Dieppe maps


The Dieppe maps are a series of world maps produced in Dieppe, France, in the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s. They are large hand-produced maps, commissioned for wealthy and royal patrons, including Henry II of France and Henry VIII of England. The Dieppe school of cartographers included Pierre Desceliers, Jean Rotz, Guillaume Le Testu, Guillaume Brouscon and Nicolas Desliens.

Existing Dieppe maps

The Dieppe Maps known to have existed into modern times include the following
Sarah Toulouse has published a more detailed and comprehensive list of 37 charts and atlases made between 1542 and 1635 and belonging to the Dieppe or Norman school of marine cartography.

The Dieppe School of mapmaking

Because many of the inscriptions on the Dieppe maps are written in French, Portuguese or Gallicised Portuguese, it has often been assumed that the Dieppe school of mapmakers were working from Portuguese sources that no longer exist. It has been assumed that Portuguese cartographers were bribed for information of the latest discoveries, despite the official Portuguese Politica de sigilo. The Cantino map of 1502 shows evidence of second-hand Portuguese sources, and this has been taken by some as supporting evidence for this assumption.
Common features of most of the Dieppe world maps are the compass roses and navigational rhumb lines, suggestive of a sea-chart. However, the maps are best understood as works of art, clearly intended to be spread out on a table, and containing information on the latest discoveries, side by side with mythological references and illustrations. For example, the Desceliers 1550 map carries descriptions of early French attempts to colonise Canada, the conquests of Peru by the Spanish and the Portuguese sea-trade among the Spice Islands. On the same map can be found descriptions of legendary Cathay, king Prester John in Ethiopia, and the race of Amazons in Russia. Other Dieppe maps also carry fictitious features such as the Marco Polo inspired Zanzibar/Îles des Geanz.. As with other maps made before the 17th century, the Dieppe maps show no knowledge of longitude. While latitude could be marked in degrees as observed by astrolabe or quadrant, easting could only be given in distance. Mercator's projection first appeared in 1568–9, a development too late to influence the Dieppe cartographers.
Most of the Dieppe maps depict a large land mass entitled Jave la Grande or terre de lucac between what is now Indonesia and Antarctica. In the English-speaking world particularly, academic and popular interest in the Dieppe maps over the last 150 years has focused largely on this feature of the maps. This is because Jave la Grande is thought by some writers to provide clues of a possible Portuguese exploration of Australia's coasts in the 1520s. However, the most recent academic writings on the Dieppe maps by Carile, Brunelle and King have suggested that the maps need to be considered in their entirety, and consideration needs to be given to what they reveal about various influences on the mapmakers, as well as French aspirations.
This group of writers argue that the maps are not necessarily literal records of voyages of exploration. On the 1543 world chart of Guillaume Brouscon this feature, the northern part of TERRE OSTRALE, is called terre de lucac ; on this chart, la Jave grande refers to Java, and Jave refers to an island to its east. Similarly, on the 1570 Carte cosmographique ou Universelle description du monde of Jean Cossin, an originator of the sinusoidal projection, this feature is called Terre de lucac, as it is also by Jacques de Vaulx on his chart. On the so-called Pasterot atlas it is called IOCAT, another form of Locach.

The Dieppe maps as evidence of French territorial aspirations

Gayle K. Brunelle's work

Professor Gayle K. Brunelle of California State University has argued that, although the Dieppe school of cartographers was active for only a generation—from about 1535 to 1562—the cartographers associated with it were acting as propagandists for French geographic knowledge and territorial claims in the New World. The decades when the Dieppe school was flourishing were also the decades in which French trade with the New World was at its 16th-century height, in terms of the North Atlantic fish trade, the still fledgling fur trade, and, most important for the cartographers, the rivalry with the Portuguese for control of the coasts of Brazil and the supplies of lucrative Brazilwood. Brunelle states that the Dieppe cartographers accessed cartographic skills and geographic knowledge from Portuguese mariners, pilots, and geographers working in France, at the same time as they were producing maps meant to emphasize French dominion over the New World, both in Newfoundland and in Brazil, that the Portuguese also claimed. Portuguese-style maps, in particular, became the basis for the work of other cartographers produced for courts throughout Europe, so much so that at times Italian, French, German, or Flemish map makers did not even bother to translate the Portuguese inscriptions they had 'borrowed' from Portuguese maps. Brunelle noted that, in design and decorative style the Dieppe school maps represented a blending of the latest geographical and nautical knowledge circulating in Europe, with older conceptualizations of world geography deriving from Ptolemy and mediaeval cartographers and explorers such as Marco Polo. Renaissance mapmakers such as those based in Dieppe relied heavily on each other's work, as well as on maps from previous generations, and thus their maps represented a mixture of old and new data and even differing conceptualizations of space, often coexisting uneasily in the same map.

Other writers on French world views and the Dieppe Maps

The Dieppe maps all depict the southern continent, Terra Australis, incorporating a huge promontory extending northward called "Jave la Grande". According to the French geographer Numa Broc, Terra Australis found its most inspired illustrator in pilot-cartographer of Le Havre, Guillaume Le Testu. Le Testu's Cosmographie Universelle, the sumptuous atlas he presented in 1556 to Coligny, Grand Admiral of France, constituted a veritable encyclopaedia of the geographic and ethnographic knowledge of the time. French historian Frank Lestringant has said: "The nautical fiction of Le Testu fulfilled the conditions of a technical instrumentality, while giving to King Henry II and his minister, Admiral Coligny, the… anticipatory image of an empire that awaited to be brought into being". In the Cosmographie twelve vividly coloured charts are devoted to a survey of the fictitious continent Terra Australis. In these charts, Le Testu drew the outlines of an enormous Austral continent which covered the southern part of the globe and filled a considerable part of the Indian Ocean. This imaginary land derived from the Antichthone of the Greeks and had already been reactivated, notably by the mathematician and cosmographer Oronce Finé and by Le Testu's predecessors of the Dieppe school. According to the Portuguese historian Paolo Carile, the attitude of Le Testu reveals a cultural conflict between the old cosmographic beliefs and the demands of an empirical concept of geographical and ethnographical knowledge, influenced by the rigour of his Calvinist faith. Carile notes that while on the iconographic side Le Testu depicts an Austral Continent with strangely tropical conditions incorporating beasts drawn from fantasy and old legends, on the other side he nullifies these leaps of imagination by his admission that the land shown as part of the Terra Australis was still unknown and what was marked out on his map was based solely on imagination and surmise.

