Jeremiah Alfred Watts, surveyor and trader, was the son of Stephen Watts and his wife Carolina, born Evans. He was employed in the Surveyor-General's office of Natal Colony in the eighteen-fifties. In 1855 he compiled the first reasonably accurate map of Natal, on a scale of six miles to the inch (1:380 160). It showed rivers, roads, settlements, missions, farms (including their size and the names of their owners), and the areas occupied by African chiefs and their people, and was based mainly on the surveys that had been carried out by the Surveyor-General and his staff during the previous ten years. The map is now in the Local History Museum, Durban.
Watts was married in 1853 to Alida Gerhardina Maria de Kock, with whom he had several children. He was declared insolvent in 1863.
