The Northern Irish Sea, Charted for the Post-Revolution Navy.

This chart from Captain Greenville Collins’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot of 1693 surveys the northern Irish Sea from the Lleyn Peninsula and Anglesey in the south to the Solway Firth and the Mull of Galloway in the north, placing the Isle of Man prominently at the sheet’s center. It is dedicated to the Honourable Sir John Lowther, Baronet, one of the Commissioners for executing the Office of Lord High Admiral of England in 1689, an appointment that situates the original survey squarely within the administrative apparatus of the post-Revolution naval establishment. Together with its coastal profiles and unusually dense sounding data for the Dee and Mersey approaches, the sheet represents one of Collins’s most practically oriented compositions for the western seaboard.

 

The Map in Detail

The chart encompasses the coasts of Caernarfonshire and Flintshire on the Welsh side and Lancashire and Cumberland on the English side. The Dee and Mersey estuaries, being among the most treacherous approaches on the western coast of England, are depicted with close attention to their shifting sands and tidal bars. The deep-water channel through the Sound of Man, with anchorages at Castletown, Douglas, and Ramsey Bay, is clearly differentiated. A compass rose at the sheet’s center dispatches the usual web of rhumb lines across the open water. Two coastal profile panels in the lower left offer views of the Little and Great Orme heads as seen from the entrance to Chester Water, a practical navigational supplement that Collins reserved for the more technically demanding sheets. The dedicatory cartouche in the lower right is one of the more exuberant in the series, a riotous Baroque assembly of putti, sea-creatures, shells, and nautical trophies that almost submerges the dedicatory panel in its own ornamental energy.

 

Historical Context

The northern Irish Sea presented mariners with some of the most demanding navigation on the entire western coast of Britain. The Dee and Mersey estuaries, serving the ports of Chester and Liverpool respectively, were notorious for their shifting sandbanks and unpredictable tidal bars, which could strand or wreck vessels with little warning. Liverpool’s rise as a major Atlantic port was already underway by the time Collins conducted his surveys, making reliable charts of the Mersey approaches an increasingly urgent commercial necessity. The Isle of Man, placed at the center of the sheet, occupied a strategically ambiguous position in the political geography of the period, its ancient connection to the Scottish crown recently resolved in favor of the English through purchase, but its waters remaining a busy thoroughfare for Irish Sea trade. The dedication to Sir John Lowther, made in the immediate aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, reflects the close relationship between Collins’s project and the new Williamite naval administration. Lowther, as a Commissioner for the Lord High Admiral’s office, was among those responsible for rebuilding English naval power after the political upheavals of 1688 and 1689, and his patronage of Collins’s chart signaled the institutional investment of the new establishment in improving the hydrographic record of British waters.

 

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.