Description
This exceedingly rare map is one of most attractive of all major West Indies maps of the Emancipation Era, being J. Johnson’s large format map of Antigua, which meticulously labels all its sugar plantations (specifying their sources of power), marks towns, villages and slave quarters, depicts all roads and infrastructure, and carefully represents all topographical features and jurisdictional boundaries, as well as presenting a detailed depiction of the coasts and offshore reefs.
Notably, the map was the product of an extremely ambitious commercial art project and, as such, it is of extraordinarily fine printing quality, design and embellishment with lovely aquatint views. Johnson’s work, issued only four years before the abolition of slavery, is the last map to capture Antigua during the era of the sugar economy, before the island underwent a dramatic socio-economic transformation that included the brief rise of a Black elite community on the island and the downfall of its agrarian sector.
Johnson’s work, which was the only major map of the Antigua produced between 1793 and 1852, shows the island divided into its 6 parishes, with each distinguished by its own resplendent hue of original colour, while the coastlines are traced in an azure wash. The work, executed to the ample scale of About 1¼ miles to 1 inch, names all the estates and shows the street grid of the capital, Saint John’s. The ‘Reference’, on the lefthand side, explains the symbols used throughout to identify Churches, Chapels, [the power sources for grinding sugar cane:] Windmills, Dismantled Windmills (indicative of the decline in the sugar industry), Cattle Mills, Dismantled Cattle Mills, Steam Mills (a recent innovation), ‘Negroes Houses’ (Slaves’ Quarters), Roads, Parish Boundaries, Division Boundaries and Forts & Batteries. The numbers along the roads mark the mileages between major junctures.
The map features much practical nautical information, as it charts the islands dangerous offshore reefs, and provides notes for sailors, including ‘Directions for Saint John’s’ (upper centre) and ‘Directions for Saint John’s Road and Harbour’ (lower centre), while a line in the sea to the north of the island reveals a good route from Saint John’s out to the open Atlantic.
A highlight of the work is the 5 lovely hand coloured aquatint coastal profile views, lower right, meant to aid mariners, likely made after original sketches by Johnson, who was skilled artist. They are, from top to bottom: [1] ‘Appearance of Deseada when first seen S.W.½S. about 8 leagues’ {La Deseada, or La Désirade, is an island off Guadeloupe that was a key waypoint for sailing to Antigua from Europe}; [2] ‘Deseada bearing S.W.b.S. about 5 leagues’; [3] ‘Appearance of Antigua bearing S.W.b.W. distant 8 or 9 leagues; [4] ‘Appearance of the Island of Antigua from W.b.S. to W.N.W. about 4 leagues’; and [5] ‘Appearance of the Land entering St. John’s Harbour Antigua’, being a lovely prospect.
The ‘Observations’, in the upper left corner, note that Antigua has a land area of 108¼ square miles, or 69,277 acres, while below is the breakdown in acreage for each of the island’s parishes.
In the lower left corner is a chart, ‘The Population of Antigua in…’ noting population statistics (divided int both ‘White’ and ‘Slave’) at regular chronological intervals from 1707 to 1824, when the island had a total of 30,314 residents.
Much of the geographical detail is predicated upon the previous great map of the island, John Luffman’s Antigua in the West Indies / America (1793), although many key details have been updated, while the artistic adornment is novel.
For comparison, please see a link to the Luffman map:
The Context of the Map’s Publication
The context of the publication of the Johnson map is unusual, and it explains its extraordinary rarity.
In the mid-1820s, J. Johnson (of whom little is known, although he was evidently a highly talented artist), embarked upon a boldly ambitious project to create a grand multi-volume folio series of topographical views (after his own drawings), as well as maps, of the British West Indian islands, accompanied by textual descriptions. No expense was to be spared in the engraving, colouring and binding of the work, which was intended to be purchased by major West Indies plantation owners, as well as merchants and military and political figures with connections to the region.
Johnson published the first 3 (of an intended 5) parts of his intended magnum opus, as A Series of Views in the West Indies: engraved from drawings taken recently in the islands: with letter press explanations made from actual observations (London: published by (Parts I-II:) Messrs. Underwood (part III:) Smith, Elder & Co, 1827-1829). This work included 11 grand topographical views (variously of Antigua, St. Christopher and Tortola), and, in Part III, an example of the present map, as well as the publisher’s advertisement leaf for the map.
