RKD STUDIES

By the mid-17th century, and especially after the Restoration, England increasingly competed with the Dutch Republic for maritime supremacy and colonial trade and connected to both, the art and science of navigation instruments, maps, and charts. Nuala Zahedieh has shown that the first two Anglo-Dutch wars, especially the second from 1665 to 1667, were driven by the prospect of accessing Iberian markets in the Americas, of which, the most lucrative trades were gold, silver, sugar, and enslaved African people.¹ The Dutch were superior to the English in all these trades, aided by their seizure of territories from the united Spanish and Portuguese Empires – with whom they were at war, in the pursuit of independence, until 1648. Supported by the Dutch West India Company, with its state monopoly and asiento contracts, and a network of Dutch merchants, the Republic became heavily involved in the Atlantic slavery system. As Harold John Cook has shown, the wealth accrued from enslaving and transporting an estimated 85,000 African people before 1674 financed the ‘Dutch Golden Age’ of art and science.² Nicolaes Visscher’s Totius Americae, is one such example [8] – in the top left cartouche is a dedication to the cartographer's patron, Cornelis Witsen (1605-1669), administrator of the Dutch West India Company and patron of the arts.

To further promote Dutch expansionism, Nicolaes Visscher’s map employed anti-Spanish visual propaganda, known as the ‘Spanish Black Legend’. The cross-wielding woman in the upper cartouche represents the Christian faith, and the falling figure with talons represents diabolism, which when seen in tandem with the mineral wealth, connects the design with the often-cited Dutch proverb of god and gaud – where the latter flowed abundantly, it was proposed, the former was typically scarce.³ From the late 15th century, Spanish colonists enslaved Indigenous American peoples to meet the demands of mining and establishing plantations in the ‘New World’, and although Isabella I of Castile (1451-1504) prohibited Amerindian enslavement, Indigenous peoples continued to be exploited through complex labour arrangements such as the encomienda. There was, however, no prohibition of African slavery and as the Indigenous population declined through disease, overwork and resistance, Spanish colonists turned to enslaved African labour supplied by other European merchants.

The relation between God and gold was central to encomienda, as the overseer, initially a Spanish conquistador, would receive tribute in gold in exchange for protecting the Indigenous person and teaching them the Christian faith. In the early 16th century, the Spanish clergymen and settler Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) campaigned to abolish the encomienda by propagating the exploitation and ultimate death of millions of Indigenous people under Spanish rule in publications such as The Tears of Indians [9].⁴ Las Casas’ polemic became a European best-seller from the 1570s onwards, and his rhetoric of Spanish cruelty and greed fuelled the cultural paradigm of the Spanish Black Legend, which the Dutch championed. Nicolaes Visscher’s map reminds viewers of Spanish brutality and thus justifies the Dutch presence as relieving the Indigenous population of their cruel Catholic overseers. Moreover, the group of labourers delivering gold grains and bars, and the six ships scattered across the Atlantic Ocean, carefully construct an image of Dutch maritime power and success in the Atlantic slavery system, without depicting, and therefore, identifying the cruel treatment of non-European people by Dutch merchants and colonisers. The scene at once signposts and distracts from Dutch activities in the Americas.

From London, the restored Stuarts strove to compete with the Dutch in colonising, trade, art, and science, ultimately in pursuit of access to Spanish-American markets. In 1660, incentivised by an allowance of customs revenue, and mounting anti-Dutch sentiment, King Charles II (1630-1685) re-enacted and extended the Navigation Act, legislation that limited trade to and from the colonies to English ships, captains, and ports, and thus encouraged an English merchant marine and shipping industry, which excluded the Dutch. In that same year, the Stuarts and their merchant friends founded the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa, to which Charles granted a chartered monopoly (reissued in 1663) that by 1662, included the supply of 3,000 enslaved Africans a year to the West Indies, at £25 per head. In the early years, this monopoly was defended from interlopers, chiefly the Dutch, by Royal Navy ships. Also in 1662, Charles gave the Royal Society its first charter, which promised to ‘extend not only the boundaries of the Empire, but also the very arts and sciences’, by promoting knowledge that was useful to the imperial policy.⁵ The Stuart ambition of improving English maritime power, to profit from colonialism and Atlantic slavery, drove advances in practical mathematics, naval and military engineering, and navigation technologies, including cartography.

