Carte Réduite de l’Australasie, pour servir a la lecture de L’Histoire des Terres Australales, par le Sr. Robert de Vaugondy Geog?ord? du Roi, de l’Academie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Nancy. 1756.

Rare, seminal c.18th map of Australia and one of only a handful of maps solely devoted to the Australian continent published between 1663 to 1800.

The map is much rarer than Nicholas Bellin’s map; Carte Reduite Des Terres Australes, on which it is based on. The map records the Dutch discoveries on the northern, western and southern coast of Australia.

William Charles de Brosses, president of the Burgundian Parlement and a shareholder in the French East India Company, produced the first major collection devoted exclusively to voyages in the Pacific. Published in 1756, the work was intended to encourage French commercial expansion and territorial settlement in the southern oceans, particularly in regions associated with the speculative continent of Terra Australis. Central to de Brosses’ argument was the strategic and economic importance of the Pacific and the lands later identified with Australia and the wider South Pacific. He included a substantial essay advocating exploration, together with practical proposals for voyages of discovery and future colonies. His ideas contributed to growing French interest in the region and influenced navigators such as Louis Antoine de Bougainville during France’s Pacific expeditions and the settlement of the Falkland Islands. The work also had an indirect connection with British exploration of Australia. James Cook carried a copy during his first Pacific voyage, despite the fact that de Brosses had written partly to challenge British expansion in the Pacific. The English writer John Callander later adapted much of the material in his Terra Australis Cognita (1768), a work closely associated with contemporary interest in the southern continent and the exploration of Australia.

De Brosses also introduced several geographical terms that entered lasting use, including “Australasia” and “Polynesia”.

From: Brosses, de Charle, Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes. Paris