Separately issued folding wall map of the world published for the Japanese market and based on an English map by John Purdy c. 1845.

This rare and important map has a strange pedigree. The Russian diplomat, Admiral Yevfimiy Putyatin was in Japan to negotiate a trade treaty with the Shogun. While he was there, his fleet suffered a disaster and was sunk by an enormous tsunami. One of the few items rescued from the wreck of one of the ships was an English map credited to John Purdy and published by Robert Holmes Laurie. Although the map was originally issued in 1810, it was immediately popular and went through multiple updates, revisions and size changes. It is believed that the map rescued from the wreck was a version issued in the mid 1840s. The rescued map came into the hands of a Japanese publisher and map maker, Kango Takeda who translated the text and used its geographical model to issue one of the earliest Japanese maps of the world on Mercator's Projection in 1858. This example is the second edition, this time issued by a very curious individual, Edward Schnell.

Schnell and his brother Henry, were Prussian arms dealers and military advisors who had settled in Yokohama, Japan. They were both colourful figures who were given the right to bear weapons and both married Japanese ladies. They had links to the Prussian consul and in fact, Henry and his Japanese wife would go on to found the first Japanese settlement in California. It is unknown how the map came into Edward's hands.

Geographically, the map suggests that Schnell had access to other sources than just the Purdy map from the mid-1840s. The geography of Australia, Europe and the Middle East is current to maps of the 1830s and early 1840s. However, the geography of North America is surprisingly contemporary. The border between the United States and Canada is shown as fully running on the 49th parallel, referring to the Oregon Treaty between Great Britain and the USA signed in 1846 and the southern border between the United States and Mexico is now shown as running through modern Arizona and New Mexico and just above the Baja Peninsula. This border was negotiated to end the Mexican American War of 1846-8 at the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Generally, the borders of the countries of Europe are a little sketchy and haphazard and this is far more the case in the Middle East and Asia. It has to be remembered that Purdy was a hydrographer as opposed to a cartographer and that the original map was in fact a chart, or concentrated on the seas, oceans and marine voyages rather than political borders.

A mention must be made of the aesthetics of this piece. Printed on wood blocks, Japanese maps are renowned for their delicacy and their bright, vivid hand colour. This map bears those characteristics, including the use of the very fine rice paper available to local publishers. The combination of these factors provides a very different aesthetic in comparison to their 19th century western counterparts. From studying the few institutional copies available, we can ascertain that there are two versions of this map: One with an extra panel on the right showing a collection of international flags such as this example, and another version which is missing this panel. It would seem logical that the examples with the flags are the rarer and were the more expensive to purchase at the time due to the extra work involved their production.

As is almost always the case, this map has a small amount of worm damage, which has been repaired. There are also two repaired splits next to the boards. Most unusually, it has not been backed. The boards are modern but they bear the original titles. Original hand colour. [WLD4440] Folded.