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British Military Map-Making in The
Peninsular War – Part 2
P.K. Clark and Yolande Jones (Hodson)
Preliminary remarks
This year, 2019, marks 200 years since the return from the Peninsula of Lieutenant Thomas Mitchell. He had been tasked with completing surveys and gathering material for a government- backed project to compile a set of plans to illustrate the operations of the British forces in Spain and Portugal during the Peninsular War (1808-1814). The story of that project, and the mapping and survey operations leading up to it, is told in this account which was originally written for and presented to, the 7th International Conference on Cartography at the meeting of the International Cartographic Association at Madrid in April-May 1974. Although it is forty-five years since the paper was written, it has been used extensively in the last twenty years by students of the Peninsular War. However, it is not easily accessible, and it is reproduced without change here to make it more widely available. Scholarship has moved on, of course, but the primary facts expressed here have remained the same. - YH October 2019
The Quarter Master General’s Department
The innovations in the training of staff officers which have been described are paralleled by developments in the organisation and administration of the land forces. The inadequacies and delays in the service provided by the Board of Ordnance led to the development of resources at the more immediate disposal of the Commander in Chief. Two new corps were formed to support the QMG. These were the Permanent Assistants to the QMG and the Royal Staff Corps. The first, formed in 1804, comprised a small group of officers, Majors and Lieutenant Colonels, not holding regimental commissions, to be employed on the staffs of the military districts in the United Kingdom and of commanders overseas. Their duties included military survey, the examination of roads, marking ground for the encampment and exercise of troops and the direction of works for national defence.
The other new unit was the Royal Staff Corps, formed in 1800. Unlike the Permanent Assistants, this was not a corps of officers only but provided a force intended to be capable of a wide range of field engineering activities. The companies of this corps consisted of artificers and tradesmen with the skills relevant to such tasks as the construction of field fortifications, roads and bridges; it is not surprising that several officers from the disbanded Irish Engineers found appropriate employment in directing the activities of this nature and accepted commissions in the new corps. The coping stone of the new structure of QMG resources was the reform and extension of the Department itself.
In the eighteenth century, there had been a small QMG’s Department whose function it was to prepare routes for the marches of troops and to arrange for quartering in camps and billets. The department was small, comprising three or four officers and a few clerks. It had little authority and a narrow range of competence. In 1803, the new QMG, Brownrigg, proposed a substantial increase in the staff of his department and the establishment within it of a Depot of Military Knowledge (often referred to as the Military Depot). The proposal, by the Commander in Chief, the Duke of York, received government sanction and was implemented in the years before the campaign in the Peninsula. By 1808, the new department was fully operational and included a military library and a ‘drawing room for copying plans and containing a collection of the best plans and maps.’ There was also a collection of military information ‘collated from the manuscripts of officers who now occupy, or may formerly have held staff situations, or who may have been employed upon foreign service.’
Murray and the mapping operations
Despite the efforts of the reformed QMG’s Department and Military Depot at the Horse Guards (the office of the C-in-C and his staff), the British force which landed in Portugal in 1808 found itself poorly provided with maps and sadly lacking in topographical information generally. The available Portuguese and Spanish maps were at small scales and defective in accuracy and completeness. In Portugal a principal triangulation commenced in the previous decade, provided a double chain of
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