Maps

“This is an uncommon map of the whole of Asia from the Black Sea east to Japan. In the North, one coastline of Nova Zembla is sketched out; later it was discovered that Novaya Zemlya consists of two large islands. The interior of Asia (Tartary on this map) is nearly void of details. The Great Wall of China separates the known from the unknown. The east coast of Asia is sketched in lightly and filled with conjecture. It was later in the century before Bering and Cook provided details that added the Kamchatka Peninsula and Alaska to the charts. In the South, the northern coastline of New Holland is still indefinite.”

However, it does not come from any of Morden’s own books (e.g. Geography Rectified (1680), Geography Anatomiz'd (1693) and Atlas Terrestris (1695)), but from the 1703 “second” edition of Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie.

The first edition of Heylyn’s Cosmographie was published by Henry Seile in 1652 with maps of the world and the four continents copied from John Speed’s maps and engraved by William Trevethen. After Henry Seile’s death in 1662, at least five more editions were published before 1700. Some of these were published by Henry’s business partner, Philip Chetwind, who inherited the copper plates but, for his edition of the Cosmographie in 1666, replaced Henry Seile’s name on the maps with his own (“Philippi Chetwind”). Other editions were published by Henry’s widow Anna Seile (“one of the few women to be involved in London’s map publishing business”), with maps engraved by Robert Vaughan and Johan Goddard (Asia).

The revised "second" edition appearing in 1703 was printed in London “for E. Brewster, R. Chiswell, B. Tooke, T. Hodgkin and T. Bennet”, and the maps in this edition are by Robert Morden according to an article "Unrecorded maps of the world and four continents – by Morden?" by Mead T. Cain, published in The Map Collector Issue No. 57 (Winter 1991).