by John Goss

Our research editor, John Goss, has been collecting stamps since he was a small boy and quite early he discovered the fascination of stamps showing early maps. Here he shares with readers some of the fascination he has felt together with hard facts and figures which could set you off on the road to being avid collectors yourselves.

The collecting of stamps showing early maps is an increasingly popular collecting field which has given rise to a new term describing it - cartophilately. There are many different types of maps on stamps and it is possible to collect maps of islands by themselves or in conjunction with world maps, single country maps, district maps, town plans, sea charts and even modern topographic surveys.

Islands are perhaps one of the favourite themes for collectors and this is hardly surprising since the forces of nature have conspired to give many of the islands scattered over the face of the globe intricate and in some cases fascinating outlines. Many of the islands are small enough to enable considerable amounts of detail to be shown on a stamp sized design without too much designer's or artist's licence. This has meant that over the years many of the British Commonwealth territories of the Caribbean and elsewhere have issued stamps showing maps of their island homes.


For example, the 1968-70 definitive issue of Barbuda shows a well designed map of the island as the design of the 112 to 15c values as designed by R. Granger Barrett (SG 12-20); Bermuda, on its handsome recess-printed 1953-62 definitive issues showed a neatly drawn map on the 3d and Is 3d values (SG 140 and 145) with the famous Die I 'Sandy's' error, corrected in 1957 to 'Sandys' on Die II of both values (SG 140a and 145a). Other island territories issuing map stamps have been Nauru, the 1954-61 5s (SG 56); Newfoundland, the 1928-29 lc (SG 164) which included the mainland area of Labrador; New Zealand 1940 Id Centennial showing also Captain lames Cook and HMS Endeavour; Norfolk Island, the 1960 2s 8d Local Government issue (SG 40), (incidentally this same territory issued the ultimate map stamp in 1975 in the form of singularly unattractive self-adhesive labels in the shape of the island.) Pitcairn Islands issued a detailed relief map design on the Id value of the 1957-58 definitive issues (SG 19) St Helena in the 1934 Centenary of British Colonisation issue showed a map of the island on the Id value (SG 115); St Kitts Nevis had an attractive map design on the £1 value of the 1938-48 definitive (SG 77c), repeated in somewhat modified form on the $2.40 value of the 1954-57 definitive issue (SG 117a). St Lucia contributed a map design of the island in 1967 on the 15c Airmail value of the Statehood issue (SG 240).


The most recent issue of island stamps showing early maps was a set of Bermuda which appeared early in 1979. It is a five stamp set and includes the manuscript map of Bermuda by Sir George Somers (1609) which he made when he was shipwrecked in the uninhabited islands. Also in recent years Jamaica has issued sets of stamps showing the changing shape of the island as depicted on maps through the centuries. 1975 saw the issue of a set of four stamps showing sixteenth-century maps: lOc, Bordone's map of 1528; 20c, Porcacchi's map of 1576; 30c, de Bry's depiction of 1594 and 50c, Langenes' outline of 1598 (SG 411-14). 'Darkly green Xamayca ... the fairest island that eyes have beheld' (Columbus, 1494) has fascinated travellers, seafarers legitimate and not so and mapmakers ever since, a fascination attested to by the large number of separate maps of the island made over the years. To a certain limited extent, but one which will, hopefully, be less limited in future years, the stamp issues of Jamaica showing sixteenth and seventeenth century maps illustrate this fascination rather neatly. Benedetto Bordone's map 'Jamaiqua' (1528) is the earliest printed map of the island, printed at Venezia in his Isolario as a woodcut illustration to a text dealing with the islands of the then known world. It was reprinted in 1533, 1534 and 1547. It was a common practice of geographers of the time to write texts in this manner, and this has handed down to us today some most interesting small maps and ones which translate particularly well into stamp design. Tommaso Porcacchi's little map 'Iamaica' (1576) was published in the island atlas Iso le piu famose del mondo at Venezia or later at Padova. Typical of small format Italian maps of the period, it was delicately engraved with the interior topography indicated as groups of molehills, and was set in a page of descriptive letterpress. Porcacchi's work continued in publication until as late as 1686. The subject of the 30c stamp, a map stated to be de Bry (1594) comes, not from a map devoted to Jamaica at all, but adapted from a large and extremely ornate map of the whole of the West Indies, 'Occidentalis Americae partis, vel earum Regionum quas Christophorus Columbus primu detexit', published by Theodore de Bry to illu,strate an encyclopaedic text,  Historia Americae in fourteen volumes, and which dealt with the history of the discovery and exploration of the New World from the time of Columbus to the late sixteenth century. The fourth stamp shows part of the little map by the Dutch mapmaker Barent Langenes (1598) entitled 'Cuba Insula' in which Jamaica is prominently shown, but is not named in the title. This set of stamps has been particularly successful from an aesthetic viewpoint because, as hinted at earlier, little designer's licence has really been necessary. In any case, the size of the original map areas was quite small, and, in the case of the Langenes, the outline of Jamaica is about lifesize on the stamp design.


