A Complete Map of the Southern Continent Survey’d by Capt. Abel Tasman & depicted by order of the East India Company in Holland in the Stadt House in Amsterdam

[1744]

Hocken Maps 122 1788

London

Emanuel Bowen, a prolific and talented map engraver and geographer to King George II, created the first printed English map of Australia in about 1744. Bowen based his map on one engraved by French nobleman Melchisedech Thevenot in 1663. Bowen added the Tropic of Capricorn and the two blocks of text which not only tell the ‘reader’ the map is incomplete because it only depicts the land which ‘has been Actually discovered’, but also of the possibility of riches to be found there.