A sea chart of the Channel Islands first published by John Thornton in the ‘Coasting Pilot’ dating from c.1697 of which there is only one known example. The existence of this atlas was presumed by a reference to it in a National Library of Scotland listing an edition by his son Samuel Thornton, 1714. It is the only known example of that edition also. In the March and April editions of the ‘London Gazette’ for 1672 John Seller advertised a new atlas entitled the ‘Coasting Pilot … upon the Coasts of England Flanders and Holland’. It provided sailing directions for the east and south coasts of England and the continental European coastlines bordering on the English Channel.

‘Of the consortium members John Thornton had the greatest experience through his skills as a manuscript chart maker. He occupies a special position in British Chart marking for most of his working life hitherto he had been a part of a group of manuscript chart makers who were members of the Drapers Company, collectively known as the Thames School. Thornton was to continue to prepare manuscript charts until the early 1700s, but meanwhile many of Seller’s plates had come into his hands’ (Shirley). This plate is however not one of them and is an original production by John Thornton. No examples could be located in any maritime atlases in the British Library or National Maritime Museum. Reference: Shirley ‘The Maritime maps and atlases of Seller, Thornton, and Mount & Page’, in ‘The Map Collector’ no. 73, pp. 2-9;Verner ‘Engraved Title Plates for the Folio Atlases of John Seller’, in ‘My Head is a Map’, a Festschrift for R. V. Tooley, pp. 21-52; Verner ‘John Seller and the Chart Trade in Seventeenth-Century England’, in ‘The Compleat Plattmaker’ edited by Norman J. W. Thrower, Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 127-57.