SINCE AUTUMN 1991 when "Discovery of the Rawlinson copperplate maps of the Americas and their related prints" by Pearce S. Grove and Helen M. Wallis appeared in The Map Collector (Issue 56) Mary Alice Lowenthal and Helen Wallis have undertaken further researches on the Rawlinson-Holkham series. The plates in Richard Rawlinson's collection in the Bodleian Library comprise Plate A (a general map), and Plates I, II, III, VIII, IX and X. To recapitulate, in May 1991 Helen Wallis found at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, in John Innys' System of Cosmography, completed about 1750, prints from all the Rawlinson plates except I and IX. She then identified prints bearing the numbers IV, V and VII as the missing items in the series, and set out an almost complete list of plates and prints (TMC 56, p.21). Only one item, no. VI, remained to be found.

By Pearce S. Grove and Helen M. Wallis

Many millions of visitors must have marvelled at the reconstructed colonial town of Williamsburg, the eighteenth century capital of the British colony of Virginia. Few will know the part played in the reconstruction by one humble copperplate which was discovered in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and led indirectly to one of the most remarkable finds of this century — a batch of copperplates giving a unique and remarkable picture of life for the settlers in the 1700s. This discovery has added immeasurably to historical knowledge. Here Pearce S. Grove, who was Library Director of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation which protects the interests of the town today, describes how the find was made and Helen Wallis, his collaborator, analyses the maps and her further discovery of the prints. Pearce Grove is now Director of Development at Virginia State Library Foundation, Richmond, and Helen Wallis has now retired as Map Librarian of the British Library.

The controversy over the Vinland map – genuine artefact or forgery – has caused the most heated arguments ever generated by a map. Colleague has been set against colleague, friend against friend, and still the dispute rumbles on. Whether the evidence to prove its authenticity or disprove it will ever emerge it is hard to say. In the meantime Helen Wallis, retired Map Librarian of the British Library, London, who first saw the map thirty years ago, tells the story as she sees it. The map was on display recently at the British Museum in the exhibition 'Fake? The Art of Deception'.

by Helen Wallis

WE ARE PRIVILEGED (by permission of Mrs Frances Hanna) to print here for the first time these verses by the late Warren L. Hanna of California on the problem of identifying Drake's anchorage in 1579 on the north-west coast of North America. A distinguished Californian lawyer, Warren Hanna, was a member of the State of California Sir Francis Drake Commission. He applied 'keen judicial analysis and a mastery of historical narrative' to the unravelling of the 400-year-old conundrum. He published the results of his study in Lost Harbor. The Controversy over Drake's California anchorage (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: 1979). His conclusion was that 'after 400 years of mystery, including nearly 200 years of controversy, we still have no solution to the Drake anchorage riddle (p.344). Quoting Robert F. Heizer (1974), he added: 'Thus far, no specialist knowledge has succeeded in discovering the solution to the problem … But opinions have not and never will solve the question – only some kind of archaeological or documentary evidence can resolve the problem.'

BY 1510 PORTUGUESE voyages round the Cape of Good Hope on the route to India had revealed the general shape of Africa but, with the exception of Ethiopia, the continental interior remained largely unknown for nearly three hundred years. In the eighteenth century mapmakers were still using traditional sources such as Ptolemy's Geography, dating from c. AD 150, in its original form. The first stage in the transformation of the map was the work of the French geographer Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, who on his large four-sheet map of Africa, 1749, swept away the speculative features and was content to leave large areas of the interior blank. This became the model for later eighteenth century maps of Africa.