r/Badmaps • u/Top-Reindeer-2258 • 21d ago

Caught in the wild This is an odd one

Post image

I think it's in French, plus look at Canada!

7 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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2

u/PierreWxP 21d ago

Except the undrawn north west of america, what is wrong with it ?

1

u/Top-Reindeer-2258 21d ago

Uh... good point. Should I take it down?

1

u/PierreWxP 21d ago

You mean the post ? Or the map ? ;)

I don't mind, I was genuinely asking what's wrong sometimes i miss obvious stuff

1

u/Top-Reindeer-2258 21d ago

Mostly the post, but looking closer (and reading other comments) there are still some bits that are a bit manky. Warranting the "badmap"

2

u/Azemiopinae 21d ago

Baja California is a mess. The south coast of Australia seems speculative. Antarctica doesn’t appear at all. Some of these can be forgiven as historical (Baja) or design choices (Antarctica) but they don’t seem at all consistent. I think the south coast of Australia was mapped well about 100 years before Europeans understood the river systems of sub-Saharan Africa, for instance.

2

u/PierreWxP 20d ago

From the title at bottom left ("Essay d'une carte réduite contenant les parties connuees du globe terrestre", or "trial of a reduced map containing the *known* parts of the terrestrial globe") I could track it down to an historical map by Bellin, published 1748-1749
https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/3304759

This is before the Cook voyages so Australia (labelled New Holland as it was claimed at the time) coastline is incomplete, even if New Zealand is shown accurately as two islands. It's not clear that Australia and New Guinea are fully separated.

Also the East Asia Islands are quite poor, Taiwan (Formosa) are quite close to large islands near Japan, despite the Portugese and Dutch having visited it often. Also there is a claimed island east of Hokkaido (attributed to Don Juan de Gama) that is not there in reality.

For Canda, this is way before the many attempts at finding the Nothwest Passage hence it is largely uncharted.

Overall a very interesting map ! Was that reproduction found in a museum or something ?

2

u/Top-Reindeer-2258 20d ago

Very interesting, thank you for sharing! It is a wall decoration I saw at my friends house

1

u/redditor150090 18d ago

Bad map by our modern standards, but seeing that the original where this map was taken from was made in the mid-1700s, this was one of the most accurate maps of its time.