India quae Orientalis dicitur, et Insulae Adjacentes.

1. 1. • BLAEU’S IMPORTANT CHART OF THE DUTCH DISCOVERIES IN AUSTRALIA 1635

Important map in the history of the charting of the Australian continent and one of the first to show a number of the early Dutch discoveries on the northern Australia coast by one of the most famous of all cartographers.

The map records the discoveries made by Dirk Hartog (‘T Landt van Eendracht’) 1616, Lenaert Jacobszoon in the Mauritius (‘Willems Revier’) 1618, Jan Carstenz on the western side of Cape York Peninsula 1623 and de Witt on the north-west coast (‘G.F.de Wits Landt’) 1628.

The map also records the first English sighting of the Australian coast and the first recorded European shipwreck off the coast of Western Australia by the Tryall, an East India Company ship under the command of John Brookes in 1622, that had run aground on the Tryal Rocks (105km off the north-west coast of WA). Brookes’s subsequent untruthful report to the authorities in Batavia, had him place the rocks further west than their true position and in the direct course of VOC ships sailing due north for the Sunda Straits. This new information immediately prompted Gerritz, the VOC mapmaker in Batavia, to add the rocks on Dutch charts where they remained in this incorrect position for a period of almost two hundred years.

References: Allen p.80 ill. p.81, Clancy p.79, ill.map 6.7 pp.78-79,
Clancy (R) p.77, ill.80-81, Perry p.31, ill.pl.12, Quirino p.105,
ill.p.107, Suarez (A) pp.201-202, ill.fig.115, Schilder 40, ill.p.323,
Schilder (K) p.81-82, ill.4.18(c) p.81, Tooley 223.

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