Carte Reduite des Terres Australes (Nouvelle Hollande) pour servir a l’histoire des voyages. Par le Sr Bellin Ing. De la Marine. De la Societe Royale de Londres &ca  1753.

(One of only a few 18th century maps that show Australia by itself) Reduced Chart of theSouthern Lands by Jacques Nicolas Bellin (1703-73), Marine Hydrographic Engineer of the Roya lSociety of London, who was given the task of surveying all the known coasts of the world. 

Original copperplate-engraved map for L’Abbe Prevost’s L’Histoire Generale des Voyages (General History of Voyages of the Abbot Antoine Francois Prevost), published in Paris circa 1753, with hypothetical east coast, joining New Guinea and New Britain to the north, Espiritu Santu (later named New Hebrides), a section of the New Zealand Coast, and Tasmania; with (in French) along the dotted line, "I suppose that the land of Diemen could join with the land of the Holy Ghost but this is without proof".

Hydrographical Engineer of the French Navy, Hydrographer to the King, and member of the Royal Society of London, Jacques Nicolas Bellin (1703-1772), was commissioned by the King of France to survey all the known coastlines of the world. On his Reduced Chart of the Southern Lands (nearly 20 years prior to Captain Cook’s discovery and charting of the east coast of Australia), Bellin used a dotted line to join Tasmania to Vanuatu and north to Papua New Guinea, and printed along this version of our east coast “Je suppose que la Terre de Diemen peut joindre avec la Terre de St. Esprit mais sans preuve” (I suppose that Van Diemen's Land could join with Espiritu Santu (now Vanuatu) but without proof).

Map size: 200 x 275mm.