However, A Series of Views in the West Indies, despite its inarguable artistic merits, was commercially a white elephant. Johnson’s timing was terrible, as the 1820s saw the sharp decline in the fortunes of many of his intended clients, while (as all Caribbean people know), collectors of maps/views of the West Indies tend to only like buying works featuring their own island and tend not want to pay for material showcasing ‘rival’ colonies. Indeed, it is recorded that many potential clients requested that the publisher send them certain separate views, a notion that Johnson found frustrating. As such, subscriptions flagged, while Johnson was buried in debts from the endeavour. He shelved the publication of Parts IV and V.
To rescue the project, Johnson decided to publish a standalone work solely focusing upon what was thought to be his most commercially promising island, Antigua. He duly produced An Historical and Descriptive Account of Antigua, illustrated by numerous engravings, coloured in imitation of drawings taken on the spot.., accompanied by a map of the islands… with a list of proprietors, number of slaves, &c. &c. and a chronological table of events connected with the colony (London: printed by Henry Baylis for the author, 1830), which included 6 topographical views, the present map, varied text, as well as a small geological map of Antigua and a map of the Leeward Islands. Sadly, this work, while gorgeous, proved too expensive for what was a rapidly deteriorating market, and Johnson found very few subscribers.
As such, only a handful of examples of both A Series of Views in the West Indies and An Historical and Descriptive Account of Antigua were ever printed. While strong circumstantial evidence suggests that his grand map of Antigua was also issued separately, clearly only a very small quantity of these were ever released.
A Note on Rarity
Johnson’s map of Antigua is exceedingly rare, as only a handful of examples were published, due to the commercial failure of the author’s West Indies publication projects.
We can trace the current whereabouts of only 4 other examples of the map, being 2 examples of the map separately, held by the National Archives U.K. and the Dockyard Museum (English Harbour, Antigua), as well as 2 examples within copies of the book, An Historical and Descriptive Account of Antigua, held by Watkinson Library, Trinity College (Dublin) and the private S.P. Lohia Collection. While there are a couple institutional listings for A Series of Views in the West Indies, these apparently lack the present map.
Moreover, we can trace only 3 instances of other examples of the map as being sold on the market in the last 20 years. There was an example of the separate map sold many years ago by an American dealer, while 2 examples of the map were sold at Christie’s London on April 8, 2004 as parts of two separate lots featuring A Series of Views in the West Indies (sold for £57,360) and An Historical and Descriptive Account of Antigua (sold for £22,705).
Historical Context: Antigua on the Eve of Transition: Emancipation and the Rise of the Black Antiguan Middle Class
The present map appeared during a period of transformative change in Antigua’s economy, politics, society, and its race relations. While the changes in some ways mirrored those on the other British West Indian colonies during the period of the abolition of slavery, in many key respects, the course of history in Antigua followed its own distinct trajectory.
Antigua was one of the first British colonies in the Caribbean, having been founded in 1632 by the great sugar baron Christopher Codrington, who bought setters over from St. Kitts. By the 1670s, Antigua had formed highly profitable sugar-slave economy. The heyday of the island’s agrarian bounty came in the 1760s, when it was the fourth largest sugar producer in the British Empire (next to Jamaica, Barbados and St. Kitts) and one of the wealthiest places in the world (at least as far as Antigua’s small white planter community was concerned). However, of the island’s 36,000 residents, 32,000 were slaves, with the ‘free coloured’ (liberated slave) population perhaps numbering only a few hundred souls. Meanwhile, beginning in the 1740s, Antigua was home to an important Royal Navy dockyard, at English Harbour.
While sugar remained important and was only crop that could be sustained upon a mass-scale in Antigua, as it was less fertile than the other great sugar islands, from 1770s onwards its soils gradually became depleted, such that its annual crops yields diminished. However, the island’s excellent location, immediately along the main West Indies-Europe shipping routes, aided by the stellar nature of Saint John’s Harbour, supported a booming mercantile trade independent of the sugar industry, while the fixed naval establishment proved a reliable support to the economy.
