Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Guillaume Le Testu's 1556 Cosmographie Universel, 4ème projection, where the northward extending promontory of the Terre australe is called Grande Jave.. Because many of the inscriptions on the Dieppe maps are written in French, Portuguese or Gallicised Portuguese, it has often been assumed that the Dieppe school of mapmakers were working from Portuguese sources that no longer exist.
Guillaume Brouscon was a Breton cartographer of the Dieppe school in the 16th century. [1] He was from the port of Le Conquet , near Brest , [ 2 ] which is shown prominently in large red lettering on his 1543 map of the world.
The primary evidence advanced to support this theory is the representation of the continent of Jave la Grande, which appears on a series of French world maps, the Dieppe maps, and that may, in part, be based on Portuguese charts. However, most historians do not accept this theory, and the interpretation of the Dieppe maps is highly contentious.
The map, said Jenks, was said to have been “the property of a man named Rotz, a French sailor who passed some part of his life in England”. Jenks commented: “this fact gives some colour to the claim put forward by the French, that their countryman, Guillaume le Testu, was the true discoverer of Australia.
Cartographic historian Robert J. King has also written extensively on the subject, arguing that Jave la Grande on the Dieppe maps reflects 16th-century cosmography. In 2010, King received the Australasian Hydrographic Society's Literary Achievement Award for 2010 in recognition of his work on the origins of the Dieppe Maps. [107]
This confusion was greater on the earlier Dieppe maps of the 1540s where Java Minor and Java Major (Jave la Grande) were transposed, apparently in accordance with Marco Polo's statement that Java Major was "the greatest island in the world". In the Dieppe maps, Jave la Grande was made a part of the Antarctic continent, Terra Australis. [10]
There is some speculation that like some other works of the Dieppe school of maps, the atlas may show the Australian coastline with its depiction of a continent labelled Jave la Grande, which would mean it was created before the documented discoveries of Willem Janszoon or James Cook.
World map finished in 1550 by Desceliers Detail of the Map of Jave La Grande, 1550, by Desceliers. Pierre Desceliers (fl. 1537–1553) was a French cartographer of the Renaissance and an eminent member of the Dieppe School of Cartography. He is considered the father of French hydrography. Little is known of his life.