Three Unbound Charts (1630) from the Indian Ocean Lodged in Greenvile Collins’s Journal

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Notes

^1. Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Collins, Greenvile (d.1694)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), 12: 707.

^2. Greenvil Collins’s journal of the Speedwell (1676) is held by the Arader Galleries in New York. In this and the following note, Collins’s first name is spelt as in the manuscripts cited.

^3. The journals are, respectively, at Kew, The National Archives, ADM 7/688, Greenvill Collins’s journal of the Charles, James, Newcastle & Plymouth; while Greenvill Collins’s Leopard journal is at Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Minor Deposit 38B.

^4. On the rarity of such charts, see Sarah Tyacke, ‘Gabriel Tatton’s maritime atlas of the East Indies, 1620–1621: Portsmouth Royal Navy Museum, Admiralty Library Manuscript, MSS 352’, Imago Mundi 60:1 (2008): 39–62.

^5. In 1689, John Kempthorne (1651–1692), son of Admiral [John] Kempthorne, copied the Strait of Hormuz and Bandar Abbas charts. Kempthorne replicated the 1630 soundings. Those charts are at London, British Library (hereafter BL), Sloane MS 3665, fols. 56 and 58 (the manuscript is locatable only through the printed catalogue). Kempthorne’s voyage journal is Sloane MS 3671.

^6. The watermark resembles, but is not identical to, those already catalogued for London for the 1618–1624 period. See Edward Heawood, Watermarks of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hilversum, Paper Publications Society, 1950), 144–45, POT: Pl.480–481, examples 3580–3584.

^7. William Foster, The English Factories in India, vol. 4: 1630–1633 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1910), xxxviii.

^8. The 536-foot mountain took its name from Westminster Hall in London. That name persisted for at least two centuries before a hydrographer labelled it Mainia on British Admiralty chart 692, St. Augustine and Tulléar Bays, published in London in 1895. For a view of the London landmark, see John Dunstall’s engraving (after Wenceslaus Hollar), Part of Westminster, c.1690 (London, British Museum, number 1978,U.3507).

^9. During the Persian Safavid period, both the Dutch and English mostly used the name Gombroon; later it was changed to Bandar Abbas.

^10. In the 1620s, English workers in the east were aware of banyan trees, a type of fig. William Foster, The English Factories in India, vol. 3: 1624–1629 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1909); Edward Ives, A Voyage from England to India (London, E. & C. Dilly, 1786), 100.

^11. Tony. Campbell, ‘The Drapers’ Company and its school of seventeenth-century chart-makers’, in My Head Is a Map: Essays and Memoirs in Honour of R. V. Tooley, ed. Helen Wallis and Sarah Tyacke (London, Francis Edwards & Carta Press, 1973), 81–99.

^12. D. T. Pugh, Tides, Surges and Mean Sea-Level (Chichester, Wiley, 1996), 179.

^13. The journal is in London, British Library, East India Company papers at Gumbroone and St. Augustine Bay c.1630 IOR/E/3/12, fols. 60–61, and fol. 131.

^14. Henry Gellibrand, A discourse mathematical on the variation of the mathematicall needle: Together with its admirable diminution lately discovered (London, 1635). According to Taylor it was Thomas James who prompted Gellibrand’s investigation: E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor & Stuart England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1954), 203.

^15. Thomas James, A Strange and Dangerous Voyage by Captain Thomas James (London, 1633); Wayne K. D. Davies, ‘James, Thomas (1592/3–1635)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), 29: 739.

^16. London, BL, Add..MS.5415.G.1, The platt of sayling for the discoverye of a passage into the South Sea. This manuscript has no watermark.

^17. John Speed, ‘Africae described … Ano 1626. Abraham Goos Sculpsit’ (49 × 38 cm), between pages 5 and 6, in A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (London, 1626).

^18. Cyrus Ala’i, Special Maps of Persia (Leiden, Brill, 2010), 144. No early maps for the Hormuz and Toliary regions are found in the Comprehensive Atlas of the Dutch United East India Company (Utrecht, Explokart, 2006–2010).

^19. The handwriting on Davis’s map is older than that of the three charts described in this article. I am grateful to Sarah Tyacke for alerting me to this manuscript: British Library, IOR/L/MAR/A/XLIV Discovery journal Apr 1626–Dec 1629, p. 34.

^20. Greenvil Collins’s journal of the Speedwell (1676) is held by the Arader Galleries in New York.