page_title: Emanuel Bowen
section_title: Complete map of the Southern Continent
hierarchical_section_title: Emanuel Bowen / Complete map of the Southern Continent
caption_attribution_description: English: A Complete map of the Southern Continent survey'd by Capt. Abel Tasman &amp; depicted by order of the East India Company in Holland in the Stadt House at Amsterdam; E. Bowen, Sculp. [1]
context_page_description: Emanuel Bowen was a Welsh map engraver, who achieved the unique distinction of becoming Royal Mapmaker to both to King George II of England and Louis XV of France. Bowen was highly regarded by his contemporaries for producing some of the largest, most detailed and most accurate maps of his era. He is known to have worked with most British cartographic figures of the period including John Owen and Herman Moll.
context_section_description: Bowen's map, 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 at Amsterdam, was essentially a copy of the map Melchisédech Thévenot had published in Relations de divers Voyages curieux (Paris, 1663, v.1). Although Thévenot said that he had taken his chart from the one inlaid into the floor of the Amsterdam Town Hall, it appears to be an almost exact copy of that of Joan Blaeu in his Archipelagus Orientalis sive Asiaticus published in 1659 in the Kurfürsten Atlas (Atlas of the Great Elector). The map of the world set into the floor of the great hall of the Amsterdam Town Hall was drawn from Blaeu's world map of 1648. Once Blaeu's map of the world appeared other mapmakers, such as Thévenot, copied his depiction of New Holland. Hollandia Nova in the Kurfürsten Atlas is shown as it appears in Blaeu's world map of 1648. It appears to have been Thévenot who introduced a differentiation between Hollandia Nova to the west and Terre Australe to the east of the meridian corresponding to 135° East of Greenwich, emphasised by the latitude staff running down that meridian, as there is no such division on Blaeu's map.
  A legend on Bowen's map emphasised the separation between Hollandia Nova and Terra Australis that had been introduced either inadvertently or intentionally by Thévenot when he placed the two names on either side of the latitude staff running down the 135° East of Greenwich meridian. Bowen's map legend identified Terra Australis as the land described by Quirós by saying:
  It is also requisite to observe that the Country discovered by Ferdinand de Quiros lies according to his description on the East Side of this Continent directly opposite to Carpentaria which if Attentively considered will add no small weight to the Credit of what he has written about that Country and which has been very rashly as well as very unjustly treated by some Critical Writers as a Fiction; Whereas it Appears from this Map of Actual Discoveries, that there is a Country where Ferdinand de Quiros says he found one: And if so why may not that Country be such a one as he describes? 
  Another legend added by Bowen to the map called for discovery and settlement of Terra Australis:
  It is impossible to conceive a Country that promises fairer from its Situation than this of TERRA AUSTRALIS, no longer incognita, as this Map demonstrates, but the Southern Continent Discovered. It lies precisely in the richest climates of the World....and therefore whoever perfectly discovers and settles it will become infalliably possessed of Territories as Rich, as fruitful, and as capable of Improvement, as any that have hitherto been found out, either in the East Indies or the West.
  The territorial claim made by Britain when the colony of New South Wales was established in 1788 included all of Australia eastward of the meridian of 135° East dividing New Holland from Terra Australis, as shown on Bowen's map.
caption: 1744 Chart of Hollandia Nova – Terra Australis, before Captain Cook had mapped its east coast.
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