Bradock Mean or John Green
1745 Bradock Mean or John Green Antique Map of Bay of Arguin, Mauritania, Africa
- Title : A Map or Chart of ye Westn Coast of AFRICA from Cape Blanco, to Tanit. taken from Labat
- Size: 10in x 7 1/2in (255mm x 195mm)
- Ref #: 15998
- Date : 1745
- Condition: (A) Very Good Condition
Description:
This fine original copper-plate engraved antique map of The Bay of Arguin on the Atlantic coast of Mauritania, North Africa - located south of Cap Blanc, north of Cap Timiris - by Bradock Mean or John Green, was published in 1745 after Jean-Baptiste Labat.
General Definitions:
Paper thickness and quality: - Heavy and stable
Paper color : - off white
Age of map color: -
Colors used: -
General color appearance: -
Paper size: - 10in x 7 1/2in (255mm x 195mm)
Plate size: - 10in x 7 1/2in (255mm x 195mm)
Margins: - Min 0in (0mm)
Imperfections:
Margins: - Top right margin cropped to border
Plate area: - None
Verso: - None
Background:
Jean-Baptiste Labat 1663 – 1738 was a French clergyman, botanist, writer, explorer, ethnographer, soldier, engineer, and landowner.
Mead, Bradock ne John Green 1685 - 1757
The world of the commercial cartographer in eighteenth-century London was quite respectable. It was punctuated by the usual calamities that befell any entrepreneurial enterprise: partners split in acrimony; some cartographers, such as Thomas Jefferys in 1766 or Osgood Carleton in 1803 suffered the misfortune of bankruptcy. Yet there was a claim to respectability among these tradesmen. They mixed with the literati and natural philosophers; the texts and maps they published contributed to \\\"the science of princes\\\"; their clientele comprised gentry, clergy, and aristocracy; a favored few sold their maps to royalty and claimed titles such as \\\"geographer to His Majesty.\\\"
John Green, however, presents an effective antidote to this image of propriety and respectability. He took cartography from the salons and the coffee houses into the taverns and the squalid streets memorialized in Hogarth\\\'s prints.
The events of Green\\\'s life are obscured by his working for publishers who took the credit for his work; his willingness to remain anonymous was certainly enhanced by his brushes with the law. The main source of information for his life is an undated letter that Thomas Jefferys wrote to the earl of Morton (James Douglass, 14th earl, then president of the Royal Society) presumably in January 1767.
John Green was born Bradock Mead in Ireland, probably well before 1688. He clearly came from a sufficiently respectable family to get a good education; the Thomas Mead who became Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1757 was likely his brother.