A map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish settlements adjacent thereto
THE FIRST MAP OF THE THIRTEEN COLONIES
London: William Henry Toms, 1733 [ca. 1735]. First edition, Babinski state 6.
Folio (20 7/8” x 15 ¼”, 529mm x 385mm): the letterpress contents (Babinski state 1, with “XII” for “XIII”) pasted to the front paste-down and 21 engraved maps: the key map with hand-color in outline (Babinski state 1), and the twenty-part map in 15 double-page sheets and 5 single sheets.
Bound in contemporary marbled paper boards backed with modern calf. On the spine, eight panels. Author and title (“POPPLE’S/ ATLAS”) gilt to red morocco in the second panel.
Modern backing, end-papers and guards. The boards faded, worn and frayed, with much of the marbled paper cover to the rear board perished. Unusually clean, with some peripheral tanning throughout. Pen trial to the front board. Manuscript ink shelf-marking (cost codes?) to the contents as well as to the title-cartouche.
Henry Popple (d. 1743), whose major accomplishment was the present map, is himself something of a mystery. Born to a Huguenot family long connected with the Board of Trade— forebears and successors alike — Henry himself had but a short connection with the board, perhaps inheriting a position filled by his father William. His obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine[1] notes that he was cashier to the late queen, viz. Caroline of Ansbach, consort of George II (d. 1737); this too he may have inherited from his father.
Popple’s achievement, however, is difficult to overestimate: the Map of the British Empire is the first of the thirteen original colonies (and the first to depict Georgia). With Mitchell’s 1755 Map of the British and French Dominions in North America it lays claim to being one of the two most important maps in American history. The mapmaking was carried out by Clement Lempriere,[2] chief draughtsman at the Tower of London. Together Popple and Lempriere sought to counter the expansive land-claims made by the France, although their reliance on (superior) French surveying somewhat negated the effect. Despite the endorsement by no less than the Astronomer Royal Edmund Halley, the Board of Trade — to whom the map is dedicated — never officially endorsed it, perhaps for this reason.
The map was nonetheless used by colonial administrators and Britons alike. It incorporates important surveys of the Southeast, in particular Col. John Barnwell’s 1727 survey of the “southern frontier” of British settlement. The insets are noteworthy for drawing on Burgis’s “South Prospect of the Flourishing City of New York” (ca. 1720) and on Joliet’s view of Quebec, which had only circulated in French maps. The tremendous size of the assembled map (four double-sheets plus a single mapsheet wide by four sheets tall), more than 8’ square, appealed to the founding fathers: George Washington owned the key map, and Benjamin Franklin ordered two sets (one bound, one in sheets for joining and hanging) for the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1746. It was used in land disputes from the 1750’s through to 1899, when it was used as evidence in the adjudication of the border between Venezuela and Guyana.
Much scholarly attention has been paid to the states of the work. Because Popple sold it at the staggering price of 4 guineas (£4/4/-) — devoid of the support and thus financing of the Board of Trade — very few examples circulated of the early states. Mark Babinski — whose 1998 (suppl. 2000) Henry Popple’s 1733 Map of The British Empire in North America was printed in a run of just 20 copies — defines state 6 by the inclusion of arabic numerals at the top-right of each sheet but without change of publisher from Toms to Toms and Harding in 1739 (at a third the price, and consequently far greater numbers); he estimates the date of the present state to be 1735. Babinksi estimates that only one in three examples contains the contents sheet (rarer still in its first state, as here), and many circulated without the key map (also first state, and with its deckle edges preserved at the fore).
Babinski, Mark. Henry Popple’s 1733 Map of The British Empire in North America. Garwood, NJ: Krinder Peak, 1998.
Howes P 481 (“b”); Pritchard & Taliaferro, Degrees of Latitude 24 state 5 (dated 1734); Sabin 64140; Schwartz & Ehrenberg, The Mapping of America p. 151.
[1] The Gentleman’s Magazine vol. XIII (1743), p. 553: “Sept. 27 At Bourdeaux, Henry Popple, Esq; formerly Cashire to the late Q. and Agent to several Regiments.” Pace the claims of a London map dealer that he died in 1747.
[2] Bernard Baron designed the cartouche, replete with monkeys, an alligator and a head shot through with an arrow.
Item #JLR0832
Price: $160,000