Britain’s Northern Seas, Asserted by a Royal Coat of Arms and Dedicated to the Future Hero of Gibraltar.

This chart from Captain Greenville Collins’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot of 1693 is among the most geographically ambitious in the entire atlas, encompassing the eastern seaboard of Scotland from the Firth of Forth northward to the Moray Firth and Caithness, with the Orkney and Shetland Islands extending to the upper margins of the sheet. It is dedicated to the Honourable George Rooke, Vice Admiral of the Blue, an officer who at the time of publication had yet to achieve the fame that the battles of Vigo Bay and Gibraltar would bring him. The chart carries a crowned royal coat of arms placed directly on the Scottish mainland near Edinburgh, an explicit assertion of British sovereignty over the northern kingdom at a moment immediately following the Glorious Revolution.

 

The Map in Detail

The Orkneys, here labeled Orcades, are shown in the upper center of the sheet, while the Shetland Islands appear in the upper right. Many coastal towns and villages are named along the Scottish mainland, including Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, and Peterhead, their relative positions masking the considerable distances and difficulty of the survey. The scattered islets and sound passages of both island groups have been given individual names and soundings despite the challenge of surveying waters so remote from any English naval base. Three men-of-war are scattered across the open North Sea, asserting British maritime interest in these northern latitudes. The crowned royal coat of arms of England and Scotland quarterly, placed on the mainland near Edinburgh, lends the sheet an explicitly political character that distinguishes it from most other plates in the series.

 

Historical Context

The placement of the royal coat of arms on the Scottish mainland was not merely decorative. Collins’s atlas appeared in 1693, only four years after the Glorious Revolution had replaced the Catholic James II of England and VII of Scotland with the Protestant William III and his wife Mary II. Scotland had accepted this settlement only uneasily, and Jacobite sympathy remained strong north of the border. The arms of England and Scotland quarterly, displayed over Edinburgh on a chart of Scottish waters published for the English Admiralty, made a pointed statement about where sovereignty resided. The dedication to George Rooke situated the chart within the same Williamite naval establishment. Rooke had served with distinction in the operations that accompanied William’s accession and was rising steadily through the officer ranks. The fame that would make his name — the destruction of the Franco-Spanish treasure fleet at Vigo Bay in 1702 and, above all, the capture of Gibraltar in 1704, which gave Britain its enduring foothold at the mouth of the Mediterranean — still lay ahead of him when Collins inscribed his dedication. The survey of Orkney and Shetland was itself an act of naval assertion: these waters, long dominated by Scandinavian maritime tradition, were being mapped and claimed as part of a British hydrographic record for the first time by an English surveyor.

 

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.