Globo terrestre delineato sulle ultime osservazioni con i viaggi e nuove scoperte del Cap. Cook, inglese

Giovanni Maria Cassini was a Roman geographer, engraver, and publisher active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His printed terrestrial globe, Globo terrestre delineato sulle ultime osservazioni con i viaggi e nuove scoperte del Cap. Cook, inglese, was first issued in Rome by the Calcografia Camerale in 1790 as twelve gores on four sheets, and was later incorporated into vol. 1 of his Nuovo atlante geografico universale in 1792. The globe reflects the importance of Captain James Cook’s Pacific voyages in European geographical publishing, while also retaining earlier Dutch and French discoveries in the southern hemisphere.

This engraved sheet contains three terrestrial globe gores, numbered 4, 5, and 6. These tapered segments were designed to be cut out and applied to a spherical globe, where they would align with adjacent gores to form a continuous world map. The sheet covers a broad region extending from India, central Asia, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the East Indies to Nuova Olanda, Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands. Australia is divided across the lower portions of the gores and appears as Nuova Olanda. The east coast incorporates discoveries from Cook’s first voyage in Endeavour, including labels such as Capo Howe, Baia Botany, Capo Morton, and Stretto d’Endeavour. The eastern coast is labelled Nuova Galles Meridionale, marking the incorporation of Cook’s 1770 survey into Italian cartography.

Cassini also preserves earlier Dutch discoveries along the western, northern, and southern coasts of Australia. Names associated with seventeenth-century Dutch navigation include Terra di Wit, Terra della Concordia, Terra di Nuyts, and Terra di Leeuwin. Van Diemen’s Land is shown at the lower right, still closely associated with the southern mainland, reflecting the incomplete state of European knowledge before Bass and Flinders clarified the separation of Tasmania from the continent. The Pacific portion of the sheet includes New Zealand, here divided across the right-hand gore, as well as island groups encountered or mapped by European navigators, including the Ladrones, Caroline Islands, New Britain, New Ireland, and other island chains. The tracks of voyages are indicated by dotted lines, placing Cook’s discoveries within a wider history of European oceanic exploration.

The sheet is important because it shows Australia and the Pacific not as an isolated regional map, but as part of a global instrument. Its curved geometry, dense place names, and voyage tracks translate recent exploration into the spherical format of the globe. In relation to Cassini’s separate map of La Nuova Olanda e la Nuova Guinea (15), these gores show how the same late eighteenth-century geographical knowledge could be adapted for a very different cartographic form.