Dependence of the Dieppe school on the cosmography of Oronce Finé and Johannes Schoener

The cartographers of the Dieppe school incorporated into their world maps the cosmographic concepts of Oronce Finé, the first Professor of Mathematics at the Collège Royal in Paris. His 1531 world map was published in 1532 in the Novus Orbis Regionum ac Insularum. Finé's cosmography was derived from that of the German mathematician, Johannes Schöner. In his study of Schöner‘s globes, Franz von Wieser, found that the derivation of Finé's mappemonde from them was “unverkennbar”. Lucien Gallois noted in 1890, as Franz von Wieser had done before him, the undeniable “ressemblance parfaite” between Finé's 1531 mappemonde and Schöner's 1533 globe. Schöner's globe of 1523 also closely resembled Finé's mappemonde, proving that Schöner's cosmographic concepts pre-dated those of Finé. Albert Anthiaume wrote in 1911:
One place name in particular on the Dieppe maps, the baie bresille on northwest coast the 1542 Rotz map's Lande of Java, which appears as Baye bresille on the Harleian, Baye bresill on the Desceliers and Baie Braecillie on Le Testu's Grande Jave of 1556, illustrates the reliance of their makers on the Schöner/Finé cosmography. Armand Rainaud noted in 1893 that this appellation, “without doubt comes from the globes of Schoener and the maps of Oronce Fine”. On Finé's 1531 mappemonde, BRASIELIE REGIO is shown as part of the Terra Australis lying to the east of Africa and to the south of Java, just where Schöner located BRASIELIE REGIO on his 1523 globe, and where the Dieppe maps locate their Baye Bresille.
Another indication of this reliance is given by the placement of CATIGARA on the western coast of South America on the mid-1540s Harleian mappemonde and on Le Testu's 1556 map of western South America: the same location it occupied on Finé's 1531 mappemonde and on Schöner's 1523 and 1533 globes. Kattigara or Cattigara was understood by the 2nd-century Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy to be a port and emporium on the eastern side of the Sinus Magnus, the actual Gulf of Thailand. The 1507 Waldseemüller map shows Catigara in this location. Following the 1519–1521 circumnavigation of the world by the expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan and completed after his death in the Philippines by Sebastian de Juan Sebastián Elcano, Schöner identified the Pacific Ocean with Ptolemy’s Sinus Magnus, which he labelled on his 1523 globe, SINUS MAGNUS EOV MARE DE SUR. The eastern side of the Sinus Magnus, which Schöner took to be the peninsula of India Superior where Cattigara was located, was therefore identified by him with South America, which on his 1533 globe bears the inscription, America, Indiae superioris et Asiae continentis pars. Cattigara was accordingly located on Schöner's 1523 and 1533 globes on the western coast of South America. CATIGARA occupied the same location on Finé's mappemonde, as it also did on the Dieppe school maps, the mid-1540s Harleian mappemonde and Le Testu's 1556 map of western South America.

La Popelinière and French colonial expansion

The extent of French knowledge concerning Terra Australis in the mid-16th century is indicated by Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière, who in 1582 published Les Trois Mondes, a work setting out the history of the discovery of the globe. In Les Trois Mondes, La Popelinière pursued a geopolitical design by using cosmographic conjectures which were at the time quite credible, to theorize a colonial expansion by France into the Austral territories. His country, eliminated from colonial competition in the New World after a series of checks at the hands of the Portuguese and Spanish, could only thenceforward orient her expansion toward this "third world". He declared: "to the ambition of the French is promised the Terre Australe, a territory which could not but be filled with all kinds of goods and things of excellence". Taking up an earlier proposal by André d'Albaigne and inspired by Le Testu's description of Terra Australis, La Popelinière described in eloquent terms this unknown "third world" which would complete the Old World and the New World. He wrote;
It is noteworthy that La Popelinière believed that only Ferdinand Magellan had actually sighted the southern continent, in the shape of Tierra del Fuego. He was apparently ignorant that Francis Drake sailed through open sea to the south of Tierra del Fuego in 1578, proving it to be an island and not, as Magellan had supposed, part of Terra Australis. La Popelinière, the would be colonist, gave no indication that he thought that anyone, French, Portuguese or otherwise, had visited the part of Terra Australis shown on the Dieppe maps as "Jave la Grande".

Debates over the theory of Portuguese discovery of Australia

Discussion of the Dieppe maps in contemporary Australia is exclusively confined to the Jave la Grande feature. In the media, the maps are sometimes mistakenly described as Portuguese.
The first writer to put these maps forward as evidence of Portuguese discovery of Australia was Alexander Dalrymple in 1786, in a short note to his Memoir Concerning the Chagos and Adjacent Islands. Dalrymple was intrigued enough to publish 200 copies of the Dauphin map.
Since then a number of other writers have contributed to the debate about the "Jave La Grande" landmass that appears on the Dieppe maps. These include;

19th and early 20th century writers