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Attractive copper-engraved polar projection map of the southern hemisphere, first engraved by Guillaume de L’Isle later updated by Philippe Buache and here issued in an updated 1782 state by Jean-Claude Dezauche. This edition incorporates the latest discoveries from the second and third voyages of Captain James Cook, as well as additional Pacific and circum-Antarctic exploration up to the early 1780s.

The plate presents a finely engraved hemispheric projection centered on the South Pole, framed in ten-degree radial graticule to the Equator, and surrounded by the updated outlines of South America, southern Africa, New Holland (Australia), the East Indies, and New Zealand. Dezauche’s revision includes a new explanatory key (lower left) identifying the track of Cook’s second voyage (1772–1775) as well as the full course of the third voyage (1776–1780), including the return journeys of Clerke and Gore after Cook’s death in Hawaii. These routes are shown in lines looping through the South Pacific, past New Caledonia, the Marquesas, and the Society Islands, and continuing into the southern Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic.

Among the most significant cartographic updates are the inclusion of Cook’s full delineation of the eastern coast of Australia, here labeled Terres Australes, the accurate rendering of New Zealand as two main islands, and the the removal of the large speculative Antarctic outline. Van Diemen’s Land remains joined to the mainland, as it would until Bass’s discoveries of 1798–99. The South Pole reads Terres Australes Antarctiques, floating in a largely empty polar space. The effect is to emphasize the empirical void left by Cook’s demonstration that no habitable southern continent lay within the Antarctic Circle.

This is a transitional map that captures a pivotal moment in Enlightenment geography. It preserves the scientific structure of the De L’Isle–Buache system while effacing its most speculative elements, replacing them with the observational rigor of Cook’s reports. At the same time, it demonstrates the speed and skill with which Dezauche repackaged older material for a public hungry for up-to-date knowledge of the Pacific and Austral regions.