The instrument maker and cartographer John Seller moved between the commercial and intellectual spaces at the forefront of improving English maritime power and trade. In 1667, John Seller became a brother of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, and corresponded on magnetic variation with Robert Hooke at the Royal Society, and in 1672, won a contract to supply the Royal Navy at Chatham Dockyard with compasses and glasses.⁶ In 1671, the King bestowed on John Seller a monopoly on ‘maps, plats, or charts’ for thirty years and made him the official Royal Hydrographer [10]; a year later John Seller produced a chart showing the Atlantic and the Royal African Company’s coat of arms, for the Company's renewed charter book [11].⁷ John Seller also taught and published on navigation, mathematics, surveying, gunnery and fortification architecture. His career was entwined with Restoration imperial policy, and crucially, late-Stuart interests in surpassing the Dutch in maritime trade and knowledge.

John Seller was determined to challenge the Dutch Republic’s dominance of cartography, writing in 1669 that he intended on ‘making a Sea-Waggoner for the Whole World’ ‘for the general benefit of Navigation’ which would rival ‘our neighbours the Hollanders’.⁸ To do this, John Seller purchased old copper plates by the Dutch cartographers Willem Jansz. Blaeu (1571-1638), Johannes Janssonius (1588-1664), Jan van Loon II (c. 1614-1686) and Nicolaes Visscher, some of them made as many as 50 years earlier. He then reworked the designs, either directly on the old copper plates, or by copying the Dutch designs on paper and then transferring them to new copper plates, sometimes with help from the engravers William Faithorne I (1616/20-1691), James Clark and Francis Lamb (fl. 1667-1701). This method allowed John Seller to combine old and new decorative schemes and geographic information and thus to work quickly. In a short period, Seller printed multiple editions of English atlases, chiefly The English Pilot (1671), The Coasting Pilot (1672) and Atlas Maritimus (1675). The decorative schemes of the 48 maps and charts in Atlas Maritimus (1675) are overwhelmingly copied from Dutch copper plates, a debt that John Seller admits in the preface, ‘we must see no further than their books direct us, nor how to avoid a shelf without a foreign pilot’.⁹ At the time, London offered a steady supply of Dutch navigational instruments, both directly from the Republic and from the Dutch map shops along the Thames. Indeed, in 1663, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) recorded his visit to ‘look at a Dutch shop or two for some good handsome maps’.¹⁰ It was through Anglo-Dutch trade and artisanal exchanges in London that John Seller could (literally) build on and rework the Dutch Republic’s superiority in art and science, even borrowing anti-Spanish propaganda.

8
Hendrick Doncker (I)
Portolan chart of Guinea, c. 1670
New Haven (Connecticut), Yale University

8a
Detail of fig. 8

9
Richard Gaywood
Frontispiece to Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Tears of the Indians: Being a True Account of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters... Committed by the Spaniards..., translated by J.P. (J.C. for Nathaniel Brook), London 1656
Etching, 157 x 111 mm
The British Museum, inv.no. 1884,1213.50

10
John Seller
Atlas maritimus, or A book of charts ; Describeing the sea coasts, capes, headlands, sands, shoals, rocks and dangers, the bayes, roads, harbors, rivers, and ports, in most of the knowne parts of the world …, Londen 1675, title-page
Harvard University, Harvard Map Collection

11
John Seller
Atlas maritimus, or A book of charts ; Describeing the sea coasts, capes, headlands, sands, shoals, rocks and dangers, the bayes, roads, harbors, rivers, and ports, in most of the knowne parts of the world …, Londen 1675, seq. 36
Harvard University, Harvard Map Collection