IN ONE YEAR, 1860, the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty sold 140,000 charts, an average of over fifty copies of each of the 2,500 separate sheets then in print. By the end of the nineteenth century that number would have quadrupled; yet Admiralty charts are hard to find today. The reason is simple, and probably obvious: loose sheet navigational charts have always been treated as functional objects and no more – to be annotated, rolled up or folded as convenience dictated, and eventually thrown away. For the modern collector, Admiralty charts have at least three advantages. Their inclusive coverage of the world's coastlines gives them relevance to anyone who lives by the coast or who goes down to the sea in ships. Then, their contemporary scarcity makes for a difficult and hence satisfying hunt. Finally, when a relevant sheet is located it may well prove to be inexpensive, because the unsurpassed merits of British Admiralty charting are not widely appreciated outside hydrographical circles!

Between 1813 and 1824 William Henry 'Mediterranean' Smyth surveyed much of the central Mediterranean and the coast of North Africa. The fair drawing for this chart of Alexandria was completed back in London in 1825 (By courtesy of Robert Douwma Prints & Maps Ltd).

For those who find dates hard to remember, it was thoughtful of the Admiralty to issue the first chart in 1800. This meant, however, that they were narrowly pipped to the post by the equivalent department in Spain, which published its first sheet two years previously. Both these efforts, though, pale beside those of the French, whose Dépôt Général de la Marine had been established as far back as 1720. Their leading light and his major production – Jacques Nicholas Bellin's Hydrographie Françoise – are well known. It was, indeed, the enforced reliance on the charts of their French enemy which persuaded the British Admiralty in 1795 to appoint their first Hydrographer. Alexander Dalrymple. History's uncomplimentary verdict on Dalrymple is now being rethought and the 'father of the Admiralty Chart' must be given due credit for having published more than half of those sheets which were listed in the earliest extant Admiralty chart catalogue, that of 1825.

Dalrymple was also Hydrographer to the East India Company. The bibliographical confusions resulting from this dual role are highly involved. It is planned to include in a future issue of The Map Collector explanatory notes on the dating of Admiralty charts. The unravelling of the Dalrymple charts is best held over until then. Under his successor, Thomas Hurd, Admiralty charts ceased to be restricted to the Royal Navy, and in 1821 the first priced sheets were released for general sale. The tenure of the third Hydrographer, W.E. Parry, was interrupted by his two voyages to the Arctic and it was left to his successors, Francis Beaufort and John Washington, to win for the Admiralty chart the pre-eminent position it has held ever since. It was under Beaufort's direction that the decision was taken to extend the British surveying effort to much of the rest of the world – a policy that had been largely carried out by the time of Washington's death in 1863, and so efficiently that many of today's charts are merely updated versions of those original surveys. Entire volumes have, quite rightly, been devoted to early Admiralty surveying. It is only possible here to sample the riches and mention a few of the highlights from the first sixty years of the production of these charts.

The early surveyors were faced with a wide range of difficulties and dangers. The hydrographic work was carried out in sailing vessels or in oared longboats – the first limited in manoeuvrability and liable to strike the underwater perils they were specifically there to discover, the second easily swamped in a squall. Not unnaturally, some of the existing inhabitants, in Africa and the Pacific for example, took violent exception to activities whose obscure purpose they could not fathom. In Africa the deadly malaria, the cause of which remained a mystery, decimated the surveying parties as soon as they entered any river estuary. Given the inadequacy of the instruments in use at the time, and the parsimony of the Admiralty paymasters (the main reason for Parry's resignation) one might expect the quality of earlier work to have suffered. Yet it is precisely this period which produced most of the greatest names in the field.

The roll-call of those whose skill and, above all, perseverance produced the first scientific and accurate charts of many regions in the world – and in a number of cases the first printed charts of any kind – would be several columns long. We can do no more than select three from this great list: Smyth, Owen and FitzRoy.

William Henry (or 'Mediterranean') Smyth was the architect of one of the earliest and most thorough Admiralty surveys. Having already proved his worth with unofficial surveys in Spain and the Balearic Islands, Smyth charted the entire coasts of North Africa, the Adriatic, the Ionian Islands, Sicily and Malta between 1813 and 1824. So impressed were his superiors by his early achievements that they announced in 1817: 'As a mark of their approbation and as an incitement to other officers to give their attention to similar pursuits they will direct a Selection of his Drawings to be engraved and published for the benefit of Captain Smyth.' The Hydrography of Sicily, Malta and the adjacent Islands (1823) was the result. Their Lordships' atypical generosity was not misplaced. In 1940, when an Allied landing on the coast of Sicily was under consideration, Smyth's original manuscripts were called for and studied. It may seem curious that the publication of many of Smyth's other surveys should have been delayed, in some cases by more than a quarter of a century. The reason was that in 1826, two years after his return from the Mediterranean, on being peremptorily ordered out of the Hydrographical Office, Smyth took all his unpublished manuscripts with him. Lengthy cajoling was required before these were gradually released for publication.

It was said of W.F.W. Owen's African charts that they were 'drawn and coloured with drops of blood.' Yet, assisted by A.T.E. Vidal, he managed to survey 30,000 miles of inhospitable coastline in just five years, providing in the process the first reliable charts of long stretches of the African coast. Malarial fever meant the burial parties were often overworked, especially in the dreaded Bight of Benin, where 'one comes out for forty goes in.' Nevertheless, his valiant effort was an essential precondition for the opening up of Africa's rivers to European trade, and, later, to the first attempts at colonialism. Shallow and shifting sand-bars at the entrance to most West African rivers – hindrances which more than one African ruler tried to spirit away by human sacrifice – were only one of the difficulties facing Owen and Vidal. Slavery was another. Following Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy was required to enforce the ban. At one point, on the River Sherbro, Owen was himself caught up in the hostilities, leading a successful assault against the slave trader, James Tucker.

The fourth in a six-sheet series covering the whole of Africa's coastline, this 1827 chart describes southern Africa, with an enlarged inset of the area around Cape Town. It summarizes part of the 30,000 mile survey carried out largely by W.F.W. Owen and A.T.E. Vidal (By courtesy of Robert Douwma Prints & Maps Ltd).