Richard Holmes Laurie was the scion of a famous map publishing firm. His father, Robert Laurie, was one half of the firm Laurie and Whittle, one of the leading commercial map publishing firms of their day. Richard took over the firm in 1818 and continued to issue maps, with an emphasis on sea charts. He was also highly successful and in fact, the family is still involved with cartography today as it is part of the modern chart company, Imray, Laurie, Norie and Wilson Ltd.



This fine linen backed folding chart of the world was issued in 1850 but is based on a much earlier map. In 1810, Laurie and Whittle published a large chart on Mercator's Projection compiled and engraved by their principal engraver, John Purdy. No doubt, they wanted to compete with their contemporaries such as Aaron Arrowsmith, William Heather and John Cary all of whom had their own versions of this map. Richard Holmes Laurie issued his own version in 1821, 1823 and we have found a record of a posthumous edition as late as 1861. Our version has been substantially reduced and was issued in 1850; it is still credited to Purdy, although he had died two years previously.



Unlike several of his contemporaries, Laurie does not emphasize the geopolitics of the age. Instead he concentrates on new geographical discoveries, which, at this time, were mainly focused on the North and South Poles. In the South, the major updates were the discoveries of the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-42 under Lieut. Charles Wilkes. His discoveries were added to those of John Biscoe in 1830-33 and James Weddell in 1821-2. There is no indication of James Clark Ross's important voyage to the South Polar Seas of 1839-43. In the North Pole, the focus is on the Canadian Arctic showing the discoveries of Dease, Simpson, Back, Ross and Franklin all of them in the 1820s and 1830s. There is no mention of the explorers on the face of the map although there is a small panel of text on the upper left summarising Polar exploration so far, but it only reaches the year 1833 after Ross. However, the geography of the region is certainly post John Ross with Dease Straight being marked, after Dease's expedition of 1836-9. Another panel, more centre left, lists the major navigators of the age, this time stopping at Vancouver in 1795, suggesting that this is a legacy from the 1810 version of the map.



One interesting side story for this map is that a version of it was in the possession of the Russian Admiral Putyatin when he was in Japan to negotiate a trade deal in 1858. A typhoon sank his ship while in harbour and one of the few items rescued from this disaster was this map. It passed into the hands of a local Japanese publisher and became one of the principal sources for revisions and updates of Japanese world maps which up to that date were still using information from the 18th century.

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