During the early 1800s, a new class gradually emerged in Antigua that was to play an outsized role in shaping its future development. By this time, many slaves have been manumitted, while the children of mixed unions between white men and black women (either slave or free) had created a large and growing community of people who were legally termed as ‘free coloured’. As the historian Susan Lowes remarked, Antigua’s free coloured population was “Neither Black nor White, neither Slave nor Free”. Yet, over time, they were granted ever more civil rights, while some, those being the heirs of well-off white forbears, were provided with good educations and financial resources. Some of these individuals showed great industry and a strong work ethic, leading them to make successful careers as merchants or colonial officials. Indeed, the ‘free coloured’ community gradually came to occupy the island’s emerging ‘mulatto middle class’.
Between 1805 and 1821, Antigua’s free coloured population grew from 1,300 to over 4,000 persons, even as the island’s general population declined from 36,000 to 31,000. On the eve of the abolition of slavery, the free coloured community was simply too large and economically significant for their concerns to be ignored, and unlike the case in most other places in the British West Indies, where such communities tended to be marginated, there they came to play a central role in the island’s economic, political and social life, even at an elite level.
It was at this juncture that Johnson’s A New & Improved Map of the Island of Antigua appeared.
Moving forward, the catalyst for change was the administration of Major-General Sir Evan John Murray-Macgregor, who served as the Governor of Antigua and the Leeward Islands from 1832 to 1836. An ardent Scottish liberal and abolitionist, he granted free coloured Antiguans full civil rights in 1832, including the right to vote (pending the normal property qualifications) and sit in the legislature. While the British crown proclaimed in 1833 that slavery was to be abolished across the empire through a gradual process lasting from 1834 to 1838 (such that the former slaves had to serve as ‘apprentices’ to their former masters for this four-year period), in 1834, Murray-Macgregor ordered the immediate and total abolition of slavery in Antigua, with no provision for the apprenticeship regime. He also befriended the colony’s leading mixed-race clans, such as the Shervingtons, Athills and Lovings, and awarded them with crown appointments and government contracts, counting several black figures amongst his ‘kitchen cabinet’. It was said that Murray-MacGregor sought to “banish forever the objections to the seating of mixed and pure blood on similar occasions”.
Importantly, in the wake of the abolition of slavery, Antigua’s sugar economy held up much better than that of the other British West Indian islands, at least initially. First, the island was small, and its estates were relatively well managed, usually by dedicated resident proprietors, unlike the situation on most other islands. Second, the former slaves did not desert the sugar plantations en masse, as they did in places such as Jamaica, as there was virtually no free land on Antigua for them to establish their own farms, while the island’s only real towns, Saint John and Falmouth, could not accommodate a large influx of migrants from the countryside. As such, the planters were able to maintain most of the existing workforce, although at greater costs, having to forge arrangements with the heads of the ‘freedmen villages’. As such, Antigua’s economy remained buoyant, with the effect that the island’s small white population (which numbered only around 2,000) felt sufficiently secure to allow the emerging black middle class to enjoy some of the island’s good fortune.
As such, from the 1830s to 1850s, Antigua, elected several black members to its legislative assembly; had many black officials in senior government offices; while several of the island’s leading merchants, lawyers and bankers were of partial Afro-Caribbean ancestry. Additionally, black members held key roles in the local Freemason’s lodge, which was then the island’s most important elite social club.
Contemporary visitors to Antigua, often painted a rosy picture of the state of the island’s black elite. Mrs. Frances Lanaghan Flanagan, after her 1842 tour of the island, reported that “white and coloured gentlemen walk, and talk, and dine together – drink sangaree at one another’s houses, sit in the same juror’s box, and are invited, sans distinction, at Government House”. During his 1850 visit, John Candler recalled that “Many highly respectable men, who were also [i.e., once] slaves now fill the office of Legislators, or are otherwise employed in civil office, owing to their talents and qualifications for public business”.
In truth, the situation for the black elite in Antigua would have been a lot more complicated than Flanagan’s recollections imply. While the new climate allowed many well educated and connected black Antiguans to rise to great heights in business and government, they would have endured persistent prejudice, such that they would have had to work ‘harder and better’ than their comparable white colleagues to maintain their status.
