Joshua Fisher (merchant)

Joshua Fisher (1707 – February 1, 1783) was a prominent Philadelphia merchant involved in transatlantic trade and mapmaking as applied to nautical charts.

He married (July 27, 1733) a neighbor's daughter, Sarah Rowland, the granddaughter of Mary Harworth, an eloquent Friends minister who had also arrived on the "Welcome".

Fisher also purchased a country estate north of the city overlooking the Schuylkill River from the east, and built a house there in 1753 called "The Cliffs", after his family's ancestral home in Yorkshire, England.

Customers were able to order items such as porcelain, silverware, brass pulls for dressers, and every other imaginable type of merchandise from a detailed catalog, and receive their goods within weeks.

The chart was very accurate for the day, showing observations of the exact latitude and longitude, and soundings, information about harbors, stream inlets, shoals, and ship channels.

The chart was engraved by James Turner, funded by a group of local merchants and ship owners, and printed in 1756 in Philadelphia by printer John Davis.

As a consequence sons Thomas, Samuel, Meirs were exiled to Winchester, Virginia along with several other Quakers, and kept under house arrest for a year.

[2] After evacuation of the British, the group of Quakers were eventually pardoned and allowed to return to Philadelphia by order of George Washington and the Congress.

Fisher's son Samuel continued to show opposition to the revolutionary cause, and in 1779 he and was arrested on the charge of being a Tory on the basis of a letter he sent to his brother Jabez Maud on a ship unable to land in New York Harbor.