Detail of an engraved, colored map of Jamaica shows Kingston Harbor outlined in a greenish blue color and St. Andrew. Other surrounding locations labeled in English.
Detail of an engraved, colored map of Jamaica shows Kingston Harbor outlined in a greenish blue color, St. Catherine, and St. Andrew. Other surrounding locations labeled in English.
Detail of an engraved, colored map of Jamaica shows a legend where the coordinates of important locations are listed.
Detail of an engraved, colored map of Jamaica shows "Lucea-Harbour," "Cousins-Cove," among other locations labeled in English. This coastal area is outlined in pink.

To the King's most excellent Majesty, this map of the Island of Jamaica...

James Robertson
1804

After arriving in Jamaica in 1778, James Robertson, a Scotsman who had trained as a surveyor in Aberdeen, spent his early years surveying plantations and serving as an officer and surveyor during the Second Maroon War of 1795 before . This detailed knowledge of Jamaica’s interior served him well, and in 1796, Robertson turned towards an ambitious island-wide cartographic project commissioned and financed by the Jamaican House of Assembly. Finally published in 1805, Robertson’s impressively-detailed set of maps included a single large island map (192 centimeters in length) and three separate county maps in a larger scale of one inch to the mile. The maps were immediate success, celebrated then and now for their remarkable accuracy heretofore unseen on island maps: in addition to topography and coastal detail, they show 830 sugar plantations, portraying the distribution of sugar cultivation at the time of peak production in Jamaica.

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