An Early pro-Australian World Map

Update 28 June 2021: I’ve moved the front material re Collingridge’s arguments re Java and Jave-le-gtande to a new post

I just got sucked down a rabbit hole and ended up finding a fun map.

Anyway, I decided to explore more about one George Collingridge, Anglo-French artist and scholar, who had emigrated to Australia in 1879 and who in 1895 published a tome on the Discovery of Australia. Collingridge was a proponent of the Portuguese discovery of Australia prior to the Dutch (1606), an argument that was very much contra Australia’s emergent nationalist historiography. He’s nowadays a bit of a cult figure, it seems, and was briefly the motive for the George Collingridge Society, active 2003–4.

Collingridge was apparently a frequent contributor to The Lone Hand, a monthly journal that began publishing in 1907. In the first six months there appeared his essay on “When the Earth Was Flat,” a quite generic (for the period) review of medieval mappaemundi depicting the world as flat. Its most remarkable feature was the wonderful title design and the use of the ornate initial from the Rheims manuscript of Pomponius Mela (1417):

Collingridge (1907, 329)

This ornate initial had been reproduced by the viscount of Santarém, who was copied in turn by Nordenskiöld in his Periplus, which would in turn be copied as an homage by Bagrow in his 1917 account and bibliography of the history of cartography (Sims 1991).

Anyway, later in the same first volume of the journal appeared, without an accompanying article or further qualification, a simple outline map of the world, signed by Collingridge and entitled, “The Map of the World—As Australia Should See It”:

George Collingridge, The Lone Hand 1 (2 September 1907): 576

The projection, which seems to emphasize that central axis, looks to be a Van der Grinten I, introduced in 1898 (Snyder and Voxland 1989, 200) or perhaps the IV, introduced in 1904 (idem, 205).

Collingridge did not go the whole hog and put south at the top, as Australian-made maps have often come to do, but he did align the map with Australia on its central meridian. Nonetheless, this is clearly an early incarnation of a pro-Australian reorientation of the world map!

References

Collingridge, George. 1894. “The Early Cartography of Japan.” Geographical Journal 111: 403–9. Reprinted in Acta Cartographica 7 (1970): 70–76.

———. 1895. The Discovery of Australia: A Critical, Documentary and Historic Investigation Concerning the Priority of Discovery in Australasia by Europeans before the Arrival of Lt. James Cook, in the ‘Endeavour,’ in the Year 1770. Sydney: Hayes Brothers.

———. 1907. “When the Earth Was Flat.” The Lone Hand 1: 329–33.

Dalrymple, Alexander. 1786. Memoir Concerning the Chagos and Adjacent Islands. London: George Bigg.

Malte-Brun, Conrad. 1810–29. Précis de la géographie universelle, ou description de toutes les parties du monde, sur un plan nouveau d’après les grandes divisions naturelles du globe. 8 vols. Paris: Fr. Buisson and Aimé-André.

Oldham, H. Yule. 1894. “The Early Cartography of Japan.” Geographical Journal 4: 270–71, 276–79. Reprinted in Acta Cartographica 6 (1969): 382–86.

Sims, Douglas W. 1991. “Leo Bagrow’s Forgotten Early Survey of the Development of Cartographic Historiography.” Imago Mundi 43: 92–99.

Snyder, John P., and Philip M. Voxland. 1989. An Album of Map Projections. U.S. Geological Siurvey, Professional Paper 1453. Washington, D.C.: GPO.