WD2987

Mantjingan Head, Java. 1815

Probably by J. Knops

Inscribed on front in pencil in the hand of Captain G.P. Baker: ‘View of Manchingan Head from the NW on the sea shore July 1815.’ Left: ‘Rocky parts yellow ochre, shade with Bistre; from very light. Stones on the Strand, dark. The small ones or shingle white’. Note by the headland: ‘6 or 8 miles distt.’ Watermark: ‘J. Whatman 1794.’

Pencil; 43.3 by 54 cm.

Note: Mantjingan, on the southern coast of Java, is almost directly south of Jogjakarta. Captain G.P. Baker and his party left Surakarta on 18 June 1815, and after a stay at Jogjakarta proceeded to Mantjingan where they arrived at the end of July. They then commenced a survey of the coastline running westwards to Karangbolong which was reached in the middle of the following month. Raffles's instructions to Baker, dated 19 and 20 May 1815, asked for an accurate description of the south coast, accompanied where possible by sketches of the surveyed routes, as the first essentials of the survey. The instructions continued: 'The Dutch Maps of the Native Provinces are altogether so erroneous and imperfect, as to offer no guide whatever. It is therefore of some importance that whatever information you may collect, and whatever routes you may make across the country should be accurately laid down in a general Sketch map of these Provinces. I am aware that we cannot look for any thing like geographical accuracy without a regular Survey-but this it is impossible to undertake at the present moment; and your Sketch of such parts of the Country as you may actually visit, and corrected by the best local information you may obtain, cannot fail to prove highly interesting. . . .' Precisely how much the map of the island in Raffles's ‘The History of Java’ (London, 1817) owed to Baker's survey of some 250 miles of the southern coast is difficult to decide, especially as Baker did not complete his work on the survey until after he reached Calcutta in August of the following year. It is virtually certain, however, that the inset charts of the eastern and western harbours of Nusa Kambangan in Raffles's map of Java are by Baker or after surveys made by him.