Carte réduite de l’Australasie, pour servir à la lecture de l’Histoire des Terres Australes

Charles de Brosses was a French magistrate, scholar, and writer whose Histoire des navigations aux terres australes gathered earlier European voyages to the southern lands and argued for renewed French interest in the Pacific and the lands south of Asia. Published in Paris in 1756, the work helped organise the geography of the southern world into the categories Australasie, Polynésie, and Magellanique, and was part of the intellectual background to later French and British interest in the Pacific.

This map was prepared for de Brosses’s book by Gilles Robert de Vaugondy and engraved by Guillaume-Nicolas Delahaye. It presents Nouvelle Hollande within the wider region of Australasie, extending from Southeast Asia and New Guinea to New Zealand and the islands of the South Pacific. The map does not show Australia as a completed modern outline. Instead, it records the partial and uneven state of European knowledge before James Cook’s east-coast survey, combining Dutch discoveries in the west, north, and south with a conjectural eastern coastline. The treatment of Australia’s uncharted east coast is especially revealing. Rather than joining Nouvelle Hollande to New Guinea, Vaugondy begins the conjectural east coast near Cape York and extends it southwards in a swollen curve towards Van Diemen’s Land. This gives visual form to mid-eighteenth-century French theoretical cartography, in which unknown coastlines were sometimes supplied from geographical reasoning, reported discoveries, and inherited cartographic conventions. The result is a map that records both known Dutch discoveries and the limits of European knowledge before Cook’s 1770 survey of the east coast.

The western and southern coasts preserve earlier Dutch encounters, including Terre d’Endracht, Terre de Leeuwin, Terre de Nuyts, and Terre de Diemen. New Guinea appears across the north, while N. Zéelande ou le Staaten Land is shown to the southeast, reflecting the unresolved relationship between New Zealand, the western Pacific, and the imagined geography of the southern lands. The dotted or tentative eastern coastline of Nouvelle Hollande makes clear that the shape and extent of the continent remained uncertain in European cartography in the mid-eighteenth century. The title states that the map was made “to serve the reading” of de Brosses’s history, so it should be understood not as a sea chart for navigation but as a historical and geographical guide to the voyages discussed in the text. As such, it offers a compact synthesis of pre-Cook European knowledge of Australia and the surrounding Pacific.

Within the collection, this map is closely connected with Valentijn’s Kaart der Reyse van Abel Tasman volgens syn eygen opstel (177), which presents Dutch knowledge of Tasman’s voyages and the geography of New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land, and New Zealand. It also relates to John Seller’s earlier chart of the eastern East Indies and New Holland (53), John Thornton’s A draught of the coast of New Holland and parts adjacent (102), and Gilles Robert de Vaugondy’s later southern hemisphere map (40), which shows how the geography of the southern world was revised after Cook’s voyages.