Jns Kleine Gerbrachte Karte von den Sud-Laendern

Nicholas Bellin’s famous and influential map, showing Australia with a completed hypothetical east coast extending from the southern tip of Tasmania to New Guinea and a completed southern coast. It is one of only a handful of 18th century maps soley devoted to the Australian continent. This representation of the Australian landmass significantly influenced the way other cartographers depicted the continent and as a consequence, the error was included on almost all maps produced prior to the publication of James Cook’s discoveries of the east coast in 1769.

Bellin was appointed hydrographer to the French Navy at the age of eighteen and later became head of the French Hydrographic Office and official hydrographer to the King. He was an important figure of the French Enlightenment and as an encyclopediste, contributed 994 articles to Diderot’s Encyclopedie. A prodigious cartographer of the highest standards, his maps were often copied by other European mapmakers. He was also a founder of the French school of Theoretical Cartography, which applied theoretical coastlines to known cartography. Bellin adds a theoretical east coast, to the known southern portion of Tasmania’s coastline discovered by Abel Tasman in 1642, to New Guinea and the New Hebrides. He also extends the southern coastline from the furthest easterly discoveries made by Nuyts in 1627, who mapped and named ‘t Land van Pieter Nuyts’ and the islands of St. Francis and St. Pieter, in South Australia.

The chart includes: the Dutch discoveries on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula, made by Cartensz 1623, Tasman’s first and second voyages 1642-1644, Hartog 1616, Houtman 1619, van Leeuwin 1622, de Wit 1628, Nuyts 1627 and Vlamingh 1697. It also notes William Dampier’s visit to Shark Bay 1699.

German edition.

References: Clancy p.92, ill.6.28, Perry ill.pl.30, Tooley 156, ill.pl.9, 80, p.24.