A magnificent pair of Lane’s terrestrial and celestial pocket globes.

Biography
The present globe is the work of Nicholas Lane (fl.1775-1783) whose business was particularly associated with pocket globes. Little is known about Lane’s output, but Dekker suggests that his three inch globes were produced from the earlier works of Ferguson and Dudley Adams. When Dudley went bankrupt in about 1817, the copper plates appear to have come into the hands of the Lane firm, now run by Thomas Lane (fl1801-1829), where the old cartouche was completely erased in favour of a new circular one. However, the name of the engraver, J. Mynde, was kept just below the cartouche. Later on, after 1820, Lane would erase Mynde’s name from the plates.

Geography
There have been several additions to this “improved” globe: compass points to the west of Cape Horn, monsoons in the Indian Ocean and the Great Wall of China. “Enderby’s Land 1833” is marked (part of Antarctica) discovered and named by the John Briscoe.

The tracks of Captain James Cook’s voyages are shown and the coastline of Australia drawn according to his reports. The most notable addition is the marking on the west coast of Australia of the “Swan R. Settlement”.

The Swan River Colony was the brainchild of Captain James Stirling who in 1827, aboard HMS Success, had explored the Swan River. On his return to London he petitioned Parliament to grant land for a settlement along the river. A consortium was set up by the MP Potter McQueen, but was disbanded after the Colonial Office refused to give them preference over independent settlers. One of the members of the consortium, Thomas Peel, did, however, accept the terms set down by Colonial Office. In late 1829, Peel arrived with 300 settlers and was granted 250,000 acres. The first reports of the new colony arrived back in England in late January 1830. They described the poor conditions and the land as being totally unfit for agriculture. They went on to say that the settlers were in a state of “near starvation” and (incorrectly) said that the colony had been abandoned. As a result of these reports, many people cancelled their migration plans or diverted to Cape Town or New South Wales.

Astronomy
The celestial gores, which were acquired by Nicholas Lane from Richard Cushee sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, are geocentric in orientation. The difference is most noticeable in the orientation of Ursa Major, with the bear facing the other direction. All three sets of celestial gores nave been coloured differently, in order to highlight different aspects of the heavens. The concave set housing the terrestrial globe, in a yellow wash, mark and highlight the ecliptic in red; the celestial globe richly colours the constrellations, whereas the concave set housing the globe the night sky is coloured blue with the constellations left uncoloured.