However, this is not to say that all was generally secure and easy for black Antiguans – the reality was far from this. Only the well-off and well educated few enjoyed the favour of the crown and experienced extensive civil rights. The majority of black Antiguans lived in relative poverty (albeit perhaps in better conditions than on many of the other islands), many in the rural freedmen villages, having to make accommodations with their former masters. Moreover, while the mercantile communities in Saint John and Falmouth, as well as much of the government sector, may have been relatively liberal minded, open to working commodiously with black Antiguans, the island’s plantocracy remained resolutely opposed to the advancement of the black population, and tried (ultimately unsuccessfully) to block the election of black candidates the island’s legislature and to sabotage their bids to buy agricultural land. While the planters did not enjoy the same level of political power that their compatriots on the other islands generally possessed, they nevertheless represented a powerful and enduring threat to Antigua’s black middle class.
Antigua’s reprieve from economic downturn and the relatively tolerant attitude towards the island’s black community was not to last. The island was weakened by a succession of natural disasters, including an earthquake, in 1843, a hurricane, in 1848, and a draught, in 1849. However, it was the British Parliament that grievously wounded Antigua, upon its passing of the Sugar Act (1846), an incredibly consequential piece of legislation which dealt a body blow to all the British Caribbean. This bill removed the preferential tariff treatment for sugar that the British West Indies had long enjoyed, opening the British market to much cheaper imports from the East Indies and foreign Caribbean islands, such as Cuba. While the effect of this act took some years to sink in, Antigua’s sugar industry became financially unviable and, as the island would not support any another anchor crops, the agrarian sector fell into freefall. While the mercantile and naval establishments saved the island from total economic collapse, the island’s decline was sharp and inexorable. Hundreds of people emigrated from Antigua each year, as businesses failed, plantations went bankrupt, and crown largesse was ever scarcer.
Antigua’s economic downturn was a disaster for everyone; however, its greatest casualty was the island’s emerging black middle class. The entrepreneurial spirit that raised the fortunes of black Antiguans was cut down by recession, while the relatively tolerant attitudes shown by much of the white establishment towards them started to wane. Moreover, the black middle class suddenly had ‘competition’, as between 1847 and 1852, 2,500 Portuguese immigrants from Madeira settled in Antigua, fleeing famine on their home island. Their migration had been encouraged and aided by the British crown to restore the island’s rapidly dwindling white population. The Portuguese Antiguans proved to be extremely entrepreneurial and with the support of the existing white establishment, set up businesses that rivalled the black-run enterprises in Saint John and Falmouth.
In this context, Antigua’s white establishment showed its true colours. While they had previously ‘tolerated’ the rise of the black middle class when it suited them, now, once resources had become scarce, they ‘circled the wagons’ around the remaining white population (including the new Portuguese arrivals), progressively freezing black merchants and officials out of business opportunities and crown largesse. The black middle class began to unravel, and while a few individuals managed to maintain profitable businesses or government careers, such instances were few and far between.
The remainder of the 19th century proved to one long recession for Antigua, with most of the islanders who did not emigrate living in relative poverty. The middle class of any kind dwindled to be only a very small percentage of the population, such that the hope and optimism that the black community enjoyed from the 1830s-’50s became a distant memory. It was only during the early 20th century, with the rise of tourism and the opening of the Panama Canal (which placed Antigua, once again, along critical global shipping routes) that the island’s fortunes gradually improved, leading the reemergence of a black middle class.
References: [re: map separately:] National Archives U.K.: CO 700/ANTIGUA10; Kit S. KAPP, ‘The Printed Maps of Antigua, 1689-1899’, in in R.V. Tooley (ed.), The Map Collector’s Circle, no. 55 (1969), no. 65; P.A. PENFOLD, Map and Plans in the Public Record Office: 2. America and West Indies (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1974), no. 3051 (p. 533); [re: map as part of the An Historical and Descriptive Account of Antigua book:] Watkinson Library, Trinity College (Dublin): FOLIO F2035 .J6; OCLC: 14510282; S.P. Lohia Collection (private holding): 5605.
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