New Zealand, Tasmania & Western Australia Map 1849 Regional Print - Auckland, Christchurch, Hobart, Perth

Adam and Charles Black, the Edinburgh publishers, issued this map of New Zealand in London in 1849 as part of Black's General Atlas. The firm was a major publisher of atlases and reference works in the nineteenth century, and its maps were valued for their clarity. This map is colored by islands and carries numerous place names and several annotations, and its distinguishing feature is a pair of insets of Van Diemen's Land and Western Australia, which place the whole of the colony's Australasian neighbors on one page. It is a regional map of New Zealand drawn in 1849, nine years after the colony was founded and while its settlements, from Wellington to Dunedin, were new.

Auckland, the colony's capital, and Wellington, founded in 1840 by the New Zealand Company, were the principal towns. Nelson and New Plymouth were settled in the early 1840s, and Dunedin had been founded as a Scottish Presbyterian settlement in 1848. Canterbury, where Christchurch would stand, was still a year from its founding. The Van Diemen's Land inset shows an island still receiving convicts, with Hobart as its capital, and the Western Australia inset records the Swan River Colony, whose capital Perth was a small port settlement, about to receive its first convicts in 1850. Placing the three together shows how closely the colonies of the South Pacific were linked.

A New Zealander with settler ancestors from Wellington or Dunedin, a Tasmanian or Western Australian family, or a collector of Black's atlases would find a thoughtful gift here. TheMapVault's Hunt and Eaton map of 1893 also pairs New Zealand with a Tasmania inset, but it is an American commercial sheet with county keys; this 1849 Black edition is the earlier British view, with two Australian insets and annotations. Tallis's 1851 sheet is the decorative one, with vignettes of Auckland and Wellington. 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.