richard w. unger: Jeannette D. Black Memorial Fellow, 2005-2006

The thorne map, 1527 

Maps, such as this less well-known one taken from a book now in the John Carter Brown Library collection, always convey a range of knowledge. At different times and under different circumstances, they can have other lives. In the early sixteenth century, the success of Columbus’ voyages increased interest in the potential of lands beyond the Ocean Sea among sovereigns but even more among merchants from ports with easy access to the Atlantic, like Bristol. Robert Thorne (1492-1532) was the son of a prominent merchant who was early involved in the family business. (1) Sent as an agent to Seville, Thorne there saw first hand the impact of Columbus’ discoveries, since the Spanish crown funnelled all New World trade through the city. In 1526, he wrote to the English ambassador at the court of the king of Spain claiming that there was a way to make England rich, not by challenging the Spanish on their established routes to the West Indies but instead by going north, by seeking a northeast or northwest passage to the Far East. In 1527, Thorne sketched a map as visual reinforcement to his argument.

The map languished as a single manuscript (now lost) until Richard Hakluyt published a woodcut version in his Divers voyages (1582) to accompany Thorne’s letter advocating a different approach to exploration for England. In its second as well as first life, the map or “Carde”, which Thorne claimed had “beene very well made after the rules of Cosmographie” leant greater force to the argument for finding a better, faster, shorter and more profitable way to the spices of the Orient.(2) In this, both Thorne in making the map and Hakluyt in printing it in his polemical work participated in the rapidly growing use of maps for visualizing political action. Hakluyt wanted England to take a more active role in exploration and in planting colonies overseas. The world map as he reproduced it, supplementing Thorne’s plea for action, fit perfectly into the propaganda effort.

Despite the connections to international political competition, to the settling of North American shores by English colonists, and to the sudden expansion of global trade there is another telling feature about the map: the two ships included in the Indian Ocean.(3) The larger vessel is a standard full-rigged ship with three masts carrying square sails on the main- and foremasts and a lateen sail on the mizzen.  Its high and tapered stern represents design developments in the sixteenth century.  With all sails set and a deep waist, the depiction is similar to ships, especially those plying the Atlantic, on a number of other maps, and suggests the kind of vessel that left English ports in the 1580s on long distance voyage.(4) The second vessel has one mast with a spritsail and an additional sail hanging down from the forestay. This simple rig was highly efficient allowing one man, with little or no help, to handle the boat himself on inland and coastal waters. The small open boat was not the kind of craft for open ocean sailing and certainly was not seen in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century.

Thorne may have included sketches of ships on his original 1527 map but whether or not he did so, Hakluyt included the ships to make a point and not just to fill up empty space. They were not so much ships to be found on the way to the Far East as English ships that could make their way to other parts of the world. In general in the fifteenth and, even more so, the sixteenth century, European cartographers came to decorate their maps with ships sailing the open ocean. The vessels were a declaration of the new capability of the ships, and the men who sailed them, to dominate the oceans. The ships on Thorne’s map fit a pattern of sixteenth century cartography. They made an argument to the public and, even more, to Queen Elizabeth and her advisers for England to take a leading role in what would come to be known as European expansion. 

R. C. D. Baldwin, “Robert Thorne the younger (1492–1532)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27347/49970?docPos=2, accessed April 9, 2012.

2. Richard Hakluyt, Divers voyages touching the discoverie of America and the Ilands adjacent unto the same : made first of all by our Englishmen and afterward by the Frenchmen and Britons : and certaine notes of advertisements for observations …, London : T. Woodcocke, 1582. Page 40.

3 . A number of sixteenth century maps in the JCB collection show similar vessels including Nuevo Mundo (1532) B551 C828b / 1-SIZE; Totivs Orbis Descriptio (1562) Cabinet A562 / 2; Giovanni Francesco Camocio, Cosmographia Vniversalis (1569) Cabinet A569 1.1; Abraham Ortelius, Americae sive Novi orbis, nova descriptio (1587) Z 077 1598 1 / 3-SIZE.