Nicholas Comerford’s map of the East Indies, made in 1665, may be the earliest English-map showing Borneo, including Kuching and Sarawak (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
Patrick Comerford
Inevitably, once I had arrived in Kuching, I started searching for Comerford family links in the past with Kuching, in Sarawak, or in Borneo, or in Malaysia.
We arrived in Kuching two weeks ago (15 October 2024), but in the two weeks since I have found very little about any Comerford presence here before me as I trawl the internet and pored over academic papers, news reports and the historical research of others in the past.
There wis the occasional academic paper with a Comerford co-author, but none of them amounted to a long-standing connection with this part of south-east Asia. There is an Australian racing commentator, also called Patrick Comerford, who has worked here occasionally, but he has also worked in Singapore as well as Abu Dhabi and other parts of the Middle East. Once again, though, there were no long-standing associations.
I extended my research a little further in Malaysia and found Comerfords who had been here on business trips or who had on-off business connections with Malaysia as part of their interests in south-east Asia. In my initial searches I could find no Comerford involved in colonial administration, no Comerford involved in rubber plantations, oil exploration, or missionary engagement in Malaysia, or in the Brooke administration in Sarawak.
I even wondered whether there was a possibility that the Brooke family, one-time Rajahs of Sarawak, were related to Comberford Brooke (1675-1711), who lived at Madeley, Shropshire, and Comberford Hall, Staffordshire, and who was also known as ‘Mr Brooke of Cumberford’ and ‘Captain Cumberford’.
He was living with his sisters and his grandmother, Catherine Comberford, at Comberford Hall in 1705. He became an English Jacobite and a captain in the German Regiment of Saar. But he maintained regular contact with his family and friends, and as Comberford Brooke of Comberford he made his will in 1711.
Comberford Brooke married Rose Austen, daughter of Sir John Austen of Bexley, Kent. But his descendants in the male line came to an end with the death of his only son Basil Brooke, who died in 1727, and the line of descent of these Comberfords and Brookes passed into the Smitheman, Edwardes, Giffard, Salughter and Mostyn family.
A portrait of Basil Brooke, Comberford Brooke’s son, painted in 1727 … I could find no links with the Brookes of Sarawak (Photograph courtesy Paul and Kathy Schaefer, Fairfield, Iowa)
The legacy of the Brooke family can be seen throughout Kuching to this day. But it does not include a descent from the Comberford family of Comberford Hall.
And then I remembered the work of the Nicholas Comberford or Comerford, the 17th century mapmaker in London, who worked in Radcliffe and Stepney.
Returning to the work of Nicholas Comberford, I also returned to the paper I wrote 25 years ago in the Old Kilkenny Review, the Journal of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (‘From India to Brazil: Nicholas Comerford, a seventeenth-century Kilkenny-born cartographer’, 1999, pp 92-102).
Nicholas Comerford’s maps charted the world from the East Indies and India to Brazil and the coast of North America. However, unlike the other members of the Thames School, he was not an Englishman, but a Kilkenny-born Irishman, who, as well as being overlooked until recently by cartographers and art historians alike, has been overlooked too in his native county.
Nicholas may well have been the first person to create English-language maps that show Borneo, including the area that is now Sarawak and the place where Kuching would later develop.
Two versions of his colourful map, East Indies, have survived. They are both on vellum and similar in every detail apart from their size, including the materials and colours Nicholas used, his spelling of place names and the inscriptions: ‘Nicholas Cumberford dwelling at the Signe of the Platt neare the weste end of the School House in Ratcliffe, 1665’.
The larger version, measuring 70.5 cm x 55.5 cm, is in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London; the smaller version, measuring 40 cm x 32 cm, is in the Braga Special Map Collection of the National Library of Australia. The map in Greenwich is a single sheet Portulan made of vellum and mounted on two hinged boards, each 70.5 cm x 27.5 cm. The signature reads: ‘Made by Nicholas Comberford dwelling at the signe of the platt neare the west end of the school house in Ratcliffe anno 1665.’
Nicholas Comberford’s smaller map in the National Library of Australia is in colour, measuring 40 x 32 cm, with a similar inscription and also dated Ratcliffe, 1665.
Borneo is at the very centre of these two maps, and it is possible to identity the location on the map where Kuching later developed. Other places included in the maps include the West Pacific, Malaya, Sumatra, Siam, China, Taiwan, Japan, New Guinea, Timor, the Philippines and north-west Australia. Cambodia is named as Camboea an seems to include Laos and Vietnam; Java is identified as Iava Maior; the Philippines as Laphillpinia, and Korea as Coray. A clear line indicates the Equator.
Inside Saint Dunstan’s Parish Church, Stepney, facing east … Nicholas Comberford and Mary Kithen were married here on 10 June 1624 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)
Nicholas Comberford was a leading member of the Thames School of chart makers who drew manuscript plane charts on vellum. Although he lived most of his working life in Stepney and Wapping, he was born in Kilkenny. He was a member of the Drapers’ Company all his life. His maps charted the world from the East Indies and India to Brazil and the North coast of America.
