It could be argued that William Faden was the most important figure in British cartography in the second half of the 18th century. He was certainly one of the main figures in a meteoric surge of English map makers during this period. Individuals such as John Cary, Aaron Arrowsmith, Thomas Jefferys and Faden himself took advantage of Britain's emergence as a major maritime power to publish maps which established new paradigms and debunked multiple geographical legacy myths.



William Faden was born in 1749, the son of a printer and soon established himself as a map maker in his own right. In his early twenties, he became associated with the estate of Thomas Jefferys and collaborated in the issue of the "North American Atlas" which in turn led him to publish his own version of that work under the same name in 1777. This to a series of highly successful separately issued maps of the battles and sieges of the American Revolution. However, his flagship and most successful work was the "New General Atlas" a work containing maps from all over the world. The earliest edition we can find of this work is from 1777 and the last is from 1820. The maps within are almost always dated although these dates range widely and Faden would often revise and update the geographical detail of the maps without altering the printed date.



The earliest edition of this map of the world is dated 1802 and is usually to be found as two separate maps, one of the western and the other of the eastern hemisphere. Our example has been joined into one map, possibly for a composite work. Another far more important variation on our map in comparison to the other two examples we have been able to find, is the mapping of Australia. Our example shows the continent with the newly discovered Bass Straits but lacking the southern coast of the continent. The other examples we have been able to find show Australia with a south coast and with the modern Spencer Gulf and Gulf St. Vincent named as Gulf of Bonaparte and Gulf of Josephine respectively. These were named by Nicolas Baudin during the French expedition to Australia of 1800-3 after the First Consul, Napoleon and his wife. The official account of this journey was published between 1807-16 but it was likely that this information about the nomenclature may have been available shortly after 1804 when the expedition returned to France. This suggests that our example with its omission, bears a far closer resemblance to the geographical knowledge of 1802-3 while the other two examples are later despite bearing the same date on their face.



Other interesting features on the map include greater detail in the mapping of the sub-continent of India especially after the surveys of Rennell and the Anglo-Mysore Wars, on which Faden published separately issued maps. The detail in China is based on the Jesuit survey drawn by D'Anville for Du Halde, still the authoritative work on the country after sixty years. Africa is based on Faden's own map and with more interior detail, much of it still very speculative. In the Far East, the geography of the North Pacific has been greatly advanced after the voyages of James Cook and George Vancouver with the modern Vancouver Island here called Wabash Island. In the interior, Faden still shows North America as possibly connected to a vast Arctic landmass together with a land connection to Greenland although he also shows both Hearne's and McKenzies overland voyages reaching the Arctic Ocean in 1772 and 1789 respectively. He also makes a small reference to a tiny mountain range which he calls the "Stoney Mountains" in the west.

SL [WLD4490]