The Anatomy of a Map - Notes on the 1644 Bonaparte Tasman Map, Matthew Flinders’ 1804 and 1814 Australia Maps, their Sources and their Anatomies

Soft cover. Condition: New. 1st Edition. Format: 22 x 28 cm, 162 pages + cover with folds. This book examines two important maps in Australian cartography: the so-called Bonaparte Tasman Map, since 1933 owned by the Mitchell Library at the State Library of NSW, and Matthew Flinders' modern Australia map, published in the map volume of 'A Voyage to Terra Australis' (1814). Common scientific agreement since the 1920s and 1940s is that the Bonaparte Tasman map is a copy made c. 1695, with strange cartographic features that no trained map maker could have drawn. "The Anatomy of a Map" demonstrates how this particular map still must have been the source for the Dutch map printer Blaeu when they printed their World Map with Tasman's new discoveries in 1645/46. Tasman circumnavigated Australia 1642-43 discovering Tasmania, New Zealand and Fiji, and charted Australias north coast in 1644. While the 1642-43 expedition is documented with charts and detailed journals, the 1644 journey is known basically through charts. Central in the The Anatomy of a Map are some fragments from Tasman's lost journal. They were first presented by Nicolaes Witsen in a Dutch book that was written in 1705 but published only in 1785. Alexander Dalrymple cited it a few years after, and Matthew Flinders again in 1814. While this information has been known for more than 200 years, it has been considered insignificant. It is not. The Anatomy of a Map demonstrates how these fragments are crucial to the understanding of the anatomy of the Bonaparte Tasman map, and also to the understanding of Blaeu's printed maps of northern Australia. Blaeu were official cartographers to the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) from 1633 to 1705, with Europe's largest printworks in the mid 1600s. In a comparison of Matthew Flinders' "modern" Australia map in 1814, it is shown how features on the west coast were drawn with texts by William Dampier and charts by other British navigators as sources. It is also shown how maps based on Tasman's charting were used as late as in 1814, and how French maps made after Nicolas Baudin's scientific expedition 1801-03 gave Matthew Flinders the longitudes for these parts of the map. This book is important for anyone interested in early discovery of Australia. Despite its obvious flaws, it is demonstrated how the Bonaparte Tasman map influenced all of Blaeu's maps after 1644. The intricate anatomy of the map is explained in text and illustrations, and it is shown how mistakes on the map or its wrong scale were transferred to other charts. The author is Norwegian. His interest for Australian cartography began in 2006, when he published Sweers Islands Unveiled. Senior curator Paul Brunton at the Mitchell Library wrote the foreword to the book, which shed fresh light on the understanding of the Bonaparte Tasman map. Sweers Islands Unveiled came in enlarged second and third editions in 2020 and 2022. The Anatomy of a Map is a direct continuation of those works, but with deeper analysis of the Bonaparte Tasman map where the former books concentrated on details. These chapters are repeated also in the new book, and form part of the complete analyses. The Bonaparte Tasman map was cleaned from old varnish in 2020, and is presented in sections in full scale in the last chapter of the book.…