Historical Maps Collection

The Historical Maps Collection is one of the State Library of Queensland's many treasures. It comprises approximately 300 original maps, primarily of Australia and the Australasian region, dating from the 16th to the early 20th centuries. A small number of the maps show regions in other parts of the world.

This collection contains only a small amount of Queensland mapping as most historical maps of Queensland, its cities, towns and districts, are held in the John Oxley Library's collection.

The maps in the Historical Maps Collection are mainly European in origin. The earliest map in the collection dates to the mid-1500's, and shows most of Asia as it was then understood from the European perspective. It was made by the German cosmographer Sebastian Munster who produced it as part of his revised version of Ptolemy's 2nd century AD atlas, the Geographia. Prior to the early 1600's, the space on maps that Australia now  fills were often occupied by depictions of mythical creatures such as a whale-like fish or a two-tailed mermaid.

La Perouse's Chart of the great Pacific Ocean or South Sea

The map shows the last part of the route of La Perouse's 1785-8 expedition. La Perouse was commissioned by the French to go on an expedition in the Pacific. He left Brest on 1st August 1785 in command of the two ships La Boussole and L'Astrolabe. After sailing via Brazil, Cape Horn, Chile, the Sandwich Isles and Alaska he proceeded to sail through the Pacific Islands to Norfolk Island and then on to Botany Bay. La Perouse was sighted off the coast of Botany Bay on 24th January 1788. However bad weather prevented him from entering the bay for two days. He camped on the north shore for six weeks in the location that now bears his name. Leaving on the 10th March he disappeared and was never heard from again.

James Cook - Entrance of Endeavour River

The name James Cook is well respected in the history of world exploration. His three voyages of discovery in the Pacific region during the late 1700s completed much of the world map.

Cook's discovery and exploration of Australia's east coast is well-known. When here turned from his first voyage of exploration in 1769-70, the maps he had created were soon engraved and published in accounts of his explorations. This map of the entrance of the Endeavour River in north Queensland is one such map.

The Endeavour, Cook's Ship, had sighted the south-eastern corner of the Australian mainland at Point Hicks on April 19, 1770, and then sailed north to reach Botany Bay. The crew spent several days in the area, charting its shores and collecting specimens of fauna and flora from the area, before continuing north.

Sebastian Munster: La table de la region orientale, comprenant les dernieresterres & royaumes dâAsie

In 1453, Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottoman Turks. Scholars fleeing west from the destruction brought with them a document rarely seen in the West, the Geographia of the second century Greek cartographer Claudius Ptolemy. This was an atlas of the world according to Ptolemy, with a gazetteer or index giving the positions of many hundreds of places on the earth's surface. The maps themselves were evidently lost in antiquity, but the gazetteer had survived.

The Geographia contributed to a rebirth of Europe's interest in, and knowledge of, the Classical era and of the wider world that had begun in the 1300s; the process that we now know as the Renaissance. Scholars pounced on Ptolemy's work and began to draw their own maps of the world and its parts, based on the gazetteer. From the late 1400s a series of new editions of the Geographia began to be published by various geographers and 'cosmographers', often augmented with maps depicting the latest discoveries in the Americas and elsewhere.

German cosmographer Sebastian Munster was one such scholar who published a version of the Geographia released in 1540. The map shown comes from a French language edition of his work. It depicts most of Asia and the Indian Ocean, and shows how much, and how little, Europeans then knew of this vast area and its topography. Zanzibar is shown east of Madagascar instead of west, and a great deal larger than its true size. The vast subcontinent of India is here shown as smaller than the southeast Asian peninsula, while the various archipelagos of the western Pacific and the East Indies are likewise less than exact.

The map also shows some of the Australasian region. Australia itself is missing,replaced here by a two-tailed mermaid swimming in the warm South Seas. Even so, this, the oldest map in the Historical Maps Collection, provides a fascinating view of the Far East as imagined by Europeans in the mid-16th century.

Chart of the Great Pacific Ocean or South Sea

La Perouse was in command of the two ships La Boussole and L'Astrolabe. His expedition was sighted off the coast of Botany Bay on 24 January 1788, and landed two days later.This was shortly after the First Fleet's arrival in 1788 (and some seven years prior to Flinders' first arrival in Sydney). After spending six weeks in the Bay the expedition sailed north and disappeared. Discoveries in the 1820s confirmed that La Perouse had been shipwrecked on the island of Vanikoro.

Typus Orbis Terrarum

The 17th century was a period of Dutch supremacy in western European map making. Some of the greatest names in cartography date to this period, including Abraham Ortelius,creator and publisher of the first modern atlas; the Blaeu family, producers of some of the most beautiful atlases ever published (there is a fine example in the State Library of Queensland's History and Art of the Book Collection) and Gerard Mercator, considered with Claudius Ptolemy, to be one of the greatest names in the history of cartography.

Another famous dynasty of Dutch cartographers was the Hondius family, based in Amsterdam. It was founded by Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612), who began his career as an engraver in Amsterdam and London before establishing his publishing firm in 1595.

The world map shown here, one of the oldest in the Historical Maps Collection, dates from about 1600, and may come from one of Jodocus's pocket-sized atlases of the world. It reflects the growing European knowledge of Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, and the lack of knowledge of the Australasian and south Polar Regions. These are shown as one large 'super' continent, reflecting a commonly held belief that there must be a large southern land mass to balance the known ones in the north. The name Hondius gives it, Terra Australis Incognita, means 'Unknown South Land'.

Emanuel Bowen: A new and accurate map of the world

Emanuel Bowen was an English printer, engraver and seller of maps, who was appointed mapmaker to kings such as George II of England and Louis XV of France. Despite this he died in poverty and almost blind in 1767.

Derbyshire

Thomas Kitchin or Kitchen was a prolific engraver and publisher. He was based in London from the late 1730s to mid-1770s and was appointed Hydrographer to the King. He is perhaps best known for engraving a 1755 map of the British and French dominions in North America by John Mitchell (1755). This map was subsequently used at the Peace Council at the end of the American revolutionary war. In his later years he worked with his son. He died in 1784.

Mappe Monde 1748

George Louis Le Rouge was a prominent publisher in Paris from 1741 to 1789. This particular map shows the world in two hemispheres, with four cartouches that represent the crown, religion, conquest and trade. Geographical features include a vast Terra Incognita in North America, a misshapen Japan and New Guinea appended to Australia. Tasmania is depicted as a peninsula.