A SCARCE pilot book of c.1793, John Leard’s …Pilot for Jamaica and the Windward Passages was a highlight of a Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) sale of January 25 and sold for £13,500.
Though it appeared to lack one of the 15 uncoloured charts, five of which are doublepage or folding, the auctioneers could trace only two other examples in institutional collections (in the USA and Australia) and found only one record of a copy at auction – in 1937.
The pilot book was made at the order of Vice-Admiral Philip Affleck, C-in-C of England’s naval operations in Jamaica and Bermuda at the time, but this copy was later owned by a French master mariner, Captain Auguste Booquet. The saleroom speculated that it may have fallen into French hands during the Napoleonic wars.