The Port That Decided Ireland’s Fate.

This chart of Kinsale Harbour from Captain Greenville Collins’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot of 1693 occupies an unusual place in the atlas. Collins’s official commission was formally restricted to the coasts of England and Scotland, and yet Kinsale, along with a handful of other Irish charts, appears in the Coasting Pilot as a voluntary extension of his surveying ambition beyond its official remit. That he chose to include it is entirely understandable: Kinsale was one of the most strategically significant harbors in the British Isles, its twin star forts commanding an approach that had determined the course of Irish history more than once. The chart is dedicated to Sir Robert Southwell, Vice Admiral of Munster and Principal Secretary of State for Ireland, a figure who also appears in the Bristol Channel chart of the same atlas, there as the host who received King William III on his return from Ireland in 1690.

 

The Map in Detail

The chart surveys the coastline from the lighthouse promontory of the Old Head of Kinsale westward to Ballymacus Point, taking in the broad sweep of the Bay of the Old Head and the sheltered estuary of the River Bandon as it opens into Kinsale Harbour. Depth soundings, sandbanks, and anchorages are distributed across the navigable waters. The harbour mouth is flanked by the two celebrated star forts: Rincorran Castle, the Old Fort, on the eastern shore and the formidable Charles Fort on the west, both rendered in plan and conveying their defensive mass and strategic command of the approach. The town of Kinsale itself, at the head of the tidal estuary, is depicted with streets and individual houses, an unusual degree of topographic detail for a primarily nautical chart. A single compass rose at the chart’s center sends a dense web of rhumb lines across the water, giving the sheet its characteristic radiating geometry. The dedicatory cartouche in the upper right is among the most elaborate in the series, an exuberant Baroque assembly of putti, ribbons, heraldic arms, and colored flags, surmounted by a pair of trumpeting cherubs.

 

Historical Context

Kinsale’s strategic importance to whoever controlled Ireland could hardly be overstated. The Battle of Kinsale in 1601, in which English forces defeated a combined Irish and Spanish army, had effectively ended the old Gaelic order and opened the way for the Ulster Plantation. The town and its harbor had remained a key military installation ever since, and Charles Fort, constructed in the 1670s as one of the finest examples of star fort architecture in the British Isles, was the physical expression of that importance. During the Williamite Wars of 1689 to 1691, Kinsale had been among the last Jacobite strongholds in Ireland, held against Williamite forces before finally falling in 1690. Collins’s decision to survey it despite his official commission ending at the Scottish border reflects both the harbor’s military significance and the patronage network that supported his project. Sir Robert Southwell, the chart’s dedicatee, was one of the most well-connected figures in the Irish administration, his role as Principal Secretary of State and Vice Admiral of Munster making him the natural patron for a chart of Ireland’s most important southern harbor. His appearance in two separate charts in the Coasting Pilot, here and on the Bristol Channel plate commemorating William III’s landing at King Road, underscores his centrality to the Williamite establishment that Collins served.

 

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.