By Richard A. Gardiner

CARTOGRAPHY has been defined in many ways by many people, but there can be no doubt that its main function is to provide a means of   visual communication on subjects which have in themselves some spatial elements. The cartographer’s products may be simple or complex, vital or of rela¬tively small importance, but all cartographers have the same aim, to transmit information to the viewer - the map user. Only a few map makers achieved lasting fame, but a great many have in the past played useful parts in the advancement of knowledge, even if, in a narrower sense, they contributed little to the advancement of their own profession. The same is true today, but unlike their fellows in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, many modern cartographers work in complete anonymity within comparatively large organisations. The identification of map makers is one of the aspects of the history of cartography which makes its study so interesting.

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In 1965, in the second volume of the publications of the Map Collectors’ Circle, there appeared the first instalment of Ronald Vere Tooley’s Dictionary of Mapmakers. In this work, still in progress, Mr Tooley is attempting to include brief entries on all geographers, map engravers, map publishers, etc. of all nationalities and countries in a single list, covering from the earliest times to 1900. It is a formidable project, expected to contain more than 30,000 entries, when completed. In 1971, the sixth section of thirty-eight pages appeared, with the last entry: ‘Kruse, Karsten Christian’, but this marks little more than the first third of the whole work.

Mr Tooley’s Dictionary is, of course, but the latest in a long line of similar lists. It aims at being more comprehensive than its predecessors, the last of which was Kartenmacher aller Lander und Zeiten, produced by Wilhelm Bonacker in 1966, just after Tooley’s first instalment appeared. In many respects, these two modern lists complement, rather than compete with, each other. Bonacker provides, for each entry, dates of birth and death, and place of work, together with references to source material for further reading; Tooley provides a short list of selected works, and occasional, but useful, notes. Bonacker was deliberately selective, listing only 6350 map makers, although he included many alive today; his intention was to include only significant cartographers, and few have questioned his judgment, at least up to the twentieth century, although there must be many border-line cases. Tooley’s aim is to be comprehensive, and research workers will owe him a special debt for this approach. All map collections necessarily include many products of the lesser lights of the profession, and information about them is badly needed. In future, the cartographer will, we hope, be really rare who is ‘not in Tooley’. Bonacker, in the introduction to his book, provides a brief history of earlier listings, from Ortelius’ short list of eighty-seven cartographers onwards; no useful purpose would be served by repeating it here.

Tooley has chosen his title well. Most of the entries refer to the period in history when the great majority of maps were engraved, and production required the co-operation of a trio of craftsmen: the compiler, sometimes a surveyor, more often a geographer, responsible for the accuracy of the information provided; the engraver, at times a mere copier but more often an artist himself and a true cartographer, responsible for the legibility and beauty of the resulting map; and lastly, the publisher, responsible for the marketing but in many cases also providing the grand design for the whole work. Usually three different men were concerned, but often two or more of the functions were combined in one individual; the middle men, the engravers, sometimes compiled maps and frequently sold them. Only rarely were women involved, although there are several instances of widows who continued their late husbands’ publishing activities. Anne Lea (fl 1700-1725), the widow of Philip Lea, continued to publish maps for a quarter of a century after his death, in successive partnerships with Robert Morden, William Berry and Richard Glynne.

In Tooley’s Dictionary there will, of course, be found notes on all the great names in cartography, but, in truth, in this context, these are of minor importance; much more detailed information is readily available elsewhere. The main value of this new work will lie in the short entries of the ‘lesser men’, the men on whom Tooley has himself commented in his preface: ‘For a large percentage of the names cited no information is available, and many are known only from a single work or map.’ These entries offer a challenge to every map curator and research worker who can find time to investigate the lives or activities of any of the subjects just a little further. Something, hitherto unrecorded, can often be found, and these little snippets of information are, in the writer’s view, worth publication, if only to add a few grains to the whole structure of the history of cartography and perhaps indicate starting points for further research in other directions. A few notes of this type are appended below. They are necessarily incomplete and probably inaccurate, but may encourage others to comment and correct them, and, it is hoped, produce more. The subjects of these notes are not great figures in cartographic history; they are not rivals of such men as Speed, Blaeu, Ogilby or d’Anville, or even lesser lights like Moll or Emanuel Bowen. Their selection has been due to chance alone; they are items from a rag-bag of minor investigations into some of cartography’s lesser men.

Jehoshaphat Aspin seems to have been a historian, with a bent for chronological analysis, who produced a number of books between 1805 and 1832. His major work was probably his two-volume Systematic Analysis of Universal History, published 1816-1820 by Leigh, of Liverpool, for which he prepared a number of maps on historical subjects. In 1814 he is known to have assisted Professor C. Gros in the production of a revised version, with maps, of C. V. Lavoisne’s Genealogical, Historical and Chronological Atlas. Lavoisne’s original atlas, published in 1807, contained no maps, merely genealogical tables; Lavoisne himself died during the production and it was completed by Gros. A ‘second American edition’ of the Atlas, published by M. Carey & Son, Philadelphia, in 1820, contained 32 maps, some by Aspin, but his contributions were omitted from the third American edition, published by Carey, and the fourth edition, of 1840, revised by J. Satchell. Copies of a map of Asia, pre¬pared originally by Aspin in 1822 ‘for the elucidation of Abbé Gaulthier’s Geographi¬cal Games’, are known in several states, engraved by N. R. Hewitt and published by J. Harris & Son. A chart of New South Wales, by J. Aspin, engraved by Hewitt, is recorded by Tooley; the subject seems very far from his other known interests.

The cartographic activities of the Basire family of engravers, working from about 1720 to 1855, remain somewhat obscure. The family’s fame rests mainly on the work of James Basire (1730-1802) in the field of engraving copies of paintings, especially those of R. A. Turner.