PBA Galleries

Approximately 58.5 x 28.5”. Besides charting the coastline, there are smaller inset maps of the Kingdom of Dahomey; Court of Gato or Regio Creek, with the Entrance of River Benin (1789); and Entrance of River Serra Leone (1790). Written in the margin on verso, in period ink, is the name E.P.Smith, also the number 9. Well-worn, suggestive of active nautical use. Tattered at edges, long tears at several  folds, one with a tape repair, but with only a small portion of the map missing at right edge. WorldCat lists a few other, generally smaller, imprints, held by the national libraries of Britain, Scotland, France and Spain, but with no copy in any American institution.

Large and very rare nautical map - sailing chart of that portion of the west coast of Africa –the Gold Coast, Ivory Coast and “Slave Coast” – which was the major source of African slaves during the Atlantic slave trade that was not outlawed until 1807-08 by England and the United States. British cartographer Robert Norris, was a Liverpool slave trader for some forty years before his death in 1791 – and a vocal defender of that trade in both his 1789 published memoir and public statements before Parliament. Obviously used on a sailing vessel, possibly one trading in such African “exports” as ivory and gold, but, more likely, by a slave ship. The undocumented provenance is of from an estate in Newport, Rhode Island, where much 18th century wealth was derived from the trade in human cargo.