The first detailed chart of the Gulf Coast published in America, depicting the coast from the Mississippi River Delta to just east of Florida’s Appalachicola Bay. Extremely rare in any edition, here in an unrecorded issue of 1820, just months before Spain’s cession of Florida to the United States.
The chart includes the coastal outline with names of major towns and landmarks, soundings and other hydrographic data, and shoals and other navigational hazards. An inset map at left depicts a “Continuation of the Mississippi River and Part of the Coast of Louisiana, from actual Survey,” and an inset chart at upper right details the difficult channel and bar at the head of Mobile Bay.
An odd anachronism is the failure to acknowledge the United States’ 1812 annexation of the region between the Perdido and Pearl Rivers, based on the dubious claim that it had been included in the Louisiana Purchase. By October 1820, when this chart was published, the annexed area formed the coasts of the Alabama Territory and the State of Mississippi, neither of which are identified. Just months later the Adams-Onis Treaty was ratified by Spain and the United States. By the terms of the treaty Spain turned over East and West Florida, and on March 30, 1822 the two were merged into the newly-formed Florida Territory.
Publication history
This chart was engraved by Samuel Harrison (1789-1818) of Philadelphia and first published by Edmund March Blunt on March 1, 1815, with the “Continuation of the Mississippi River and Part of the Coast of Louisiana” on a flap attached to the top. At the same time Blunt issued a small pamphlet bearing the title Directions for sailing to and from the River Mississippi. These were the culmination of a plan Blunt had conceived at least as early as 1796, when he announced:
“Any PERSON Who is well acquainted with the River MISSISSIPPI, And will give Directions for sailing into the same, that can be depended on, shall be generously rewarded for his information, provided he will leave the directions with Mr. John Fenno, printer, Philadelphia, or Edmund M. Blunt, Newburyport” (Gazette Of The United States, no. 1296 (Nov. 3, 1796), p. 2)
New York publisher William Hooker then purchased the plate from Blunt and issued an “improved” edition on October 1, 1818. For this edition, Hooker had the “Continuation of the Mississippi River” re-engraved and re-formatted as an inset on the left side of chart.
Offered here is a previously-unrecorded edition “republished” by Hooker on October 1, 1820. I have so far noticed only two changes: First, for some reason the right-hand side of the plate has been cut down by perhaps 1 ½ inches, thus losing a small amount of information on the insert “Plan of Mobile Bar” at upper right. Second, coordinates have been engraved along the 31st meridian, to replace those lost when the plate was cut down.
All three editions of the chart are of the utmost rarity: I am aware of but one copy of the 1815 edition, held by the Osher Map Library, and one copy of the 1818 edition, purchased by a private southern collector in 2013. I have been unable to locate another example of the 1820 edition offered here.
Edmund March Blunt (1770-1862) and William Hooker (1782-1856)
While chart makers such as Matthew Clark and John Norman produced charts of the North American coastline for commercial use as early as the 1790s, Edmund March Blunt was the first to compete with English firms for primacy in the American market.
Blunt was an American publisher and compiler of navigational books, charts and other aids. While his name is most closely associated with the publication of Furlong’s American Coast Pilot and Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator, the only 18th-century large format map bearing his name is a chart of George’s Bank, Cape Cod and the Islands, on which he collaborated with Amos Doolittle and Paul Pinkham. His next major chart venture was a new printing of a large-scale chart of Long Island Sound (1813), first published in 1806, after which he began to issue charts of eastern American waters in rapid succession.
Blunt retired from retail trade in about 1818, his shop passing to engraver William Hooker, while he continued as a chart-maker and publisher until about 1828. His sons Edmund and George William set up their own business in 1822, as “E. & G.W. Blunt.” The three firms worked in parallel until about 1828, when Hooker gave up the shop, and the three businesses amalgamated as “E. & G.W. Blunt”, chartmakers and publishers. The business continued for many years, even after Hooker’s death in 1856, eventually closing with the death of Edmund in 1866.
References
Guthorn, United States Coastal Charts, p. 10 (mentioning 1815, 1818 and 1834 editions, but not this 1820). Neither Phillips, List of Maps of America nor OCLC list any editions of the chart, and neither RareBookHub nor Antique Map Price Record list any having appeared on the market. Background on Blunt from Worms & Baynton-Williams, American Map Engravers (forthcoming), Smith and Vining, pp. 19-21 and Guthorn, pp. 9-11.