Very often however, old maps were produced at quite large formats, and the Jamaica seventeenth century map series of 1976 (SG 425-28) shows maps and charts published originally at folio format. The 9c shows Capt Edmund Hickeringill's outline map of 1661 published at London in Jamaica Views. This map does not name the infamous Port Royal destined for destruction by the earthquake of 1692 but does mark and name the fort on the site at Cagway, 'Poynt Caggoway'. It may just be discerned on the printed stamp, but unfortunately, off the southern coast of the island several soundings have been omitted. Port Royal is shown on the next stamp, the lOc, depicting the 1671 map by John Ogilby, 'Novissima et Accuratissima Jamaicae descriptio per Johannem Ogilvium Cosmographum Regium'. This map, based on a survey made in 1760 at the order of Sir Thomas Modyford, Governor of Jamaica, 1664-71, was the prototype for most of the maps of the later seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. It was published in Ogilby's geography of the Americas, America being an Accurate Description of the New World. Another map which had a long life in one form or another is that depicted on the 25c value, Nicolaas Visscher's 'Jamaica, America Septentrionalis ampla insula, a Christophoro Columbo detecta, in suas Gubernationes peraccurate Distincta' which first appeared at Amsterdam in [1680] and continued in publication through to the 1720s. The celebrated English maker of sea charts, John Thornton, produced the subject of the 40c value. His chart, 'The Island of Jamaica' was published in the now quite rare The English Pilot, The Fourth Book at London in 1689 and was continually published until the 1770s. The outline of Jamaica bears a close comparison with that shown on modern maps; Thornton himself was famous for the general accuracy of his charts. The reprodution on the stamp shows the detail clearly enough; the designer added a compass rose at the top right.

 

Such designs as these are praiseworthy in their depiction of old maps, often difficult enough to reproduce successfully as book illustrations, let alone as the subject of a stamp design several times reduced in format from the original and in a totally different printing medium. Many old maps have elaborately engraved decorative devices such as ornate title cartouches, large compass roses, figured scale cartouches and indeed large areas of decoration put in by the original mapmaker (often) to disguise cartographic deficiency or to conceal the fact that he had, as was almost legion in those days, plagiarised his map from another source without acknowledgement, or placed mythical animals at strategic places, giving rise to Jonathan Swift's oft-quoted quatrain, published in 1733 in On Poetry, A Rapsody:

So Geographers in Afric-maps,
With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps;
And o'er uninhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns.

Swift's remarks are said to have been inspired by a chart of John Seller of the West Indies which shows also the western part of the African continent occupied by a splendid large elephant.


The writer has the feeling that there was certainly a want of feeling for good design which produced the disappointing British Virgin Islands map set in 1977 (SG 367-70). This set reproduced maps and charts published between 1738 and 1779 but so poorly and with fussy lettering and 'cartouches' out of keeping with their subject. This is all the more disappointing since the 1952 definitive issue for the same territory included some particularly fine map stamps, albeit inspired by a modern British Admiralty chart, showing 2c, Jost van Dyke; 4c, Anegada; 8c, Virgin Gorda; 12c, Tortola, and $4.80, a general map of the Virgin Islands (SG 137, 139,141,142 and 147).

The subject of old maps on stamps is one that is large and growing, but the serious thematist can limit himself successfully within this field to show, for example, the routes of explorers and their discoveries as depicted on stamps. The fine 1940 New Zealand Id Centennial showing Capt Cook and a map of New Zealand already has been mentioned, but the same issue included in the 2d value (SG 612) a particularly neat depiction of Abel Janszoon Tasman, the Dutch seventeenth century navigator, his flagship three-master Heemskerck and a chart of the western coast of Statenlandt at the point where the later-discovered Cook Strait separates North from South Island as drawn in 1642. Until James Cook showed otherwise in his circumnavigation of the islands in 1769, Tasman's discovery was considered as part of the so-called 'Great Southern Continent.'


Sometimes the very name of a territory calls to mind its depiction on an old map: Newfoundland. In 1933, Newfoundland issued a. set of stamps commemorating the 350th aniversary of the formal annexation of the island to England on August 5, 1583 by Sir Humphrey Gilbert by authority Letters Patent of Elizabeth 1. The 20c value (SG 247) shows part of Captain John Mason's map, 'Insula olim vocata Nova Terrae. The Iland called of oIde Newfound land,' published at London as the frontispiece to Sir William Vaughan's The Golden Fleece, 1626. Perkins, Bacon's production of the stamp issue gives a good idea of the appearance of the original engraved map, which is oriented south at the top. For long, mapmakers oriented their maps to any of the four cardinal points of the compass, such a practice often being dictated by the size of the copper engraving plate or woodblock available and also the particular shape of the territory to be shown on the map. Although we are nowadays accustomed to a northward orientation on our maps, John Mason's map of Newfoundland was for a long time the best delineation of the island. Mason's map showed the location of the English settlements on the A valon Peninsula (top left on the stamp) in the vicinity of the present-day St John's. Vaughan made use of the map at the time in order to express his high hopes for the English settlement.


The collecting of maps on stamps has given rise to the term carto-philately and for those interested in exploring the subject further, there is a specialist branch of the American Topical Association which publishes The Carto-Philatelist, a quarterly publication edited by Evelyn T. Nelson, 249 Hoffman Street, Franklin Square, Long Island NY 11010, USA. This publication is now in its 24th volume - a fact in itself sufficient testimony to the interest in maps on stamps - and often has detailed articles on particular subjects in the theme of map stamps, as for example, a recent article by WaIter Klinefelter on the Canadian exploration of Jacques Cartier CJacques Cartier's Canadian Exploration' in: The Carto-Philatelist Vol XXII, Issue No. 3, p 24. Also recommended is the American Topical Association's own Topical Handbook No 26: Map Stamps of the World and subsequent additions in the columns of Topical Time, both published by the American Topical Association, 3306 North 50th Street, Milwaukee WI 53216, USA. A brief study of explorers' routes was published in 1964 by the now-defunct Map Collectors' Circle, London, entitled Ancient Maps and Explorers' Routes on Stamps, as Vot. II, No 15 in the series, but is, unfortunately, now out of print.

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