Hydrographer Royal: Greenvile Collins and the Charting of Britain’s Coast

Wells, Peter (2026) Hydrographer Royal: Greenvile Collins and the Charting of Britain’s Coast. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This project presents an academic-literary biography of the seventeenth-century naval officer and hydrographer Captain Greenvile Collins, challenging his marginalisation within naval historiography and positioning him as the foundational figure of British hydrography. Best known as the creator of Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot (1693), the first atlas of British coastal sea charts derived from a systematic national survey, Collins is reinterpreted as a central figure in the development of broader geographic knowledge and cartographic authority during the period of Britain’s rise to maritime and economic power.

Drawing on extensive archival sources, including Collins’s four surviving journals, the study reconstructs a life shaped by exploration, support for British Mediterranean commerce and the production of the Coasting Pilot. It provides new insight into early modern hydrographic practice as a form of knowledge creation grounded in observation and physical measurement, rather than in the accumulation of second-hand reports. Collins emerges as an acute commentator whose writings illuminate how maritime experience was gathered, validated and disseminated in authoritative print. His relationships with important naval patrons and his personal connections with Charles II, James II and VII, and William III frame an analysis of the politics of hydrography and print publication.

The project adopts an inductive, archive-led methodology combined with a hybrid creative-critical form. This structure integrates historical analysis with literary presentation to emphasise character and human experience within the narrative context. Conceptually it argues that Collins’s cartography helped to shape ideas of British nationhood – quite literally measuring and drawing the kingdom – at a time when Britain emerged as a unified maritime state. By making Collins’s life and work its focus, the project provides new archival evidence about hydrographic practice, redefines the importance of the Stuart navy’s non-combat functions and establishes a direct link between Collins’s pioneering work and later British Admiralty hydrographic dominance.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	27 Oct 2026 09:03
Last Modified:	27 Oct 2026 09:03
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104857
DOI:

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