A beautiful chart, showing the tracks of John Byron "Foul-weather Jack", 1765; Philip Carteret, 1767, who re-discovered the Solomon Islands, and Pitcairn Island (for the first time); Samuel Wallis 1767, who commanded HMS 'Dolphin' when it stopped at Tahiti for the first time; and of Lieutenant James Cook, in 1769, across the Pacific Ocean, to New Zealand, and up the east coast of Australia to New Guinea. Tasmania, as "Terra de Diemen" is shown, albeit tenuously, to the eastern and southern coastlines of Australia.

The second edition of Antonio Zatta's chart of Australia and surrounding islands, here with a new title, but without the lengthy legend lower left. Otherwise, the chart is unchanged. It was first published in Zatta's world atlas, 'Atlante Novissimo' (1774-1782), one of the most beautifully produced of all eighteenth century atlases. Drawing on the rich decorative heritage of the baroque as well as garnering new information from contemporary explorers and hydrographers, Zatta created a uniquely beautiful 'modern' atlas. Zatta included information from the voyages of Cook, Bougainville, Byron and Wallis, and records their tracks on the two world charts.

However, the mammoth publishing task involved in producing the 'Atlante Novissimo', which involved engraving, printing and handcolouring over two hundred separate plates, took over eight years. During this lengthy process new hydrographic information was constantly becoming available, and thus some anomalies occur throughout the atlas where the earlier charts may show outdated information, whilst the later charts are up-to-date. Such is the case with the delineation of the east coast of Australia.

On the chart of the South Pacific, as here, all of Cook's discoveries are shown in great detail, but on the two world charts, prepared in 1774, the east coast is shown in a distorted and quite primitive form, even though Cook's tracks are included. This would indicate that the new information was simply added to the existing copper plates. Such inconsistencies provide the modern reader with a very real sense of the exciting times in which the atlas was being produced: the boundaries of geographical knowledge were constantly being extended, and cartographers and mapmakers struggled to keep abreast of the changes.

The mapmaker
Antonio Zatta (1757-1797) was an Italian printer and publisher, active in Venice