PIERRE DESCELIERS' MAP.
This is a map of the same type as the one I have just described. It forms
part of another large manuscript planisphere, draughted and illuminated
by Pierre Desceliers, a priest of Argues near Hâvres, and it bears in
bold characters an inscription to that effect with the date 1550.
At first sight the most, remarkable feature of this map is the display of
descriptive matter contained in cartouches spread here and there between
the illuminations. These, however, do not refer to Australia but are
descriptive of such countries as Java, Sumatra, Pegu, Malacca, Ceylon,
the Andaman Islands, etc.
The only illustrations which might be supposed to appertain to Australia
are those _not alluded to in the French text_, a fact which suggests that
the other, extraneous matter, has been interpolated.
The illustrations, not alluded to in the French text, may, therefore,
have belonged to the prototypic map, such are the representations of
trees, rough guniah-looking dwellings, guanacos, and those strange, huts
on the western coast, which may have been inspired by some freak of
nature as seen by Dampier on the same coast some hundred and thirty odd
years after these charts were painted. Dampier says: "There were several
things like haycocks standing in the Savannah, which at a distance we
thought were houses, looking just like the Hottentots' houses at the Cape
of Good Hope; but we found them to be so many rocks."
Dampier and his companions may have mistaken some anthills for rocks.
Péron the French explorer describes some huge dome-shaped ant-hills seen
on this coast, and Captain Pelsart, wrecked in 1629, also describes some
ant-hills seen by him and his companions when in search of water on this
same coast in latitude 22 degrees south.
In 1818, Allan Cunningham, when on the west coast of Australia, at the
Bay of Rest, took occasion to measure one of these gigantic ant-hills of
that coast. He found it to be eight feet in height, and twenty-six in
girth.
Pelsart's account runs thus: "On the 16th of June, in the morning, they
returned on shore in hopes of getting more water, but were disappointed;
and having no time to observe the country it gave them no great hopes of
better success, even if they had travelled further within land, which
appeared a thirsty, barren plain, covered with ant-hills, so high that
they looked afar off like the huts of negroes..."
Dampier in his second voyage to this coast in the year 1699, but more
than one-hundred miles further south, describes again some of these
evidently very remarkable features of the western coast of Australia. He
says: "Here are a great many rocks in the large savannah we were in,
which are five or six feet high and round at the top like a haycock, very
remarkable; some red and some white." But Flinders, when on this coast,
actually came across native huts similar to those depicted on P.
Desceliers' chart of Australia.