Tasmania Map 1851 Illustrated Atlas Print - Hobart, Launceston, Devonport

John Tallis, the London map publisher who made the decorative world atlas for the Great Exhibition of 1851, issued this map of Van Diemen's Island, or Tasmania, in London in 1851, engraved for R. Montgomery Martin's Illustrated Atlas. Tallis was one of the last of the great decorative mapmakers, and his engraver John Rapkin supplied the fine line work that gave the atlas its reputation for ornament. This copy is a full hand-colored example, and its character comes from its vignettes, which show Hobart Town, the residence of the Van Diemen's Land Company's agent, Circular Head, and two other scenes. It is a regional map of the island, drawn in 1851 when it was still a penal colony called Van Diemen's Land, with the name Tasmania a few years away and the gold rush across Bass Strait drawing its colonists to Victoria.

Hobart Town, on the Derwent River below Mount Wellington, was the capital and the center of the convict system, and it had its own vignette on the sheet. Circular Head, on the north-west coast, was the base of the Van Diemen's Land Company, which had received a grant of about 350,000 acres there in 1825. The company's agent had his residence at Circular Head, which is why a small view of it sits on a sheet that shows the whole island. Elsewhere the island's settled districts ran up the Tamar valley to Launceston, while the rugged west remained little known. Together the scenes record the convict labor, the company's estates and the wool and wheat settlements that were all running side by side in 1851.

Someone tracing a convict ancestor, a Tasmanian émigré, or a collector of the Tallis atlas maps will find a considered gift here, and it suits a milestone birthday or a family reunion. TheMapVault's 1831 Teesdale and Dower map of Van Diemen's Land is a plainer sheet from two decades earlier, with colored territories but no vignettes; this Tallis edition is the decorative mid-century version, with its scenes of Hobart Town and Circular Head. TheMapVault also lists a second example of this same Tallis map, so the two are interchangeable in content. 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.