New Guinea

Antique Maps of New Guinea

This category brings together original antique maps of New Guinea — the great island to the north of Australia that ranks as the second largest island in the world and that attracted European cartographic attention from the early decades of the 16th century through to the systematic surveys of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These works document the progressive and often slow accumulation of geographic knowledge about an island whose interior remained among the last great unknown territories on Earth well into the modern period, generating maps that reflect the shifting boundary between European knowledge and ignorance with unusual clarity.

The earliest European encounters with New Guinea date from the first decades of the 16th century, when Portuguese and Spanish navigators exploring the waters of the western Pacific made contact with the island’s coastlines without penetrating its interior. The maps produced in the wake of these early encounters reflect the incomplete knowledge of the period, depicting the island’s general configuration while leaving vast areas of coastline and virtually all of the interior unmapped. The great Dutch and Flemish cartographic publishers of the 17th century incorporated whatever geographic intelligence their commercial networks could access into maps of New Guinea that combined the established cartographic conventions of the Dutch golden age with the particular uncertainties of a poorly understood geography.

Dutch colonial engagement with the western portion of New Guinea from the 17th century onwards provided a more systematic basis for cartographic documentation of that part of the island, while the eastern portion remained poorly documented until the increased scientific and commercial interest of the 19th century brought more systematic surveys. The voyages of d’Entrecasteaux, Dumont d’Urville and other French explorers contributed to the cartographic record alongside British and Dutch surveys, creating a body of late 18th and early 19th-century New Guinea cartography of increasing accuracy and detail.

Antique maps of New Guinea are collected for their geographic interest as documents of one of the last great unknown territories in the mapped world, their connection to the Pacific exploration tradition that defined European engagement with the southwestern Pacific, and the decorative quality of the finest early examples from the Dutch golden age of cartography.