[Norman, John] — William Norman

A Chart of South Carolina and Georgia. [Boston: William Norman, 1798-1801]

Copper-engraved sea char♐t (sheet size: 540 x 432 mm). An early ink manuscrip♕t notation at center. 

A rare sea chart from Norman's American Pilot, one of the earliest maritime maps of the Georgia and South Carolina coasts

This map was originally published as part of the first edition of John Norman's The American Pilot (1791), and was preceded only by Mathew Clark's chart of 1790. The present second state, with "Shute's Folly" in the inset corrected to "Shutes Folly," first appeared in the very🗹 rare 1798 edition. The chart shows the area from the St. John's River, Florida, in the south, to John's Island, South Carolina, in the north. At the lower right is a large inset of Charleston Harbor.

The manuscript notation, in a contemporary hand, lends a fascinating sense of life to the map. The line concludes with the note "Black Beard Point," alluding to the fact that "Sappola Inlet," now referred to as Sapelo Sound, was one of the favorite hideouts of the infamous pirate Blackbeard (the alias of Edward Teach) during his reign of terror from 1716 to 1718. Blackbeard's nimble vessel Queen Anne's Revenge would hide i♔n the inlet from patrolling British ships of the lin🅘e that found these littoral waters too treacherous to chance. Blackbeard's presence in the area is immortalized by the designation of the Blackbeard Island National Wildlife Refuge, located at the northern part of Sapelo Island.

The presented map was made in the years following the American Revolution, which had brought to an end Britain's leading role in the mapping of America. The task now fell to the American publishing industry, still in its infancy, but with first-hand access to the new surveys that were documenting the rapid growth of the nation. In particular, there was a need for nautical charts for use by the expanding New England commercial fleets. The first American marine atlas, Mathew Clark's A Complete Set of Charts of the Coast of America, was published in Boston in 1790. Two of Clark's charts had been engraved by John Norman, who was inspired to launch his own enterprise. In January 1790, Norman published a notice in the Boston Gazette, stating he was currently engraving charts of all the coast of America on a large scale. These were assembled and published as The American Pilot (Boston 1791). Norman's Pilot, the second American marine atlas—indeed, the second American atlas of any kꦜind—marked an advance over the earlier worꦇk of Mathew Clark.

New editions of the Pilot appeared in 1792 and 1794, and after John Norman's death, his son, William, brought out editions in 1794, 1798, 1801, and 1803. Despite the seemingly large number of editions, The American Pilot is one of the rarest of all Amer🧸ican atlases, and one of the very few published during the eighteenth century. Wheat and Brun locate just ten complete copies for the first five editions. The present example came from one of the rarest of all, the 1801 edition, and is not in the Library of🀅 Congress, and is unknown to Wheat & Brun and all other commentators except Tom Suarez.

REFERENCE

Wheat & Brun, Maps & Charts Published in America before 1800 607; Suarez, Shedding the Veil 164