Smith’s New Map of Asia With the most recent Discoveries.

Very rare large scale map of Asia, showing Australia with a completed southern coast and dated 1815.

This map was issued six months after Flinders’s monumental publication A Voyage to Terra Australis, the most important survey of the Australian coast, which included his seminal chart of Australia and the first British chart to depict the southern coastline. Flinders had finished correcting the proofs of the 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.

Smith has removed all evidence of French place names given by Nicholas Baudin, the commander of the  Geographe and Naturalist who charted much of the southern coast at the same time as Flinders. No inland information is included on the Australian continent.

The map 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.

Not in Prescott, Tooley or Trove.

References: Henderson, p.74, Banyton-Williams p.614.