The World Agreable to the latest Discoveries.

A beautifully embellished c.18th double hemisphere world map with Australia and New Zealand shown according to the discoveries made by Abel Tasman on his two voyages of exploration 1642-3.

 A decorative Rococco style title is at top centre while the corners have representations of the four continents and at lower centre is a bucolic scene with a castle.

Australia is shown without an east coast which was first charted in 1769-70 by James Cook in the Endeavour. The South Australian portion of the southern coast is uncharted from from Nuyts Archipelago at the Head of the Bight which was first charted by François Thijssen in the Gulden Zeepaert in 1627. only the very southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) is shown recording the first European discovery and landing by Abel Tasman in 1642. Tasman sighted Tasmania on 24th November 1642 and named the island after the governor of The Dutch East Indies, Antonio van Diemen. The first two mountains they sighted on the island were named Mount Zeehan and Mount Heemskirk, after their ships. Seeking shelter, Tasman put into a cove to shelter from a storm. He called the location Storm Bay.  A later explorer (Furneaux) misread Tasman’s notes and called this bay Adventure Bay and a larger bay nearby was erroneously marked on Furneaux’s charts as Storm Bay. On 1st December, the storm having abated, the ships were able to move on before coming to anchor at Green Island. They put ashore for supplies at what is now known as Blackman Bay (north of Dunalley). Two days later, the carpenter, Peter Jacobsen, volunteered to swim ashore with a pole on which was the Prince’s flag, which he planted on the shore of the bay taking possession of the island for the Dutch.

The shows the western coast of Cape York, where the first Dutch landings occurred in 1606 on the Duyfken and is named Carpentaria.

Interestingly the map shows ‘Torres Strait’ between New Guinea and Cape York which was not known to exist until it was proven by Alexander Dalrymple, who having found Spanish documents captured in the Philippines in 1762 proving a passage south of New Guinea. His discovery led Dalrymple to publish the Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean in 1770–1771, which aroused widespread interest in his claim of the existence of an unknown continent. It was Dalrymple who named the strait after Torres. The first recorded European navigation of the strait was by Luís Vaz de Torres who sailed through the strait in 1606.  The second Europen to sail through the Strait was James Cook on his first voyage.