New Zealand Map 1851 Illustrated Atlas Print - Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton

John Tallis, the London publisher who produced the decorative world atlas for the Great Exhibition of 1851, issued this map of New Zealand in London in 1851, engraved for R. Montgomery Martin's Illustrated Atlas. Tallis was one of the last of the great decorative mapmakers, and John Rapkin engraved the atlas in an ornate style that his rivals did not match. This is a nice full-color example that shows the North and South Islands with many towns and geographical features, and its character comes from its vignettes of Auckland, Wellington, Mount Egmont (now Mount Taranaki) as seen from New Plymouth, a Maori warrior and a seal. It is a regional map of the colony, drawn in 1851 when New Zealand had been a British colony for ten years.

Auckland, where the colony's government had first sat, and Wellington, founded in 1840 by the New Zealand Company, both have their own vignettes. Mount Egmont, now Mount Taranaki, is the symmetrical volcano that rises above the Taranaki coast, and New Plymouth was settled below it in 1841. The Maori warrior vignette recalls that Maori still made up the majority of the population, and that the land wars of the 1860s lay ahead. Canterbury had been settled in 1850 and Otago in 1848, so both new southern settlements were a few years old. Together the views record a colony of small, scattered ports.

A New Zealand family with settler or Maori heritage, a Taranaki local, or a collector of the Tallis atlas maps will find a considered gift here, perhaps for an anniversary or a birthday. TheMapVault's Black map of 1849 is a plainer British sheet with Tasmania and Western Australia insets, and Stanford's 1896 map is colored by county; the Tallis edition is the decorative one, with scenes that no other New Zealand map in the shop carries. Cook's 1774 chart, in French, is the original coastal survey. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.