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I wish copies to be made of the Sketches of the Coast by Major Sturgeon, which are sent by the Courier this day and the Originals to be afterwards forwarded to the Horse Guards by a safe opportunity. The copies may be traced in a rough way only, without losing time upon them. I wish great care to be taken that the Originals are not injured in any manner.
The cartographic material of the Peninsular War is unique in one particular respect. These were the first campaigns in which maps for military use were produced for the British army by the lithographic process. The first lithographic press in England, originally intended for commercial use but proving unsuccessful in this connection was acquired for the QMG’s Department and installed at the Horse Guards apparently in 1808. It appears that from the beginning it was intended for map production work. From this press, beginning in 1808, there issued maps falling into various categories. There are a number of examples of retrospective battle maps, and perhaps of greater significance, a few examples of several topographical maps apparently intended for staff planning purposes. The coverage of the lithographed maps of this type which have been found so far is not very extensive. It is interesting how early analogies to the modern practice of producing successive editions with revised and extended contents can be found, and how far the production of the same map in different physical forms is exemplified among these early lithographed maps.
Retrospect: Mitchell and the Wyld Atlas
As has been seen, during the war itself, much attention was paid to the retrospective mapping of battlefields. Immediately after the peace Murray made a proposal to the C-in-C for the compilation of a set of plans to illustrate the operations of the British forces. This received government approval and Lt. Thomas Mitchell, who had already made a useful contribution to the QMG’s mapping operations since 1812, was returned to the Peninsula in the summer of 1814 to complete unfinished sketches and make surveys of other sites for which there was no satisfactory material. The Portuguese and Spanish governments gave permission for Mitchell’s work, and under orders from Murray in London, he set to work beginning with a survey of the field of battle of Fuentes de Onoro. In the succeeding years, Mitchell covered battlefields from the Lines of Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees but was recalled in 1819 because of the withdrawal of government financial support, and a few of the battle plans remained unfinished.
In London, Mitchell now began the preparation of the plans for publication, still under Murray’s direction, using his own surveys and the wartime sketches. However, the return to a peacetime military establishment put Mitchell on half pay before he could complete his work. He was found a post in New South Wales and in the following years achieved fame and a knighthood as a surveyor and explorer of Australia. The work remained in abeyance for several years until Mitchell’s visit to England in 1836, when it was resumed.
At this point, Murray became involved in public controversy with Sir William Napier, author of the History of the War in the Peninsula. During the course of the dispute, Murray was accused of keeping in his personal possession maps which should have been in the Military Depot of the QMG’s Department. Questions were asked in Parliament, but Murray appears nevertheless to have retained at least some of the maps and the work proceeded. The collection was published in 1840 by James Wyld, Geographer to the Queen, and is accompanied by a memoir containing a selection of the relevant orders. The atlas plates are mainly lithographed with a few engraved. The lithographed plates include some excellent examples of relief shading by chalk lithography. Among the engraved plates is a map of the Pyrenees in four sheets which is probably the largest and most remarkable of the small number of maps produced at about this time by Bates Patent Anaglyptograph, a device invented originally for making engravings from medals and producing a bas-relief effect. The process apparently anticipates in principal Kitiro Tanaka’s orthographical relief method of the 1930s but used a machine operating on a relief model.
The elegant and interesting maps and plans in this atlas are the most lasting monuments to the cartographic work directed by Murray and have great historical value. Many were reprinted for a later QMG by the Topographical and Statistical Department, War Office, in the 1860s.
Conclusion
The cartography of the Peninsular campaign marks an exceptional stage in the development of British military map-making. It represents the flowering of a new topographical organisation which was to
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