Australasia

Rare large scale map of Australia with a completed southern coast made one year (1815) after Flinders seminal map of Australia (1814). First edition of Pinkerton’s important map of New Holland. 

Matthew Flinders’s important survey of New Holland was the first chart to depict the Australian continent with a completed southern coastline. Flinders had finished correcting the proofs of his text and charts by the end of May 1814. ‘The book appears to have been completed by the end of June 1814, since he records in his diary that Banks received an early copy on June 1814’ (Wantrup). A Voyage to Terra Australis was formally published 18 July 1814. 

Pinkerton’s chart uses some of the names on the southern coast given by Nicholas Baudin who led the French voyage of exploration of the Australian coast at the same time as Flinders. He adds the following note; Coast very little known for the coastline, from the Coorung to Cape Banks

No inland information is included on the Australian continent. The map 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.

The Dutch discoveries on in Queensland, North Territory and Western Australia are comprehensively recorded.

Pinkerton’s map is often incorrectly dated as the publication date of 1813 is printed at the bottom of the map but in fact it was first issued in his, A modern atlas, from the latest and best authorities, exhibiting the various divisions of the world, published in 1815.

This example is on J. Whatman watermarked paper and with a date of 1810.

References; Prescott 1813.07 p.163, Tooley 979, p.131, ill.pl. 83,