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London: J. Bowles, P. Overton. T. Bowles & J. King, ca. 1720. Hand-colored engraving on three joined sheets, 36” x 24” plus margins. CONDITION: Very good, old paper repair on verso to 2.5 inch separation at fold along bottom edge, browning along folds at verso, light fraying to bottom edge.

An intricately detailed map of Russia’s vast territories and trading ports along the Baltic and Black Seas, by British commercial cartographer Herman Moll.

Dedicated to Tsar Peter the Great, this map was made according to the “actual Surveys of Cornelius Cru[y]s, His Czarrish Majesty’s Vice Admiral, John Thesing, [and] Captain Pamburg…” and has “all the improvements…of Capt. John Perry.” The central representation of Russia constitutes an intersection of British economic interests with Russian westernization, indicating the locations of “ancient ruins,” deserts, forests, rivers, and mountains along with text to show ways for European and British merchants and voyagers to enter Russian territory eastwards from the Baltic Sea and northwards from the Black Sea. Minimal attention is given to locating different ethnic groups, other than the “Tartars” and “Cossacks” north of “Turkey” and the “Bulgars” bordering China. One inset map shows the “North Part of Russia,” presenting the empire’s holdings in Scandinavia including Sweden and the White Sea, both of which are relatively close to Britain. An inset map of the “Sea of Asof” depicts the ports along the River Don. A third inset offers a view of “the River Volga from Peter Gorod” that starts at the Caspian Sea and runs north through Russia’s Muscovy territory. Interestingly, along the Don River near a place that “is…bad…for ships to Pass at High Water” and where “the Czar’s Magazins for the army are kept,” there is a “Channel” that “remains unfinished at the time.” When this map was first published, the “Channel” was under construction by “the English hydraulic engineer Captain John Perry,” who was commissioned by Peter the Great in 1687 “to build a canal linking the Ilovlyz and the Kamyshin rivers, tributaries respectively of the Don and the Volga, which would enable a passage between the Caspian and Black seas. The effort soon fizzled…Perry later published The State of Russia, under the Present Czar (1716)” for which Moll furnished a folding map (Crowley). An elaborate cartouche portrays the magnificent Peter the Great, shown as a both glorious Christian leader and a forceful military commander.

First published separately in 1715 then subsequently included in every edition of Moll’s The World Described, Moll’s map of Russia appeared at a time when “British trade in the Baltic area was opening up again.…Russia was heading towards…consolidation of its commercial power, while…Swedish control of Baltic shipping was eliminated…in 1720 the value of Britain's trade with the Baltic equalled that with the East Indies and exceeded…the Mediterranean. British imports from the Baltic region…iron ore, pitch, hemp, salt, grain and timber—were crucial to its naval power and to the nation's manufacturing industries and commercial prospects…The map of Russia…presents the vast territories and nearly limitless economic potential of Peter the Great's sphere of interest, from the coasts of Poland and Prussia south to the Black Sea and east to Siberia. The map identifies existing naval shipyards, salt works and grain magazines and also provides notes on grandiose canal projects—several of them with English engineers—to connect the Baltic, Black and Caspian seas via Lake Ladoga and the Volga and Don rivers” (Crowley).  

Herman Moll (1654–1732) was the most significant commercial cartographer in London from the mid-seventeenth through early eighteenth centuries. Arriving in England from Bremen in present-day Germany in the 1670s, he worked first as an engraver for such London mapmakers as Moses Pitt, then as an independent mapmaker, map publisher, and seller. Credited in particular as a shrewd businessman, “Moll was well aware that maps appealed to many sections of society for a number of reasons. The text on his maps was mostly in English rather than Latin, making them more accessible to a general audience. They were aesthetically pleasing, being decorated with illustrations and elaborate cartouches. They were cheap (Moll’s two-sheet maps cost one shilling sixpence each), making them affordable even to the skilled tradesman…Moll also tapped into the…English fashion for empirical knowledge by asserting that he based his maps ‘on the Newest and Most Exact Observations,’” (Koyoumijan), although that was far from always true, as Jonathan Swift humorously remarks in Gulliver’s Travels. Moll’s remarkable connections with notables of the day contributed to his success. He engraved “maps for scientific and literary works, including those by [the pirate-privateer William] Dampier and Daniel Defoe, and…[he] was part of an elite intellectual circle that included…Jonathan Swift, John Locke, Robert Hooke, the antiquarian William Stuckey, and the privateer Woodes Rogers, among others. They convened at Jonathan’s Coffee House, the famed meeting place on Exchange Alley that was also the site of financial speculation and stockbroking for the city’s moneyed investors. From his interlocutors, Moll gained prized information about natural history, navigation, and colonial trade, which he incorporated into his cartographic goods…his focus was…overly commercial, promoting the economic potential of British colonization and trade” (Nguyen). Among Moll’s other maps are his much-acclaimed “Beaver Map” of North America. In all of his maps including the present example, Moll used “extensive notes…to rail against his competitors, the French in general and French mapmakers in particular” (Worms and Williams).

REFERENCES: Crowley, John E. “Herman Moll’s ‘The World Described’ (1720): Mapping Britain’s Global and Imperial Interest,” Imago Mundi, Vol. 68, No. 1 (2016), pp. 16–34; Koyoumjian, Phillip. “Herman Moll and the London Map Trade, 1678–1732,” Imago Mundi, Vol. 70, No. 2 (2018), pp. 252–53; Nguyen, Jacob. “Handheld Cartography: Herman Moll’s Pocket Globes and Speculative Capital in the 1710s,” Journal 18, no. 10 (2020); Worms, Laurence and Ashley Banton-Williams. British Map Engravers: A Dictionary of Engravers, Lithographers, and their Principal Employers to 1850 (London, 2011), pp. 456–58.

Item #8787

Price: $1,500.00