As part of the author's current project collating all pre-1800 atlases in the British Library he has studied the contents of more than sixty-five atlases by Seller, the Thorntons, and the successor firm of Mount & Page. Although Seller's maritime atlas publishing venture ended in failure he deserves perhaps more recognition than he has been accorded as a pioneer in this field.

UP TO THE late 1660s British navigators and seamen were almost totally reliant on sea charts made and printed abroad. By 1588 Lucas Janszoon Waghenhaer's pioneering Spiegel der Zeevaerdt had been translated by Sir Anthony Ashley into English as The Mariners Mirrour and new plates engraved for a London edition. These charts with their coastal profiles proved popular and for many years all pilot books of charts were known colloquially as "Waggoners".

Later there were, of course, the masterly copperplate charts of Sir Robert Dudley engraved by Luchini which were printed and published in Florence in 1646-47 but not, apparently, widely circulated in England. In 1657 James Moxon – John Seller's predecessor as the King's Hydrographer – put together a Book of Sea Platts consisting of six charts, perhaps hoping to create a larger atlas. But in nearly all facets of seventeenth-century maritime cartography the Dutch completely dominated the world chart trade, first with books of sea charts and sailing directions published by Willem Blaeu and Johannes Janssonius, and then with large sea atlases produced by rival Amsterdam and Rotterdam firms such as Arnold and Jacob Colom, Anthony Jacobsz and the Lootsman family, Hendrik Doncker, and – as the acknowledged masters of chart production – the Amsterdam house of Pieter and Hendrik Goos.

By the time of the Restoration in 1660 the paucity of indigenous material was both a strategic threat and damaging to British pride as a sea-faring nation; nevertheless it was more for commercial reasons that John Seller launched his first atlas of sea charts, the English Pilot, in 1671.

Seller himself was trained as an instrument maker. His first venture into publishing seems to have been as the author of a popular book Praxis Nautica or Practical Navigation, published in 1669. His hopes and ambitions for remedying the want of British charts are expounded in the preface to the English Pilot of 1671. He planned to publish at least four books of charts covering the northern navigations (the North Sea, the Baltic and the routes to Archangel in Russia); the southern navigations (including the Mediterranean and the western coast of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope); navigations in Oriental waters; and finally navigations around the Americas. Even largely relying on existing Dutch charts - which Seller acknowledged in his preface was the only practical course – these aspirations were over optimistic, and led him to neglect the need for much larger resources to support the preparation of charts and atlases covering the greater part of the world. His approach is well summed up by a contemporary wag who wrote: "What Seller made, be sure will Sell", and for the first five or six years this seems to have been so.

John Seller's world map of 1673 combines seasonal, zodiacal and symbolical scenes together with serious astronomical diagrams and two pictures of the surface of the moon. (By courtesy of the British Library, 7.TAB.77*.)

In twentieth-century eyes Seller's efforts have, to some extent, been denigrated by Samuel Pepys' disparaging remarks: "Mr Phillips at sea examined and showed me how Seller's book in 1668 was the very same platts [as] the Dutch without a Dutch word so much as turned into English much less anything in the maps altered." And in another context: "…he says that he knows it to be true and Seller will not deny it, that he bought the old worn Dutch copper plates for old copper, and had them refreshed in several places, and has used them in his pretended new book."

However, at the time, the Dutch were undeniably the leaders in chart making, and it was common practice in all countries for maps and charts to be copied and republished with or without acknowledgement in the absence of any fresh surveys.

No copies of the first edition of Seller's English Pilot are extant prior to 1671 and whatever atlas of Seller's that Pepys and Phillips were examing seems to have been some very early draft, now lost. The gist of Pepys' remark was, however, true. Although most of the charts state on them that they are "by John Seller" many were taken from old Dutch plates, provided with English titles and often trimmed down in size. Originally the plates were prepared by Janssonius for a counterfeit edition of Blaeu's Het Licht der Zeevaert in 1620. They then passed to Jan van Loon for a Frenchtext edition of his sea atlas Le Nouveau Flambeau de la Mer in about 1650, before being acquired by Seller. These chart sheets were used both in copies of the English Pilot and also concurrently in editions of Seller's Coasting Pilot and his Atlas Maritimus.

However, some new plates were commissioned by Seller which were signed by British engravers and it is instructive to examine who these were: