This year, the National Library’s map collection has been enriched with nearly fifty rare historical nautical charts. Additions of such scope and significance are rare; the last time the National Library was able to acquire nautical charts for its collection on a comparable scale was almost a quarter of a century ago.

The National Library of Estonia has for many years collected and preserved historical nautical charts in order to safeguard knowledge of maritime history, cartographic culture and the depiction of the Estonian coastline across different centuries. Until now, there have been significant gaps in the collection of older nautical charts, making it difficult to form a comprehensive overview of the history of nautical charting in Estonia and the surrounding region.

The last major addition to the collection was made in 1999, when, with the support of the Ministry of Culture, 52 maps of Old Livonia were acquired from the collection of Estonian expatriate Ilo Käbin, including one nautical chart.

The recently acquired selection provides an excellent overview of nautical charts from different centuries as well as of some of Europe’s most important cartographers, from Great Britain to Russia. Represented in the collection are the renowned Dutch mapmakers Pieter Goos, Jacob Colom, Reinier and Joshua Ottens, Wilhelm Blaeu, the Johannes van Keulen family and others; the English cartographers Richard Holmes Laurie, John Seller, John Norris, John Senex and Robert Dudley; the French cartographers Nicolas Gabriel Le Clerc and Jacques Nicolas Bellin; the Swedish cartographers Peter Gedda, Johan Nordenankar, Nils Strömcrona, Gustaf af Klint and Anders Åkerman; and, from Russia, Alexei Nagayev, Jacob Friedrich Schmidt, Leonty Spafaryev and others.

All the acquired charts will be described, digitised and made available to researchers and other interested users. An initial overview of the collection can be found in the ESTER online catalogue.

Estonia is a maritime country, but during the Soviet occupation access to the sea was prohibited or restricted. Today, maritime culture is gradually being revived, and interest is growing in the history of maritime culture, ports, former coastal villages and related topics. The preservation of rare charts and the development of collections help safeguard the maritime history of Estonia and the Baltic Sea region for future generations.