The King Landed Here.

This double-page nautical chart of the Bristol Channel is one of the most historically charged plates in Captain Greenville Collins’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot of 1693. It combines a thorough hydrographic survey of one of Britain’s most navigationally complex estuaries with a commemorative vignette recording the landing of King William III at King Road on 6 September 1690 — making it simultaneously a working mariner’s chart and a monument to a pivotal moment in British history. It is dedicated to Sir Robert Southwell, who received the King at Kings Weston on that occasion.

 

The Map in Detail

The chart spans the full breadth of the Bristol Channel, recording the coastlines of South Wales from Chepstow and Cardiff westward through Swansea and Tenby, and the English shore from Bristol and the Severn estuary across North Devon and Cornwall to beyond Bude and Tintagel. Soundings, anchorages, shoals, rocks, and coastal settlements are marked throughout, with some towns shown with individual buildings — a level of topographic particularity unusual for a survey of this scale. Lundy Island sits conspicuously mid-channel, while the estuary approaches to the Severn, the Avon mouth at King Road, and the tidal passages toward Barnstaple and Bideford are densely annotated with depth markings reflecting the navigational complexity of those waters. The sheet is divided by a rectilinear grid and animated by a compass rose from which rhumb lines fan out across the channel.

The lower-right corner is occupied by a striking engraved vignette of men-of-war at anchor in the King Road, accompanied by a panel recording that King William III landed at that spot on 6 September 1690, having sailed from Duncannon Fort in Ireland in seventeen hours. A fine coat of arms surmounts the dedication to Sir Robert Southwell.

 

Historical Context

The landing commemorated in the vignette took place in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of the Boyne, the decisive engagement of the Williamite War in Ireland fought in July 1690. With the Jacobite threat in Ireland broken, William III returned to England, sailing from Duncannon Fort on the Wexford coast and making landfall at King Road, the principal anchorage serving Bristol at the mouth of the Avon. He was received at Kings Weston by Sir Robert Southwell, the chart’s dedicatee — a diplomat, statesman, and President of the Royal Society whose proximity to power made him a natural patron for a publication of this character.

Collins had been commissioned by the Crown in the early 1680s to survey the coasts of Britain, and the Bristol Channel, with its extreme tidal range, shifting sandbanks, and complex estuary approaches, was among the most demanding stretches of water he encountered. The resulting chart gave mariners their most reliable guide yet to a body of water that was also one of the busiest in Britain, funneling the trade of Bristol — at the time England’s second city — in and out of the Atlantic. The inclusion of the royal landing vignette reflects the broader commemorative ambitions of the Coasting Pilot and the political context in which it was produced, appearing just three years after the Glorious Revolution had transformed the British monarchy.

 

Publication History and Census

This chart appears as a plate in Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, first published in London in 1693, the foundational hydrographic atlas of British coastal waters. The geographic designation is embedded in the dedicatory cartouche rather than displayed as a stand-alone title, as was standard practice in the atlas. The plates were reprinted through much of the eighteenth century by the Mount publishing dynasty — successively as Mount & Page and Mount & Davidson — and surviving sheets are commonly encountered as individual disbound leaves.