The First Published Representation of Tasmania as an Island

Abstract

Two issues of a wall-map by A. Arrowsmith have recently come under examination in the Map Room of the Royal Geogr phical Society. Both are dated i April 1790, and entitled of the World / on Mercator's Projec? tion, Exhibiting all the New Discoveries to the present Time: / with the Tracks of the most distinguished Navigators since the Year 1700, carefully collected / from the best Charts, Maps, Voyages, c 1742 appears at the corresponding place on the western. The western and southern coasts of Australia are shown according to the Dutch navigators, and the eastern accord? ing to the preliminary interpretation of Cook's work. Van Diemen's Land is shown as a conjectural continuation of the Australian mainland. The other copy, presumably of the later issue, was formerly mounted on rollers but has recently been cut for convenience in filing. It resembles the earlier in nearly all respects, but it shows Van Diemen's Land as an island. This is probably the first published representation of the complete separation of Tasmania from Australia. The true date of publication of this issue is there? fore of decided interest. For satisfactory discussion of the point, reference will have to be made to a folio volume of maps and charts now in the Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society (the Chapman Collection). The contents were described in the Geographical Journal, 108 (1946) 112, as a collection made by a Captain Benjamin Chapman in Ireland before 1808. The MS. title page, not mentioned in the note in the Geographical Journal, reads: General Atlas / being a / Collection of / Maps and Charts / Selected and compiled / by Mr. Andrew Gray. Although later generations gave Bass the entire credit for the discovery of Bass strait, it is now becoming clear that Bass's contemporaries knew that Hunter believed firmly in its existence long before he sent Flinders and Bass to prove it by circumnavigating Van Diemen's Land in the Norfolk. On 1 October 1798, before this proof was forthcoming, Arrowsmith published a Reduced Chart of the Pacific Ocean from one published in Nine Sheets (No. 48 of Chapman Coll.), on which the coast of Van Diemen's Land is from Tasman and Furneaux, that of New South Wales from the revised plotting of Cook's work, that of the south-western corner of Australia from Vancouver; and a clear space is left betweeen Van Diemen's Land and the mainland in the latitude of the strait. In his * Observations on the coasts of New South Wales, intended to accompany the charts of the late discoveries in those countries'