Born in Winston, Durham, little is known about the early life of Aaron Arrowsmith until 1777. In that year, in London, he was named as a witness to the will of Andrew Dury. The latter was a well-known mapmaker and publisher in the late 18th century, famous for his large scale maps of British counties. This seems to be the first time that there is any recorded association between Arrowsmith and the cartographic world. Later, there are records of him being employed as a surveyor by John Cary and there is a suggestion of a connection with William Faden. Although there is no evidence that Arrowsmith had any formal training or education in mapmaking and surveying, his association with these individuals suggests considerable talent and remarkable knowledge in this field, explaining his later rise and success in the business. By 1810 he had been named Hydrographer to the Prince of Wales and subsequently to King George IV.
Arrowsmith became a shrewd commercial mapmaker and produced maps for the burgeoning market in travel books. Simultaneously, he began his firm’s long association with controversial publisher, Thomas Hansard which was to bear such fruit for his successor and nephew, John Arrowsmith. He also produced maps for the Naval Chronicle, a periodical which ran from 1799 to 1818.
However, if there was one field where Arrowsmith made his name, it was in large, monumental wall maps. After the defeat of Napoleon, the British Empire rose to new heights and commercial opportunities for producing, publishing and selling wall maps expanded enormously. Arrowsmith’s work included maps of the world, each of the continents, the South Pacific and India. They all share a characteristically stark, scientific beauty with extraordinary geographical detail gathered from a carefully cultivated network of sailors, scientist, and explorers. This was never better illustrated than in the 1814 edition of Arrowsmith’s, “A Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America”. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had only published the journal of their expedition earlier that same year. Arrowsmith realized that this was going to change the geopolitics of North America forever, and he rushed to incorporate this new cartographic information onto his own map. Arrowsmith’s map bears the accolade of being the first printed map to portray these discoveries in a continental context.
The family firm thrived and Aaron the patriarch was first joined by his sons, Aaron II and Samuel and then later by his nephew, John. When Aaron died in 1823, the firm continued although Aaron II left to become an Oxford scholar and then a Church of England Minister; John left to start his own business. Samuel carried on until his untimely death in 1839 whereupon it was taken over by John again and rose to new heights until 1873, when its assets were purchased by Edward Stanford.
