George Anson's voyage (1740-1744) was a landmark circumnavigation, made not so much for discovery and exploration but as an armed naval expedition to cut off Spanish supplies of wealth from South America after the outbreak of war between Britain and Spain in 1739. The object of the expedition was not attained as the expedition fell foul of scurvy and storms. Yet, with the capture of a Spanish treasure ship near China, Anson and his surviving crew reached England much richer. When the expedition's chaplain, Richard Walter published the official account of Anson's Voyage Round the World in May 1748 the book was an instant bestseller. Walter's account continued to be extremely popular in Georgian Britain. It helped to promote the development of the Royal Navy.
This paper will focus on two charts: a frontispiece world map and a chart of the southern part of South America (Book I, Chapter. IX), both from an octavo edition of Walter's narrative published in Dublin in 1748. Walter's introduction affirms that his account aims to make public the most accurate geographical knowledge for strategic purposes yet the engravings reproduce cartographic errors. Can this anomaly be explained? In 1747 Ferdinand VII of Spain issued a decree that California was a part of the mainland yet Walter's frontispiece reproduces the Island of California. Alaska, discovered by Vitus Bering as part of Russia's Great Northern Expedition (1733-1743), is absent from the frontispiece. In drawing the chart in Book I, Chapter. IX, Anson largely depended upon a chart published in 1717 by a French military engineer, Amédée-François Frézier, whose mission was to chart Spanish fortifications in South America, yet this chart in Book I, Chapter. IX contains errors, notably, the phantom Pepys Island. This paper offers a re-reading of these maps, through the critical lens of map historian John Brian Harley's theory of 'cartographic silences'. Harley argues that maps are privileged forms of knowledge operating as rhetorical devices or as a 'controlled fiction'. The paper argues that Walter's cartographic absences reveal strategic and commercial aspirations central to Britain's military ambitions in the power politics of eighteenth century Europe.