A Draught of the Coast of New Holland and Parts Adjacent.

The first English chart of the Western Australian coast and the first to show the discoveries made by William Dampier at Shark Bay in August 1699.

The map has a prominent compass rose at centre, numerous rhumb lines and an elegant decorative title. It was issued in the Third Book, of the English Pilot, which was intended to be the first complete seaman’s guide of the Indian and far eastern waters to be published in England. It contained detailed sea charts, extensive sailing directions and coastal profiles. James Cook took a copy of the Third Book on his first voyage of discovery and after using the chart of Java, wrote ‘a very good Chart in which everything seems to be very accurately delineated.’

All editions of Thornton’s charts are very rare due to their use on board ships and due to them becoming obsolete as navigational charts once the British created the Hydrographic Office to officially provide detailed and updated charts for maritime navigation.

The map records the Dutch discoveries made on the western coast of New Holland including: Hartog 1616, Houtman 1619, van Leeuwin 1620 and De Witt 1628. An inset map of the survey by William Dampier on the HMS Roebuck in 1699, is positioned at lower right. Dampier had landed at Dirk Hartog Island at the mouth of Shark Bay in July 1699 and in search of fresh water, he followed the Australian coastline north-east, reaching the Dampier Archipelago and then Roebuck Bay. Thornton shows the soundings that Dampier took of the western Australian coastline. Finding no water, he was forced to sail to Timor.

The map also records the first English sighting of the Australian coast and the first recorded European shipwreck off the coast of Western Australia by the Tryall, an East India Company ship under the command of  John Brookes in 1622, that had run aground on the Tryal Rocks (105km off the north-west coast of WA).

The chart is from The Third Book of The English Pilot which was to have an extraordinarily complicated publishing history.

The English Pilot was first conceived and published by John Seller. He published, The First Book, covering the northern navigation and went on to publish the second, third, and fourth books of the ​English Pilot, covering the Southern, Northern, Mediterranean, and North American navigations. Seller endeavoured to provide a British equivalent to the navigational atlases similar to those of the Dutch works by Goos, Blaeu, and Janssonius. Unfortunately he was ruined in the attempt and William Fisher and John Thornton acquired the plates and rights and published ten editions between 1703 and 1761. After John Thornton’s death in early 1708, his son Samuel issued an edition of the Third Book in 1711 and following his death in 1715, the Third Book became the property of Mount and Page who issued eight editions between 1716 and 1761. Of the thirty-five charts in the 1703 edition, twenty-seven were reprinted from the original plates, with occasional minor alterations in all editions

From, Thornton, The English pilot. The Third Book : describing the sea-coasts, capes, headlands, straits, soundings, sands, shoals, rocks and dangers : the islands, bays, roads, harbours and ports in the oriental navigation. Published by Mount & Page.