ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 63 | June 2003
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Maps Collection
Two very special rare maps have recently been acquired by the Library. The first is a previously unrecorded Cook polar chart by the Italian engraver Filip de Grado. Titled Carta geografica dell’emisfero Australe the map is one of a series of polar charts issued by a number of European cartographers following James Cook’s final voyage to the Pacific and southern hemisphere. Dated c.1780, the map is a copy of the English edition first published by Strahan and Cadell in 1777. Faithfully copying the original, the Italian version has been completely re-engraved, replacing English text with Italian and employing heavier shading to emphasise the coastal outline of each landmass. The map has obviously come out of a book, judging from the fold-lines appearing across it. However, despite a careful search of bibliographies, including Beddie’s Bibliography of Captain James Cook, we have not yet been able to identify the work. The second map is a sheet of gores (tapering sections) depicting the southern hemisphere and made for a terrestrial globe measuring 12.5 inches (31.75 cm). Twelve gores were originally printed on the sheet, but one depicting the South Atlantic is now lost. The map was issued by the French cartographer, Nicholas Bion, in the first few years of the eighteenth century. Lacking a title, the sheet bears Bion’s imprint as well as a dedication cartouche to the Dauphin. One interesting aspect of the gores, from an Australian point of view, is the depiction of an eastern boundary to the Australian continent in the same style as depicted on the great wall map of the world published in 1700 by another French cartographer, Jean Baptiste Nolin. This strengthens the possibility of French speculation of an eastern boundary to Terra Australis, in approximately its true position, at least 70 years before Cook’s exploration and charting of the coastline. Bion was a well-known and highly regarded globe and instrument maker
and received the appointment of Engineer to the King for Mathematical
Instruments. He made a number of terrestrial and celestial globes and
armillary spheres, which are of considerable rarity; only a handful appear
to have survived. Bion was also responsible for a treatise on the construction
and use of globes, which ran to several editions. |
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