A Discourse touching the Drayning the Great Fennes, lying Within the severall Counties of Lincolne, Northampton, Huntington, Norfolke, Suffolke, Cambridge, and the Isle of Ely, as it was presented to His Majestie

Woodcut royal arms on first leaf (otherwise blank) & one large folding engraved map (on a new stub & with a few short tears to edges carefully repaired). Title within typographical border. 2 p.l., 32 pp. Small 4to, modern morocco (first two leaves carefully remargined in gutter, light browning), uncut. London: T. Fawcet, 1642. First edition of a very rare and important book; this work, written in 1637 or 1638 but not published until 1642, details for the first time Vermuyden's plan to drain the Great Level, a significant portion of the Fens between the Nene River and the uplands of Norfolk, which was successfully completed by 1653. His plan extended over land in six counties and involved 11,000 laborers (mostly Scottish and Dutch prisoners of war) in the project. It was one of the greatest land reclamation projects ever realized. Vermuyden (1590-1677), a civil engineer who specialized in drainage, came from a Dutch family which specialized in that activity. He came to England in 1621 and worked on a number of projects involving repairs of embankments and land reclamation. Following his involvement, sponsored by Charles I, in draining Hatfield Chase, Vermuyden was engaged by Francis, fourth earl of Bedford, and then Charles I, to drain the Great Level (later known as the Bedford Level). This work describes the planned work, founded on a purely gravitational system, in which he proposes two innovations: the creation of washes, areas of land allowed to flood in periods of bad weather to absorb the extra water that cannot drain to the sea, and a catch drain around the eastern edge of the Fen. The washes were constructed as part of the second phase of drainage in the 1650s, but the catch drain was only realized in the 20th century. Vermuyden also proposes that rivers were to be dredged and straightened and sluices and channels were to be dug. "Any faults in Vermuyden's general scheme were faults of initial diagnosis, not of execution. His system worked satisfactorily for a time after its completion in 1653, and would have continued to work had not the lowering of the land-surfaces through the shrinkage of the peat-lands especially, and of the silt-lands to a lesser degree, destroyed the one simple hydraulic factor on which that system was based, namely gravitational discharge. When this discharge ceased to function a new technology, involving the mechanical raising of water, was bound to be needed just as it had been necessary earlier in the Netherlands for similar reasons. The extent to which the land shrank through desiccation was itself a measure of the effectiveness of Vermuyden's scheme of drainage."-Singer et al., A History of Technology, III, pp. 320-21. The fine map of the Fens shows the main drains already executed and proposed. A nice uncut copy with a few leaves strengthened at edges. With contemporary notes on the recto of the first leaf: "Collated & perfect 2.6," "wth ye Mapp," and "Wm. Palmer." Most copies lack this first leaf. Stamp of the Rothamsted Experimental Station. ❧ ODNB. Skempton 1692.