Tasmania Map 1831 Regional Print - Hobart, Launceston, Devonport

Henry Teesdale, a London map publisher who had been elected to the Royal Geographical Society the year before, issued this map of Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, in 1831 in A New General Atlas of the World, with the engraving by John Dower. Teesdale worked with the leading British engravers of his day, and his best-known work is a large world map that Dower also engraved. This copy is distinguished by its vivid, full coloring, which is unusual because most surviving examples carry only hand-colored territorial outlines. The sheet is a regional map of the island, drawn when Van Diemen's Land served chiefly as a British penal colony, its settlement having grown from a small military outpost founded in 1803 while its Indigenous population had fallen to around 300 through disease and warfare.

Two settlements of real size had grown up by 1831: Hobart Town, now Hobart, on the Derwent River below Mount Wellington, and Launceston at the head of the Tamar estuary in the north. Convict labor built the roads, government buildings and prisons around them, and Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula had opened as a penal station only the year before. Knowledge of the interior, especially the western half, was still thin, and the sheet describes whole districts in plain notes such as 'emu plain,' 'peak like a volcano,' 'sandy' and 'forest.' Former convicts generally left as soon as they could, most resettling in Victoria across Bass Strait. Transportation ended in 1853, after which the island took the name Tasmania.

Anyone tracing a convict ancestor, planning a move to Hobart or Launceston, or marking a family connection to the island will find a pointed gift here, as will a collector of colonial Australian cartography. TheMapVault also lists Stanford's 1926 Australia and Tasmania, but that sheet shrinks the island to one corner of a continental map; this 1831 Teesdale and Dower sheet gives Van Diemen's Land the whole page, drawn in the convict era before the name changed. 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.