Emanuel Bowen

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Emanuel Bowen held a title that no other mapmaker in history has claimed: Royal Mapmaker to both King George II of Great Britain and King Louis XV of France simultaneously. Two rival crowns, one Welsh engraver from Carmarthenshire. How a boy apprenticed to a merchant tailor in 1709 became the cartographic servant of competing empires is a story worth following. And at the end of that story lies a detail that cuts against the grandeur of the title: Bowen died in poverty, as did the son who inherited his trade. What drove a man of such renown to such an end? And what did his maps actually argue about the shape of the world?

• 2. From Talley to London

  ›

  Bowen was born at Tal-y-Llychau, the village now called Talley, in Carmarthenshire, Wales. His father Owen Bowen was described as a distinguished but not noble gentleman, a member of the local gentry. That background gave Emanuel a measure of social standing, but not enough to set him on an easy path. In 1709 he was apprenticed to Charles Price as a merchant tailor, a trade that required precision and patience but had nothing to do with maps. By 1714 he had moved to London, and on the 3rd of October 1716 he was admitted to the Merchant Taylors Livery Company. The guild membership is a small administrative fact, but it marks a turning point: Bowen was now a recognized craftsman in the city where his real career would take shape. The shift from stitching cloth to engraving copper is not as strange as it sounds. Both trades demanded a steady hand and an eye for fine detail, and engraving was a natural home for a young man with those qualities.

• 3. The Annotated Map

  ›

  Britannia Depicta, published in 1720, announced Bowen's ambitions clearly. The atlas contained over two hundred road maps alongside a miniature county map for every county in England and Wales. It built on the earlier work of John Ogilby but updated that model with historical and heraldic detail throughout. One engineering choice made the book stand apart from competitors: maps were engraved on both sides of each page, which produced a volume compact enough to be genuinely portable. By 1726, Bowen was recognized as one of the leading engravers in London. A recurring habit defined his style across all his work. He filled every corner and empty space of his maps with jottings and footnotes, both historical and topographical. Blank space was, to Bowen, a missed opportunity. That instinct to annotate, to turn a map into a text as much as an image, would reach its fullest expression in the legends he wrote for his most consequential work.

• 4. A School of Engravers

  ›

  Among all of Bowen's contributions to British cartography, the one that outlasted him most directly was the generation of engravers he trained. His apprentices included Thomas Kitchin, Thomas Jeffreys, and John Lodge, all of whom became prominent figures in their own right. Another apprentice, John Oakman, pursued a more personal connection to the Bowen household: he had an affair with and eventually married Bowen's daughter. Among the other apprentices listed in the record are Thomas Buss, John Pryer, Samuel Lyne, and William Fowler. Bowen also trained his own son, Thomas Bowen, born in 1733. The collaboration between father and son produced a number of significant works. The Large English Atlas, made with Thomas Kitchin, first appeared between 1755 and 1760 and was reissued in further editions through 1787. The Royal English Atlas, also made with Kitchin, appeared in 1762 and was still being reissued as the English Atlas as late as 1828, decades after both men had died.

• 5. Terra Australis and the Southern Continent

  ›

  Bowen's most historically consequential map concerned a continent that had not yet been fully explored. His work titled A Complete Map of the Southern Continent survey'd by Capt. Abel Tasman was essentially a copy of a map that Melchisedech Thevenot had published in Paris in 1663 in his collection Relations de divers Voyages curieux. Thevenot's map was itself derived from Joan Blaeu's map published in the Kurfursten Atlas in 1659, and Blaeu's world map of 1648 had been set into the floor of the great hall of the Amsterdam Town Hall. What Bowen inherited, then, was a chain of copies stretching back through the seventeenth century. It appears to have been Thevenot who introduced a division between Hollandia Nova to the west and Terre Australe to the east, separated by the meridian corresponding to 135 degrees East of Greenwich. A latitude staff running down that meridian made the boundary visible. Bowen's map carried that division forward, and the legends he added to it gave the boundary an almost prophetic significance: when Britain established the colony of New South Wales in 1788, the territorial claim included all of Australia eastward of precisely that 135th meridian.

• 6. The Legend Bowen Wrote

  ›

  The text Bowen placed on his Southern Continent map was not a neutral geographic note. One legend defended the explorer Ferdinand de Quiros, whose account of a land on the east side of the continent had been dismissed by some critics as fiction. Bowen argued from the map itself that the land Quiros described was visible in the actual record of discoveries, and that dismissing his account was, in Bowen's own words, "very rashly as well as very unjustly" done. A second legend went further and called for the discovery and settlement of the entire southern landmass. Bowen drew direct comparisons between the known riches of Java, Sumatra, Borneo, the Moluccas, Madagascar, and the coasts of Africa, then argued by geographical parallel that the same latitudes in Carpentaria, New Holland, and New Zealand must be equally endowed by nature. He concluded that whoever perfectly discovers and settles it will become, in his word, "infallibly" possessed of territories as rich and fruitful as any found in the East or West Indies. That argument, written by a London engraver, foreshadowed the imperial logic that would drive British settlement of Australia in the decades after his death.

• 7. Poverty and Legacy

  ›

  Despite royal patronage from two crowns and a career that spanned more than half a century, Bowen died in poverty on the 8th of May 1767. He was not unusual in this among cartographers of his time; the source notes that poverty was a common fate for men of his trade, whatever their reputation. His son Thomas Bowen, born in 1733, carried on the business after Emanuel's death but met an identical end, dying in a Clerkenwell workhouse in 1790. The workhouse was the last address of the destitute in eighteenth-century London. Thomas's death there closes a story that began in a Welsh village with a gentleman's son and ended in one of the starkest institutions the city offered. Among the posthumous reissues of Emanuel's work, the Atlas Minimus, originally published in 1758 with John Gibson, was reissued in 1774 and again in 1792, and the Royal English Atlas continued in print into the 1820s, long after both Bowens were gone.