Camden New South Wales [John Kerry Studios, Sydney]

THE first time a cartographer wrote the name Camden Town on a map happened many thousands of miles away from NW1.

The settlement of Camden Town, South Carolina, was home to a community of Irish Quakers who had travelled across the Atlantic in search of a better life.

Unlike so many settlers, they came in peace and developed a close bond with the Catawba indigenous peoples whose land they chose to live on.

In 1768, a signpost was hammered into the Carolina earth with the name Camden Town emblazoned across it in honour of Lord Camden – a champion of rights and democracy.

Our own Camden Town would not be named until 1790, after the same man who owned land north of the river.

These stories and many others of Camdens dotted across the globe have been compiled this week to mark the 400th anniversary of William Camden’s death on November 9 by the Camden History Society.

Camden Arkansas

Member David Hayes, who has overseen the project, joined the society in 1994. He worked for the Camden Council library service and used lunch breaks to a research new publication the society was working on, focusing on the stories of streets between Primrose Hill and Euston.

David has now contributed to a series of notable books published by the society. He contacted history societies from New South Wales to New York for the online project, which reveals how the Camden name spread.

The project started last year when it was noted Camden Place in Chislehurst, Kent, was marking the 400th anniversary of the death of William Camden.

David decided to give the society’s commemorative response an international flavour. He searched the world for other places.

“I expected to find around a dozen but there were at least 50,” he says.

William was born in 1551. This Elizabethan scholar gave Camden Town its name – but in a unique and roundabout way.

William, who nearly died of the plague as a youth, became the headmaster of Westminster School and the librarian of Westminster Abbey.

Camden South Carolina

He would become known as the “grandfather of modern history”, a scholar and antiquarian who published a book called Britannica, in Latin, which was a county-by-county survey.

This first Camden died leaving no descendants. His house – Camden Place – was sold to Charles Pratt, who would call himself Baron Camden of Camden Place, Chislehurst.

“He took on the name of a childless Elizabethan scholar, basing his title on another family’s surname. It was very unusual,” explains David.

The research shows that the many places called Camden around the world are named after the high-flying Georgian lawyer, Charles Pratt.

Charles, the 1st Earl Camden, was described as being short but handsome, possessing “fine grey eyes and a genial smile”.

His work lobbying for no taxation without representation for the colonists meant there are more than 30 places named after this champion of American citizens. He wasn’t frightened of the Crown, either: In 1762, King George III made him Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, a move to keep him away from politics.

Camden Missouri

In 1763, he freed the radical journalist and MP John Wilkes, who had been arrested over an article that attacked the monarchy.

“Pratt was a staunch supporter of the colonists,” adds David.

“He was constantly speaking up for them.”

His son, John Jeffreys Pratt, became the 2nd Earl Camden on his father’s death, and was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

This tenure was a disaster, and saw him impose martial law. There are not, unsurprisingly, places named after him in the Republic.

Made Minister for War and the Colonies, he oversaw the carving up of thousands of square miles of Australia for sheep farming – prompting the family name to  be found dotted across the Outback.

Britain’s colonial legacy means Camdens pop up in places where explorers, followed by Red Coats, marched.

Camden Place

In Alaska, Camden Bay, was named by Captain John Franklin – who then went on to vanish into thin air with 129 other sailors while trying to find a north west passage through the Arctic in 1845.

From the north of the Americas to the far south: the wilds of Tierra Del Fuego, the turbulent seas of Cape Horn, also carry the borough’s name.

The HMS Beagle was captained by Robert Fitzroy. The great nephew of the second Lord Camden, he drew on this to colour in bits of the global map: exploring the coasts of South America, he named an archipelago the Camden Islands.

Dotted among them is named Pratt Passage and Brecknock Passage – he was also Earl of Brecknock.

“In the islands you can find Euston Bay, Grafton Island and Whittlebury Island, as there was once a Whittlebury Street where Euston station is now,” says David.

Camden Mississippi

As well as leaving English names round the globe, Captain Fitzroy decided to forcibly take people from communities called Alakaluf and Yahgan in Tierra Del Fuego and bring them back to meet Queen Victoria. Five Del Fuegoians were marched aboard and spent a year studying English at a boarding school in rural Walthamstow.

Captain Fitzroy’s plan was to return them home, once they had been “civilised”, so they could spread their new fangled Englishness.

It didn’t work out: the kidnapped people travelled back again on the HMS Beagle – this voyage also carrying a naturalist by the name of Charles Darwin – and once returned, they shed their European clothes and returned to the way of life they previously knew.

Other places are more recent, and are marketing gimmicks rather than a homage to a long-dead aristocrat.

“I found one place in Asia,” says David.

“A few years ago an upmarket housing development in Singapore was called Camden. I contacted a historian there and he said it was ‘named after a Camden Town in south east England’.”

Other offbeat Camdens include a Camden destroyed by Franklin D Roosevelt’s push to get America out of the Great Depression through major infrastructure projects.

In 1931, Camden County was flooded to create the Lake Ozarks reservoir, with residents moved to a new city – which they called Camdenton.

Another Camden became an infamous destination during slavery. Nestled in Ontario, Canada, it represented freedom, as it was the end of the line of the so-called Underground Railroad – the route taken by runaway slaves.

One such escapee-turned-Baptist minister established a settlement and it was here the wooden house of Josiah Henson, whose autobiography describing his arduous journey from enslavement, inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

• See https://www.camdenhistorysociety.org/camdens-around-the-world