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Evidence of An Early Voyage to Australia through the Bass Strait.

This 1799 edition of Bowles's New Four-Sheet Map of the World is a highly detailed world map on Mercator’s projection, incorporating significant cartographic updates from the late 18th century. It is one of the first maps to suggest the presence of Bass Strait, the waterway separating Tasmania from mainland Australia, confirmed in 1799 by the explorations of George Bass and Matthew Flinders but rumored to exist for years beforehand. The map provides an unusual depiction of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, labeled as "Entrance of Jean de Fuca," with a speculative "Oregon R or River of the West" extending eastward from the Pacific Northwest.

The map also foreshadows the future explorations of Lewis and Clark with the "Misouri R navigable 1300 miles" extending as a dotted line into unknown territories, indicating the limits of knowledge at the time regarding the American interior.

Manuscript Sea Track to Australia

Of particular interest is the inclusion of a ship’s track—an unusual feature for a general world map, as such tracks are typically reserved for specialized sea charts. However, several elements of the map suggest its makers intended it for use by navigators. The map employs the Mercator projection, accompanied by practical notes on its application for navigation, and features an ornate cartouche in the upper left corner. The cartouche depicts finely engraved full-length portraits of a sea captain and a navigator, reinforcing the map’s nautical purpose. Adding a humorous, self-referential twist, the sea captain is shown holding a copy of the same map, which in turn displays the same cartouche, recursively illustrating the captain holding the map. This playful "map-within-a-map" is a noteworthy example of the engraver’s wit.

This example includes a manuscript track of a late-18th or early-19th-century voyage to the east coast of Australia. While the specific voyage has not yet been identified, it should be possible to do so with further research. The ship departs from the Cape of Good Hope on the 16th of a 30-day month, likely June, as the following month appears to be labeled “Juli.” It reaches Bass Strait by the 14th of the next month. Notably, the ship encounters a “Gale” on June 27th in the Roaring Forties, just north of Kerguelen Island.

On the reverse of the map, three sets of longitude and latitude coordinates are jotted down, corresponding to locations in the Indian Ocean along the ship’s track southwest of Australia. The track culminates just west of Bass Strait, suggesting that the annotator had likely sighted land and saw no need to continue plotting the course across the open ocean. This track is significant as it illustrates the use of Bass Strait as a passage to the settlements on Australia's east coast, marking a shift away from the traditional route of sailing south around Tasmania.

States of the Map and Rarity

The map was updated and issued in at least the following years: 1790, 1795, 1799, 1800, 1801, and 1802.

In the 1795 state, Tasmania and the Australian mainland are shown as completely connected. The 1799 state would thus seem to be the first in which a channel approximating Bass Strait was included on the map. Later editions up to 1802 do not revise and improve the rendition of the Strait.

All states of the map are rare on the market.