AN UNRECORDED ‘COASTING PILOT’ by John Thornton. The existence of this atlas was presumed by a reference to it in a National Library of Scotland listing for an edition by his son Samuel Thornton, 1714. It is the only known example. In the March and April editions of the ‘London Gazette’ for 1672 John Seller advertised a new atlas entitled the ‘Coasting Pilot … upon the Coasts of England Flanders and Holland’. The contents of the atlas vary but it included new charts by John Seller and old Dutch ones re-issued. It provided sailing directions for the east and south coasts of England and the continental European coastlines bordering on the English Channel. Many of the plates were issued concurrently in the ‘English Pilot’. It was a common practice of publishers of the day to make multiple uses out of available material. It did not enable him however to avoid financial difficulties and in 1677 he had to take on a number of partners in what has been called the Combine. Its members included William Fisher, James Atkinson, John Colson and John Thornton. This lasted only two years at which point it was dissolved and the assets distributed. Further examples of the ‘Coasting Pilot’ are known by John Seller alone dated after 1684 and to Richard Mount circa 1694 who utilised text from the ‘English Pilot’.

The only other publisher known to have issued a ‘Coasting Pilot’ was Samuel Thornton and this survives in just one known example dated 1714 cited above at the National Library of Scotland. Their catalogue entry cites an earlier edition by his father John but an extensive search of several online institutional search engines has failed to locate an example. None of the bibliographies refer to its survival, let alone it being published. The source of the reference at the National Library is currently being investigated.

‘Of the consortium members John Thornton had the greatest experience through his skills as a manuscript chart maker. He occupies a special position in British Chart marking for most of his working life hitherto he had been a part of a group of manuscript chart makers who were members of the Drapers Company, collectively known as the Thames School. Thornton was to continue to prepare manuscript charts until the early 1700s, but meanwhile many of Seller’s plates had come into his hands’ (Shirley). In 1689, in collaboration with Fisher, Thornton published the ‘English Pilot Fourth Book’ and in 1703 the ‘Oriental Pilot’. It is a safe assumption that the ‘Coasting Pilot’ by Samuel Thornton was not Samuel’s own work, he is not known for original publications.

The fascinating part of this atlas is the inclusion at the end of ‘A New Description of the East Coast of Scotland from Berwick to Bokannais’, a small four page chapter. It is written by John Marr about whom little is known. He is overshadowed by his contemporary John Adair. Marr was from Dundee and wrote ‘Navigation in Coasting; or a Seaman’s Instructor’, published in Aberdeen, 1683. He provided the only chart to Greenvile Collins’ ‘Coasting Pilot’ not surveyed by Collins. It is entitled ‘The Sea Coast from Fiffnesse to Montros was Survey’d by Mr. Mar, an injenious Marriner [sic] of Dundee’. This chapter to Thornton’s Coasting Pilot was almost certainly published in response to John Adair’s atlas, the ‘Description of the Sea-Coast & Islands of Scotland’, 1703.

Reference: Shirley ‘The Maritime maps and atlases of Seller, Thornton, and Mount & Page’, in ‘The Map Collector’ no. 73, pp. 2-9.; refer Shirley BL M.Sell 2a; Verner ‘Engraved Title Plates for the Folio Atlases of John Seller’, in ‘My Head is a Map’, a Festschrift for R. V. Tooley, pp. 21-52; Verner ‘John Seller and the Chart Trade in Seventeenth-Century England’, in ‘The Compleat Plattmaker’ edited by Norman J. W. Thrower, Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 127-57.