Carte Generale de l’Asie, ou se trouvert les Decouvertes faites par Bougainville, Danpierre et la Perouse Dressee par Herisson

Large wall map of Asia, by Eustache Herisson and issued in Paris by the printseller Basset. Herisson trained under Rigobert Bonne, hydrographer to the French Marine and among the most authoritative cartographers of the later eighteenth century; a pedigree the map advertises in its own title.. This map was issue in two sizes, this one being the large plate, which was reissued by the firm into the 1820s. The 1810 title names Bougainville, Dampier and La Perouse; later issues of the plate are recorded with Cook added to the voyagers named.

The map reaches from the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the East African coast across to New Guinea and the northern shore of New Holland, and from the Mer Glaciale south to the Indian Ocean, with the north-west corner of America closing the upper right. The northern Pacific follows the surveys of the La Perouse expedition of 1785-88; the coasts of Japan, Korea, Sakhalin, the Kurils and Kamchatka being the most recent French authority available when the plate was drawn.

Inland the map preserves the older French vocabulary of Asia: Tartarie Independante and Tartarie Chinoise, Grande Boukharie, the Gobi ou Desert de Sable, Thibet ou Boutan, while China and Siberia carry dense provincial detail, river systems and settlement. To the south-east the East Indies are given at length, with the Isles de la Sonde, Borneo and a note on the peoples of its interior, the Philippines and the scattered Carolines. New Guinea appears as Terre des Papoux, and beneath it the north coast of New Holland with the Golfe de Carpentarie and Terre d’Arnheim, drawn before Flinders’s survey reached publication.

Longitude is given from the Isle de Fer along the upper border and from the meridian of Paris below, with a suite of comparative scale bars in French, Russian, Italian and Indian measures at the lower left. Maps of this scale were made to be hung or folded into slipcases, and few survive.