The Most Dangerous Passage in British Waters, Mapped for the East India Company.

This chart of the Isles of Scilly and the approaches to Land’s End is the most oceanic in character of all the plates in Captain Greenville Collins’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot of 1693. An almost unbroken expanse of sea dominates its composition, reflecting the navigational reality of waters long considered among the most feared on the British coast. Its dedication, to the Honourable Governor, Deputy Governor, and Committees of the East India Company, is the only one in the entire atlas addressed to a corporate rather than an individual patron, an acknowledgment both of the Company’s institutional importance and of its direct financial interest in the accuracy of Collins’s survey.

 

The Map in Detail

The small archipelago of the Isles of Scilly floats alone in the left-center of the plate, its principal islands, St Mary’s, Tresco, and St Martin’s, rendered with careful but necessarily schematic outlines. Scattered soundings reveal the dangerous reefs and ledges of the surrounding waters. In the upper right, a sliver of the Cornish mainland appears, labeled as Land’s End and the Lizard and rendered sufficiently to orient the mariner approaching from the south or west. Depth soundings cover the sheet throughout, providing critical data for vessels navigating these waters. Two putti studying a large open book appear in the lower left, an unusual learned vignette among Collins’s decorative repertoire and perhaps a reference to the scholarly ambitions of the survey itself.

 

Historical Context

The Scilly approaches were notoriously lethal to homeward-bound East India and Atlantic trade ships, and the practical imperative behind this sheet is correspondingly acute. The archipelago sits directly athwart the western approaches to the English Channel, and vessels rounding the Scillies after months at sea, often in poor visibility and uncertain of their longitude, were perpetually at risk. The catastrophe of Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet in 1707, when four ships and nearly two thousand men were lost on the rocks of Scilly in one of the worst maritime disasters in British history, would come fourteen years after the publication of Collins’s atlas, but the danger was already well understood. The East India Company’s great ships, rounding the Scillies on their return from the Cape route loaded with the wealth of Asia, had more at stake than almost any other class of vessel, and the dedication to the Company’s governing body was an explicit recognition of their institutional authority over the trade that made these waters so consequential. Collins’s chart could not solve the longitude problem, but it gave the Company’s navigators the most reliable survey of these waters yet produced.

 

Publication History and Census

This chart appears as a plate in Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, first published in London in 1693. The plates were reprinted throughout the eighteenth century by the Mount publishing dynasty, first as Mount & Page and later as Mount & Davidson, and surviving sheets are most commonly encountered as individual disbound leaves.