The Charles Close Society for the study of Ordnance Survey maps

Digital Images Archive

223. Ten mile map of the World: Quebec (CCSA.CCS_218B_66/6)

The background to these Ordnance Survey ten-mile maps of North America is best summarised in ‘Tomorrow the World : Sir Henry James’ Map of the World at Ten Miles to an Inch’, a paper presented by Ian Mumford and Peter K. Clark at the 11th International Conference on the History of Cartography, Ottawa, Canada in July 1985. There is a copy in the Charles Close Society Archives at CCSA.BWA_332_2/1.

Fifteen sheets, each measuring 5º of latitude by 4º of longitude, were engraved, covering an area of North America extending west-east from Detroit and Toronto to Cape Breton and south to Richmond, Virginia. Copies of all fifteen, printed in January 1880, are in the British Library at Maps 69915(99).

The eight sheets present here are all from the collection of the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. These were all printed nearly twelve years earlier, in May 1868, and thanks to these images those interested will be able to investigate what further work was done on the plates in the intervening years.

[Ordnance survey plans] Constructed and engraved at the Ordnance Survey Office. Southampton. 1864. Colonel Sir Henry James. Source: Library and Archives Canada/Maps, plans and charts/NMC 51486 to 51493.