Hémisphère Austral ou Antarctique projeté sur un horizon dont le zénith est situé à 140 degrés de longitude orientale de l’Isle de Fer et à 66° 32′ de latitude australe

Gilles Robert de Vaugondy was a French geographer and royal cartographer who, together with his son Didier, helped establish the Robert de Vaugondy name among the leading cartographic publishers of eighteenth-century Paris. This large polar map of the southern hemisphere was first published in 1773 under the approval of the Académie royale des sciences. The engraving is by E. Dussy.

Hémisphère Austral ou Antarctique presents the southern hemisphere in a polar projection, centred on the Antarctic region and surrounded by extensive explanatory text, observations, and a table of positions. The map gathers the routes and discoveries of earlier European navigators, including Abel Tasman, Edmond Halley, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen, and James Cook. Rather than showing a single settled southern continent, it records the progressive testing and reduction of earlier ideas about Terre Australe. The present example is the second state, with explanatory text panels added in the four corners. It does not include the date 1777 in the lower left corner or the tracks of James Cook’s Resolution from 1773, 1774, and 1775, which were added in the third state. The second state therefore occupies an important position between the first publication of the polar map and the later Cook-revised version, showing the southern world just before Cook’s second voyage finally displaced many lingering expectations of a temperate southern continent.

The faint yellow outline in the southern Pacific shows the shape of Europe projected onto the opposite side of the globe. It marks Europe’s antipodes: the part of the southern hemisphere that lay directly opposite Europe. This device allowed viewers to compare the known geography of Europe with the still uncertain geography of the southern oceans. The surrounding notes make the sheet a cartographic essay as much as a map, combining geography, exploration history, astronomical positioning, and commentary on recent discoveries. The map is known in three states. The first state was issued in 1773 without the surrounding text panels –Example: Click here. The second state, represented here, added explanatory text panels in the four corners – Example: Click here. The third state was revised in 1777 with additional astronomical observations, the date 1777 in the lower left corner, and the tracks of James Cook’s Resolution in 1773, 1774, and 1775 –Example: Click here

Within the collection, this map is closely connected with Gilles Robert de Vaugondy’s Carte réduite de l’Australasie (17), which represents pre-Cook knowledge of New Holland and the southern Pacific in 1756. It also relates to Valentijn’s Tasman map (177), John Thornton’s chart of New Holland (102) both of which preserve earlier Dutch-derived knowledge of Australia before the later Cook-era remapping of the southern oceans.