Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Velarde Map
It is one of the 80 or so heirlooms
up for sale, Lot #183, a 1734 Pedro
Murillo Velarde map drawn up in
Manila, tagged as the "first
Pedro Murillo
(Fr. Murillo Velarde was the Jesuit
priest and polymath who designed
Pedro Murillo
51 x 33 cm, is also a sea chart for
pilots and carries a brief legend on
In 1762, the British occupied Manila, following their victory over Spanish forces
in the Battle of Manila.
When Manila fell on October 6, 1762, British soldiers pillaged (and raped, razed,
and plundered) the city for 40 hours.
One of the looted artifacts, taken by Brigadier General William Draper, was a set
of eight copperplates of the 1734 Murillo map, the most comprehensive map of
the archipelago at the time.
Draper donated the copperplates to Cambridge University, which ran new prints
of the map.
Later, the British melted the copperplates when they needed copper to print their
admiralty charts.
One of these prints was then acquired by the Duke of Northumberland, who kept
the map for over 200 years, until it was unearthed after the flood, put to the
auction hammer and won over the phone by a Filipino businessman named Mel
Velarde (no apparent relation to Pedro) in 2014.
The "Mother of all Philippine Maps" arrived in the
country on April 28, nearly three years after it was
auctioned off. Esquire emailed Mel Velarde to talk
about the map, which he is donating to the National
Museum