Thomas Best Jervis and Philippe Vandermaelen’s Etablissement géographique de Bruxelles

Abstract

This article documents the production of a series of lithographed maps published during the Crimean War (1854–1856) and argues that they were fundamental in the British Government’s decision to create a Topographical and Statistical Department, and ultimately an Intelligence Branch, within its War Office. It explores the possibility that two innovating cartographers at the time, Thomas Best Jervis, the Department’s first director, and Philippe Vandermaelen of the Etablissement géographique de Bruxelles, collaborated on these maps, in part owing to their common interest in earlier maps of Turkey in Europe and of the Crimea drawn by Franz von Weiss and Semen A. Mukhin respectively, maps Jervis had acquired copies of in Belgium in the spring of 1854. Finally, it suggests that the influence of the probable collaboration of these cartographers extended beyond military intelligence, and that the techniques used in the production of their maps, (chromo)lithography and anastatic reprinting, had a defining technical influence on later nineteenth-century map making.