Charting the course for Queen Victoria’s Royal Yacht

The British Admiralty in Asia & Africa

Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century was beginning to look for an expansion of her trade along the east coast of Africa; in 1821 preparations were made at the Admiralty for an expedition to survey the African coast. The work was entrusted to Captain William Fitzwilliam Owen (1774–1857), and between 1822 and 1826, Owen surveyed much of the west, and east coasts of Africa, the south coast of Arabia, and the River Gambia. Owen’s work was not without incident, whilst in Muscat, he invited the Sultan on board the ships, but was therefore forced to temporarily tow away the huge number of pigs on board to avoid offending the Muslim Sultan; it is reported that the whole cove echoed with their squeals. These incidences aside, it was these surveys together with his work in the India Ocean (represented in the pilots here by: Nos. 598; 721; 594; and 595) that earned him the respect of the Admiralty, who presented him with a silver punch-bowl in the form of a globe of the earth surmounted by Neptune and supported by figures representing the four continents. Other charts of note relating to Africa contained in these pilots include: No. 1771: Captain Edmund Palmer’s chart of St Helena the most accurate survey of the island carried out in the 19th century; and No. 1691: Lieutenant Bedford’s survey of the Ascension Islands, 1838.

In Asia British influence had, with the conquering of India, dramatically increased by the beginning of the nineteenth 19th. This, coupled with her acquiring footholds in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, led the Admiralty to send several voyages to the Far East, the most important of which was Captain Richard Collinson’s (1811–83) surveying work. Collinson, in command of HMS Plover spent the years 1842 to 1846 charting the Chinese coast, the first systematic charting of the waters, producing charts on which all successors were based (Nos. 2660a, 2660b, 2661a, and 2661b). Chart No. 1480, ‘Yang-Tse-Kiang from the Sea to Nanking’, his important survey of the Yangtse River from Shanghai to Nanjing, still bears his name.

In 1836, Collinson had been a lieutenant on HMS Sulphur, a surveying vessel in the Pacific, under the command of Captains Beechey and Belcher. On her return voyage via China, in 1841, the vessel became involved in the First Opium War, and specifically in the capture of Wangtong on the Pearl River delta. Whilst in the area Captain Belcher surveyed Hong Kong, the first scientific survey of the island (No. 1466). Belcher would return to the Far East in 1843–46 in command of HMS Samarang in order to survey the South China Seas, and like Collinson providing a template on which all subsequent surveys were based. The work also includes Captain J.W. Reed’s important survey of the Singapore Straits carried out on HMS Rifleman, between 1865 and 1869 (No. 2403). Reed would also resurvey the waters between Singapore and Hong Kong.

Britain’s dominance of the Indian subcontinent, would draw her into what became known as the ‘Great Game’: Britain and Russia’s struggle for de facto control of Central Asia. To this end the British fought several proxy wars, one such was the First Anglo-Persian War (1856–57). Commander Charles Constable, son of the painter John Constable, was attached to the Persian Expeditionary Force, as a surveyor aboard the ship Euphrates. On the conclusion of the war, Constable was ordered to survey the Arabian Gulf, which occupied him from April 1857 to March 1860, with Lieutenant Stiffe as assistant surveyor. The survey (Nos. 2837a and 2837b) which contains the first detailed survey of Abu Dhabi, would become the standard work well into the 20th century.

During the time that Constable was surveying the Gulf, the Suez Canal, one of the greatest civil engineering feats of the 19th century was under construction. When it opened in 1869, it would reduce the distance from London to the Arabian Gulf from 11,300 nautical miles to 6,400 nautical miles, and cut the journey time from London to Singapore from 58 to 42 days. The canal is depicted in chart No. 2555, based on surveys carried out by the French Navy in 1876, with soundings taken by HMS Shearwater.

The opening of the canal also bought a renewed interest in both the Mediterranean, Red, and Arabian Seas. Britain had during the 19th century acquired several strategically important islands in the Mediterranean, most notably Malta and Cyprus. The present work contains Captains Graves’ and Spratt’s chart of Malta and Gozo (No. 194), and Valetta harbour (No. 195), surveyed in 1863, as well as Graves’ exceedingly rare chart of Cyprus (No. 2074) of 1849.