Old Map of Tobago

Historical Background

Thomas Jefferys’s map of Tobago combines a detailed picture of the island with practical information for ships approaching its shores. Published in London with an imprint dated 20 February 1775, it places the long ridge of hills, rivers and coastal bays beside named divisions and estate totals. The two harbour plans give particular attention to Courland Bays and Man of War Bay. Together, these elements show an island being recorded for navigation, commerce and colonial administration.

Map Details

• Original title: Tobago from Actual Surveys and Observations
• Cartographer: Thomas Jefferys, Geographer to the King
• Inset survey: Great and Little Courland Bays by David Ross
• Publisher: Robert Sayer, 53 Fleet Street, London
• Map imprint: 20 February 1775; the exact atlas issue of the reproduced sheet is not established
• Area shown: Tobago, with separate plans of Courland Bays and Man of War Bay
• Original scale: Approximately 1:63,360 on the main map; the insets use larger scales
• Format: Engraved island map with coastal soundings, relief and explanatory notes
• Orientation: North towards the top, with the island running diagonally across the sheet

The island’s shape and interior

Tobago stretches from the lower left to the upper right, giving its mountainous interior a prominent place in the composition. Closely worked lines describe the slopes and ridges, while rivers wind down towards the coast. This method of showing relief, known as hachuring, gives the hills a strong visual presence without using the contour lines familiar on a modern survey map.

The contrast between the rugged interior and the indented coastline is one of the print’s most striking features. Small bays, projecting points and offshore rocks receive considerable attention. At the south-western end, the lettering around Sandy Point and Rockly Bay sits among a dense network of coastal details. Farther along the island, Great River and Queens Bay provide reference points for reading the opposite shore. The map rewards close examination rather than relying on large decorative illustrations.

Two detailed harbour plans

The upper-left inset is David Ross’s survey of Great and Little Courland Bays. Its angular border fits around a much larger view of the coast, with depth figures, shoreline features and intersecting directional lines. The separate scale allows information that would be crowded on the main island map to remain readable. It also shows how a bay could be understood as a working anchorage, with the seabed and approaches as important as the land behind it.

Man of War Bay occupies the lower-right inset. Here, the sheltered water is framed by a sharply defined coastline and named points, with soundings extending into the bay. The same place appears on the main map near Tobago’s north-eastern end, allowing the viewer to move between the island as a whole and the detail of an individual harbour. The inset’s compass and scale underline its practical purpose.

Divisions, estates and colonial priorities

Large lettering separates Courland Bay, Barbados Bay, Great River, Queens Bay, Rockly Bay and Sandy Point divisions. Beneath several names are counts of estates and quantities of land. These labels reveal a different layer of information from the physical landscape: Tobago was being described in terms of surveyed territory and its potential use within a colonial economy.

That context requires care. The plantation economy associated with this period depended on the forced labour of enslaved Africans. The map records land and estate divisions, but it cannot convey the lives of the people whose labour sustained them. Reading those administrative labels alongside the island’s history gives them a significance beyond their neat arrangement on the page.

A London publication with a continuing life

The title credits Thomas Jefferys as Geographer to the King, while the lower margin names Robert Sayer’s Fleet Street business. Jefferys died in 1771, before the date printed on this sheet. His name continued to appear on maps issued through the London publishing trade, and this Tobago map was included in editions of the West-India Atlas.

The imprint is therefore a useful identifying detail, although it does not by itself establish the date of every later atlas containing the plate. The reproduced map is described here by its 1775 imprint, without assigning an unsupported atlas edition. Its combination of engraved terrain, harbour surveys and explanatory observations gives this old map of Tobago its particular character as a fine art print.