The first English map to focus on Australia

Description

This is the 1781 Carington Bowles edition of Herman Moll’s map of Australia, first published in 1717, in volume V of his Atlas geographus and later reissued in Bowles’s Atlas minor. It is the very first British-made map solely focused on the Australian continent.

Pre-dating in its original edition James Cook’s 1770 mapping of the east coast of Australia, the map mirrors western geographic knowledge of the day, derived from the voyages and accounts of 17^th century western explorers. Key expedition and related charting and naming examples include:

• Dirk Hartog (1616): Hartogs Ree (Dirk Hartog Island) and Eendracht Land (west coast of Australia)
• Frederik de Houtman and Jakob Dedel (1619): Edels Land (broader Perth region)
• Jan Carstensz & Willem Joosten van Colster (1623): Carpentaria (Cape York Peninsula and Gulf of Carpentaria) and Car[r]on R.[iver]
• Pieter Nuyts (1627): Land of P. Nuys (coastline of the Great Australian Bight)
• Gerrit Frederikszoon de Witt (1628): De Wits Land (Pilbara coast)
• Abel Tasman (1644): New Holland (then-known parts of Australia); northern and northwestern coastline of the continent
• William Dampier (1699): Sharks Bay (Shark Bay).

Beyond Australia, the map depicts part of the Indonesian Archipelago, also naming Batavia (Jakarta), as well as New Guinea, with its southeastern coastline incomplete and still allowing for a possible connection to the presumed “Great South Land”. The island of New Britain is depicted as such, following its circumnavigation in 1700 by Dampier, achieved through his transit and charting of the eponymous strait separating it from New Guinea (Capt. Dampiers Passes). This proved empirically that New Britain was not a continuation of the New Guinea mainland, as had been believed by Europeans until then.

The overall layout of the map, and the placement of the title cartouche at bottom right, did not allow for Tasman’s 1642 charting of the western coast of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) to be included.

More importantly, though, by the time the present edition of the map was published, it was geographically obsolete, as Cook had mapped the east coast of Australia in 1770.

Further features of the map include the equator as well as the Tropic of Capricorn.

A basic compass rose is included off the northwest cost of Australia.

A neat small map showing the Fifth Continent taking shape.

Publication

Bowles’s Atlas minor : containing a new and curious set of sixty-five maps, in which are shewn all the empires, kingdoms, countries, states, in all the known parts of the Earth : with their boundaries, divisions, chief cities and towns, the whole comprized and laid down agreable to modern history [1781]

Note imprint (Printed for Carington Bowles in London.) beneath title cartouche.

Condition

Very good.

A clear impression on a clean sheet. Delicately coloured in outline. A top, cut close to neatline, then professionally remargined (inconspicuous). At bottom, cut close to platemark. Small remnants of hinge tape on verso.

Reference

List of place names of Dutch origin in Australia. (2026, July 19). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_place_names_of_Dutch_origin_in_Australia

Voyages of Grand Discovery. (n.d. [but 2007]). Western Australian Museum. https://museum.wa.gov.au/exhibitions/voyages/timeline/1600s.html

Item #: 02909

US $800.00

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