Carte Reduite de L’Ocean Oriental ou Mers des Indes Contenant Les Costes d’Afrique, depuis le Cap den Bonne Espce….

The scarce first issue of this important large scale detailed sea chart, dedicated to Comte de Maurepas, French ministre de la marine to Louis XV by Nicholas Bellin, hydrographer to the French Navy.

The chart extends from Africa to Australia and north to the Tropic of Cancer. It contains the latest cartographic information of the Indian Ocean and features extensive rhumb lines.

The first French contact with the Australian coast at Eendracht Land in 1687 by Duquesne-Guitton, in command of the ship Loiseau, is noted. The English naming of Shark Bay by Dampier 1699 and the Dutch visit to Swan River by Vlamingh 1697, are added. Bellin 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.

During this period the French navy, under the command of Comte de Maurepas, regained its lost prestige and France was once again recognised as a maritime power. From the French foothold of Reunion (previously Ile Bourbon) and Mauritius, the Indian Ocean increasingly became an area where the French endeavoured to expand their influence. As part of this expansion, they required their Hydrographic Office to provide up-to-date sea charts such as this.

From: Atlas de gʹeographie ancienne et moderne.

Reference: Tooley 155, p.24 (2nd ed.)