Description

William FADEN (1749 – 1836), Publisher. / José de SOLANO y Bote (1726 – 1806), Cartographer. / Antoine-Hyacinthe-Anne de CHASTENET DE PUYSÉGUR (1752 – 1809), Cartographer.

London: William Faden, Jany. 1st 1796.

 

This rare, separately issued map was published by William Faden (1749 – 1836), the era’s most successful and influential commercial cartographer in the English-speaking world. The successor of the legendary mapmaker Thomas Jeffreys, he was the Geographer to King George III and the Prince of Wales. He made his name by publishing many of the authoritative maps of the American Revolutionary War, a role he reprised during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Faden published the present map at the beginning of 1796 to satiate the enormous public interest in the ongoing British Occupation of Saint Domingue (1793-8), a colossal military operation that started out with great ambitions but ended up being an unmitigated disaster.

The map is highly accurate and detailed for the time, predicated upon the finest antecedents. The coasts and major harbours (noting the locations of anchorages) are well defined, while all major cities, towns, forts and rural parish churches are labelled, while the various geographic-plantation regions are named. The road systems and rivers are carefully delineated, while the many mountain ranges are expressed by hachures.

The Franco-Spanish frontier is marked as the ‘Limits between the Spanish and the French’. Various interesting details are noted such the locations of ‘Rich Gold Mines’ and ‘NB. In the Peninsula of Samana several settlements of families from the Canary Islands have been made a few years ago’ and ‘the Wild Goat Hills’, etc.

The mapping of the French part, or western third of the island, is based upon the great French hydrographer Antoine-Hyacinthe-Anne de Chastenet de Puységur’s chart, Carte réduite de l’Isle de St Domingue levée… en 1784 et 1785 (Paris, 1787). Please see a link, courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b5972656n/f1.item

The mapping of the Spanish part of the island (today’s Dominican Republic) is predicated upon the work of José de Solano y Bote, 1st Marquess of Socorro (1726 – 1806), a highly skilled military engineer, who surveyed the colony in 1776, while serving as the Governor of Santo Domingo. Information from his resulting manuscript map was incorporated into Juan López’s Carta Plana de la Isla de Santo Domingo llamada tambien Española (Madrid, 1784), which was likely Faden’s direct source. Please see a link to the López map, courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53098559r

Faden published the present map at the beginning of 1796 to satiate the enormous public interest in the ongoing British Occupation of Saint-Domingue (1793-8), a colossal military operation that commenced with grand great ambitions but ended up being an unmitigated disaster.

The Occupation occurred during the Haitian Revolution (1791 – 1804), whereupon black and mulatto rebels in Saint-Domingue, led by the great General Toussaint L’Ouverture, rose against French rule (France had fallen under the control of Jacobin revolutionaries, while the colony had been under mixed Revolutionary-Royalist rile). Before the revolution, Saint-Domingue was the world’s greatest sugar producer, an economy fuelled by slavery.

Britain, which was then at war with France, was led by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. He believed that seizing Saint-Domingue could be a masterly geostrategic move. It was reasoned that by capturing all or part of Saint-Domingue, Britian could use the ultra-valuable colony as a bargaining chip to leverage their position viz. the war in Europe, while gaining massive revenues from the colony’s sugar crop.

In September 1793, British forces, launched from Jamaica, commenced a five-year occupation of large swathes of western and southern Saint-Domingue. They linked up with French royalist forces (who despised the Jacobins, who were against slavery), while the Spanish, from Santo Domingo, invaded Saint Domingue, joining forces with the British.

However, it was not military opposition that doomed the British occupation. Over the five years of their intervention, yellow fever killed as many as 70% of the British troops stationed there, or about 12,270 persons. This made it one of the most lethal epidemics to befall any large modern military force.

When the British left Saint-Domingue in May 1798, after signing as treaty with L’Ouverture, the occupation held the distinction of being one of the greatest military disasters of the era, as in addition to the loss of so many lives, it wasted millions of £ that were otherwise desperately needed to finance the war in Europe.

The present example of the map is the second (of two states) of the map, the first having been issued by Faden with the imprint date of ‘Oct.r 1st 1794’. The two states are largely the same, with the only remarkable difference being that the second issue features some additional annotations, as well as improved detail, especially in the deep interior, near the Franco-Spanish frontier. Please see an image of the first edition, courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Library (American Geographical Society Library Digital Map Collection):

https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agdm/id/34926/

Both editions of the map were separately issued, although sometimes examples were included in William Faden’s General Atlas of Modern Geography, an atlas factice that was produced in the early 19th century.

The present map is rare. While we can trace around a dozen institutional examples of the separate map in institutions, while we can trace only a couple sales record from the last ten years.

References: Boston Public Library: G4930 1796 .F33; Huntington Library: 093:783 M; National Maritime Museum (Greenwich): DUC245:8/26;National Library of Australia: MAP Ra 25; Toronto Public Library: 912.7293 F11 (small); OCLC: 263683433.

1.200 EUR