Contemporary Maps and Sea Charts

Four kinds of document sit under this heading, all made to tell a shipmaster where the water is deep enough and the ground will hold. The first is the English pilot book, above all The English Pilot, The Fourth Book, first issued by William Fisher and John Thornton in 1689 and the first wholly English sea-atlas of American waters. The second is the continental sea atlas, the Van Keulen Zee-Fakkel and Le Neptune Francois, whose Paris publication in 1693 is probable. The third is the manuscript harbour plan, kept in state archives rather than the book trade. The fourth is the map as printed argument, plates bound into voyage narratives and crime literature, not navigational instruments.¹

One rule governs all four: date the sheet, not the subject. A plan of a pirate harbour is not evidence about pirates unless it was made when the pirates were there, or demonstrably records what was there then.

The book a master was likeliest to have

The Fourth Book is the volume an English master in the pirate decades was likeliest to own. Its copperplates passed to the house of Mount and Page, who printed the book for over a century; Library of Congress holdings of The English Pilot span 1671 to 1792. A dealer's summary of Coolie Verner's 1960 carto-bibliography gives at least 37 editions between 1689 and 1794 and a rise from 18 charts to 26, figures no better than likely because Verner has not been consulted directly. Two complete copies are digitised, John Carter Brown's of 1745 and the Boston Public Library's of 1775; a chart in the later of them may be cut from a plate of the 1690s, so edition date is not survey date.²

The manuscript plans and how they got there

A governor enclosed his plan with a despatch; archivists later extracted such maps for conservation, so the catalogue names both the place depicted and the document it came from. The keystone piece is The National Archives, Kew, MPG 1/253, dated 1723 and catalogued as "The Plan of the Harbour of Providence", an enclosure to Governor Phenney's despatch of 1 March 1722-3, taken from CO 23/13 at folios 101 and 102 and measuring 53.3 cm by 74.9 cm. It is the closest official picture of the pirates' own base, made within five years of Rogers taking the town.³

MPG 1/1016, dated 1731 and extracted from CO 23/2, carries five plans on one sheet: the fort at Nassau as Phenney found it in ruins, as repaired, and as designed to be finished, with a plan and section of Fort Walpole guarding the eastern entrance, drawn by Edward Oakley and engraved by B. Col. The 1723 plan and the 1731 sheet are an argument about neglect and expenditure, and they support the standard reading of the harbour's logic: two entrances, one guarded late, water a sloop could use and a heavy cruiser could not.⁴

The anachronism trap

The standard depictions of Nassau, MPG 1/14 and MPG 1/15, were surveyed by the engineer John Montresor by order of Major General Thomas Gage and taken from CO 5/88; MPG 1/15 is catalogued as 1770 and MPG 1/14 with the date bracketed as an archivist's inference. Both postdate the golden age by roughly half a century.⁵

The Indian Ocean is thinner still. The best-known charts of the Madagascar anchorages, the principal harbour of Ile Sainte-Marie and the Bay of Antongil, were published by William Herbert in 1767 on a dealer's cataloguing; the attribution of them to a 1746 manuscript by John Brohier of the Winchelsea is no better than possible. For the 1690s the Archive leans on Company correspondence rather than illustrating 1695 with 1767. The sheet held for Tortuga is later again.⁶

What charts can and cannot establish

Charts record what navigators believed, and belief governed action: a master in 1718 acted on the two fathoms the Fourth Book gave him, true or not. They also supply vocabulary, since the keys and inlets named in depositions and logbooks are frequently the pilot book's names. The treasure map is a nineteenth-century literary invention, and no period document examined for this cluster attaches a chart to buried treasure. What got charted is what a European trade or navy needed, so the shallow creeks where small craft careened are blank, and the blankness reads as evidence of the pirate advantage rather than of absence, though that reading is an inference from the pattern of coverage.

What this source cannot yet give is a chart of a Caribbean pirate anchorage surveyed inside the golden age: every detailed harbour depiction verified here is an administrative plan of 1723 or 1731, or a survey of 1767 to 1776, and whether that is a real absence or an artefact of the search will not be known until CO 700 is browsed at piece level. The Tortuga sheet's shelfmark and 1776 date could not be re-checked against the Bibliotheque nationale de France.