But in the 1650s, at the height of his career, he was poor and was paid little for his work. Although he had charted much of the world, he never travelled much further than the journey from Kilkenny to London, a journey that he appears to have regretted in the closing days of his life, when he longed to return to Ireland once more.
Part of the difficulty in the past in identifying Nicholas Comerford as a member of the Kilkenny family arises because many English map cataloguers have spelled his name Comberford, leading to confusion and his identification with the Staffordshire family. Nor was the historian of the Diocese of Ossory, William Carrigan, aware of Nicholas Comberford, his important contribution to 17th-century life, and his place in the Inchiholohan or Castleinch branch of the family. The manuscripts relevant to tracing Nicholas Comerford’s life were not published and available to readers until after Carrigan’s four volumes were published in 1905.
Nicholas Comberford’s father was Nicholas Comerford, the ‘King’s Gaoler’ at Kilkenny, and he was a grandson of Garret Comerford of Inshilholan (Inchiolohan or Castleinch). Garret Comerford (1550-1604) was the Queen’s Attorney-at-Laws for Connaught, MP for Callan, Second Baron of the Exchequer and Chief Justice of Munster. Just a year before his death, Garret was the third or fourth richest person with lands in Co Cork.
Nicholas Comberford’s father is the third son named in Garret Comerford’s will and was the ‘King’s Gaoler’ at Kilkenny. Nicholas Comberford the mapmaker was probably born in Kilkenny ca 1600. He moved to London in his teens, long before 1620, and settled in Stepney, where a number of Comberfords were living for a few generations. They may have been Irish cousins, or members of the Comberford family from Staffordshire, who would have accepted him as kin; in either case, they probably made it easy for him to find a place to live, and to find an apprenticeship with the Company of Drapers as a ‘plat-maker’ or map-maker.
The coat-of-arms of the Drapers’ Company at Drapers’ Hall … Nicholas Comberford was a member of the livery company founded in 1361 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
As Nicholas Commerford or Comberford, he was apprenticed to the mapmaker John Daniel in the Drapers’ Company school of portolan chart makers. John Daniel was the first draper-chartmaker of the Company of Drapers, and Nicholas completed his apprenticeship with him in 1620.
As Nicholas Commerford, he married Mary Kithen of Ratcliffe in Saint Dunstan’s Parish Church, Stepney, on 10 June 1624, when he is described as a ‘Draper.’ He continued to live in the parish, where he was ‘of the precincts of St Katherine,’ was active in parish life, and is recorded as attending a vestry meeting in 1645. In the parish records, he is described as a draper and is named variously as Nicholas Cumberford and Commerford. At the February 1645 Vestry, there were no less than 11 captains from Ratcliffe and Limehouse among an attendance of 30 parishioners.
Later, when he was living in London, Nicholas would tell visitors from Ireland that his kindred had many good estates in Ireland, but they also included a priest who by then was in Spain, and another who was a drunk and who robbed him. The priest in Spain may have been either Thomas Comerford (1583-1636) or James Comerford (1583-1640), two of his three Jesuit uncles who were sons of Garret Comerford. He may have been unaware that his second cousin, Patrick Comerford, had become Bishop of Waterford and Lismore.
According to his signature on most of his maps and charts, Nicholas Comberford lived at Radcliffe in Stepney, although a visitor in 1655 says he lived in Wapping. We are left with a very full description of Comberford’s living conditions and family circumstances from an almost mocking account of a visit to him contained in a letter from that visitor, William Dobbyns, to his cousin John (later Sir John) Percivale, written on 17 December 1655.
Dobbyns and his friends located a ‘rich’ uncle, who turned out to be Nicholas Comberford, the poor mapmaker, who had left Kilkenny and who was now living in squalor.
Nicholas is mentioned by Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1663. Yet, at the height of his career in the 1650s, Nicholas was poor and was paid little for his work. Nicholas worked in a garret in the house in Wapping, and was paid 25 shillings for a map that would take about three weeks to make. His works remained unclaimed until the mid-20th century. In recent years, he has been fully identified as a member of the group of London chart makers now called the Thames School.
In all, 28 of his charts have been recoded. The British Museum Library collection in London includes seven charts, dating between 1647 and 1665, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, has seven Comberford maps, there are five Comberford maps or charts in the Sterling National Library in Yale University, the University of Kansas has four, and there is one each in the New York Public Library, the Antigua Museum, the National Library of Australia, Lincoln Cathedral and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which has what is probably his last traceable map, dated 1670.
He was working until 1670, but I have traced no further works by Nicholas Comerford after 1670. He died in 1673 in his early 70s, still living in poverty in Wapping. The historic and artistic importance of his work and the work of other members of the ‘Thames School’ have come to be appreciated only in recent years, and his work has come to the attention of many scholars.
‘East Indies’ by Nicholas Comberford of Ratcliffe, 1665 (Braga Collection, National Library of Australia)
29 October 2024
Nicholas Comberford
and one of the earliest
English-language maps
of Borneo, made in 1665
Labels:
Borneo,
Comberford,
East Indies,
Family History,
Kilkenny,
Kuching,
London,
Malaysia,
Sarawak,
Stepney,
Travel
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