the fine series of English town-plans of Midlands towns (where Jefferys was from) that he engraved and published, but much of his output was as a jobbing-engraver.

His career path changed dramatically in 1753 and 1754; in 1753 he published the landmark Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson ‘Map Of The Inhabited Part Of Virginia’, the great colonial era map of that province and Edward Hyrne's chart of Cape Fear; at about the same time, his association with the Irish cartographer Bradock Mead began. Their first collaboration was the six sheet wall map ‘A Chart of North and South America, including the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans’, with the accompanying booklet ‘Remarks, in support of the new Chart of North and South America, in Six Sheets’ (1753), which was quite simply a cartographic

masterpiece.

In 1754 the long-running global confrontation between Britain and France flared into war. The Seven Years' War, as it is termed, is really the first world war, with the American theatre termed the French and Indian War. Jefferys published some of the earliest maps on the war, including an ‘Explanation of the Map of the Seat of War, on the Coast of Choramandel, with an Account of the War’ (1754), with map, and the London printing of George Washington’s Journal of his ill-fated expedition to Fort Duquesne, with a map of the interior of Virginia (1754).

Thereafter, Jefferys served as quasi-official mapmaker to the British government, with access to officially produced manuscript materials. He was to publish many of the most important maps relating to the events of the war, whether in America, Europe, Africa, India or on the High Seas, as well as important books with maps.

These “news-maps” were the way the British public were able to follow the news from the daily papers, and Jefferys profited from this. At the end of the war in 1763, Jefferys was the leading London mapmaker and publisher, clearly wealthy, and ambitious to do more.

Unfortunately for Jefferys, he perceived the way ahead to be commissioning large-scale county maps; the opus is remarkable but, as others found before, the effort would never be profitable. In November 1766 Jefferys sr. was declared bankrupt, and much of his stock-in-trade sold in a ten-day auction in February 1767.

To continue in business, Jefferys entered into a short-lived partnership with Robert Sayer; when the partnership ended, in about 1768, Sayer retained much of the American materials, which allowed him to publish his ‘American Atlas’, the ‘North American Pilot’ and ‘West India Pilot’ at the start of the American Revolutionary War, all attributed to Jefferys, and a turning point for Sayer as a map-publisher.

Jefferys died in 1771; his son continued the business in partnership with William Faden jr; again Jefferys’ materials proved profitable in the early Revolutionary

War, and provided the footing for Faden to go on to greater things.

It's a little search on the map, but on the right in the middle is the island called "Pedra Branca or the White Rock”. Indeed nothing more than a rock with a lighthouse and a cell tower. From 1979 the island is the subject of a long-standing ownership court between Singapore and Malaysia. In this court, which was heard before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, both parties are brought old cards as evidence to support their historical claims. In 2008, Pedra Branca was

assigned to Singapore.

A later edition of this rare chart was one of the rarest maps and a highlight, in the Singapore collection of Lee Kip Lin.

This collection of rare maps was donated to the Singapore Library in the year 2009.

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