There are 4 distinct shades of the Map imperfs — lavender, grey, pale blue and deep
blue; 600 pairs are thought to exist. The so-called muddy water variety is a colour
changeling caused by oxidation and is NOT a printing variety.
This is a note in the Unitrade Canada specialized catalog about number 85, a stamp from 1898, released in time for the Christmas season. The 2‑cent stamp features a view of the entire world, with the areas of the British Empire in red, and the phrase “We hold a vaster empire than has been.” The ocean is printed on this stamp as a blue background.
I don’t remember the first time I heard about this stamp, perhaps it was on Graham Beck’s youtube channel, or one of the other stamp-related blogs I’ve been on here and there. I don’t remember and it’s not worth looking up, but I do know that ever since I saw it I knew I liked this stamp. I don’t really collect Canada (although I still sort it out of my worldwide bins in to its own pile in hopes I will get around to it eventually) so it is one of very few that I know about and keep my eyes open for.
The last several days I have been sorting through more of my worldwide bins…I’ve been hoping to be disciplined enough to finally finish it, and get them off my list. Today I happened to find this stamp! But it looked different. The ocean is black.
Here you can see the black ocean
Time to pull the Unitrade off the shelf! That’s where I found the quote at the beginning of this post:
There are 4 distinct shades of the Map imperfs — lavender, grey, pale blue and deep
blue; 600 pairs are thought to exist. The so-called muddy water variety is a colour
changeling caused by oxidation and is NOT a printing variety.
I looked up “muddy water” in relation to this stamp, and it’s much more of a pale brown. The catalog doesn’t reference any other varieties or printing errors. What I have, I think, doesn’t look anything like the “muddy” color that I’ve found online. I do know that the chances of my finding a color error of some kind in a random worldwide assortment is *very low* in general, much less to find one not listed in the catalog, so I started to consider if this has been fabricated. Below are two more pictures of the stamp — one from the front and one from the back — you can see that there is no ink bleed through to the back of the stamp (which rules out my initial theory that someone took a sharpie to this stamp and colored it in).
The printed black ink also seems to be offset equally across the entire stamp (printed slightly lower than the outlines of the countries), so if this was colored in by hand in some way it was done very well.
I’d be curious to know if anyone else has discovered something like this. Perhaps this is just an “extra muddy” variant of the same color change. I am unsure. If you know more than me about this please leave a comment or shoot me a message.
Andrew has been collecting since 2020, and created this website in 2022 to document his philatelic experiences.