Description
FIRST SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE MAP
John BYRES.
London: Samuel Hooper, 1776.
Copper engraving with full original wash colour, dissected into 16 sections and mounted upon original linen (Very Good, resplendent original colours, some very light stains, a stellar example), 63 x 94 cm (25 x 37 inches).
At the Treaty of Paris, that concluded the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), France relinquished possession of the West Indian islands of Dominica, St. Vincent, Bequia, Grenada, and Tobago to Britain. To facilitate settlement of these islands, the British crown entrusted the Honourable Commissioners for the Sale of Lands in the Ceded Islands to oversee the division of land and the sale of cadastral lots to British proprietors. The commission was led by William Young, William Hewitt, and R. Wynn.
From the outset, a great challenge was that the existing mapping of these islands was highly imprecise. As such the commissioners created the ‘Ceded Islands Surveys’, whereby each island would be mapped to the best systematic scientific standards. This endeavour was led by John Byres, the Chief Surveyor of the Ceded Islands, and its work commenced in 1765 and continued into the 1770s.
In Tobago, Byres’s team established a thorough cadastral framework designed specifically to facilitate the organized distribution and lease of sugar plantations to British investors. Subtle hand-colouring defines the island’s primary administrative divisions, neatly zoning Tobago into its foundational northern, southern, eastern, and western divisions and parishes.
Comprehensive cadastral partitioning forms the functional centerpiece of the sheets, dividing the island’s available agricultural landscape into distinct, numbered plots that rarely exceeded 300 acres in size. The numbering schema explicitly maps out individual estate boundaries, charting a highly organized real estate matrix that determined the social and economic architecture of the colony for nearly two centuries. While specific individual surnames were withheld from the face of the map to ensure longevity, the layout documents land explicitly set aside by the Crown for the accommodation of poor settlers, alongside dedicated municipal parcels intended for future town sites and defensive military outposts. Maritime navigation is heavily integrated along the jagged coastline, featuring extensive coastal toponyms, verified water depth soundings, and tactical symbols marking safe anchorages, alongside a notable reference to the historic “Indians’ grounds” [Carib lands] located near the Great River Shoal.
Dramatic topography is communicated through dense, meticulous hachuring, where variations in line thickness and density create three-dimensional elevation shading to map out the rugged interior. Notably, the survey carefully leaves the upper mountainous spine of the island largely unallocated, laying the groundwork for the historic April 1776 ordinance that legally established the Main Ridge Forest Reserve, the earliest protected rainforest reserve in the Western Hemisphere, deliberately spared from sugar cultivation to preserve the regional rainfall required for agricultural fertility.
The exceptional rarity of the map is linked to the unique printing history of its publisher, Samuel Hooper. Unlike the massive, corporate cartographic houses of the early nineteenth century, Hooper operated as a specialized London ‘boutique’ bookseller who primarily focused on historical topographies and localized architectural views. His involvement with Byres was limited to a highly specific, low-print run series covering only four of the “Ceded Islands” (Dominica, St. Vincent, Grenada, and Tobago). As these maps were issued independently for government use and wealthy plantation syndicates rather than general commercial atlases, the survival rate of original 1776 impressions remain exceedingly low.
Amazingly, the present map remained the basic template for the cartography of Tobago for a century. The map was re-engraved and reissued by Robert Wilkinson in 1794. Updated, entirely reengraved issues, serving as the definitive maps of Tobago, were published by James Wyld I in 1832 and his son, James Wyld II, in 1863.
A Note on Rarity
The present map is extremely rare. We can trace 9 institutional examples, held by the British Library, National Library of Scotland, John Carter Brown Library, Newberry Library, Library of Congress, National Maritime Museum, William Clements Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France and the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.
References British Library (2 examples): Maps 82510.(3.) and Maps K.Top.123.120; National Library of Scotland: 6.1844; John Carter Brown Library: Map ; Cabinet Eu776 1; Newberry Library: map6F G5161.G46 1776 .B9; Library of Congress: G5160 1776 .B9; William Clements Library: Maps 7-I-1776 By.3; Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Cartes et plans, GE C-11394; OCLC: 5412782, 316559735, 1360555216, 963059889, 1484357796, 538179355; S. Max EDELSON, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 2017), pp. 197-248; Kit KAPP, ‘Some early printed maps of Trinidad and Tobago’, Map Collectors’ Series, 1 (10) no 43; D.L. NIDDRIE, ‘Eighteenth-Century Settlement in the British Caribbean’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, no. 40 (December 1966), pp. 67-77;SELLERS and VAN EE, Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies 1750-1789, no. 2111.