Keywords: Desceliers 1550 map - Australia detail.jpg This is a detail from a 1550 world map by Pierre Desceliers from the location where Australia would be and purportedly showing Australian features It is one of the Dieppe maps which are commonly put forward as evidence for the theory that the Portuguese discovered Australia in the 16th century This is a cropped and colour-balanced scan of an 1898 facsimile of this detail taken from the British Museum's copy of the original map Access to it is available on the National Library of Australia's website at http //nla gov au/nla map-rm2057-5 The graphical user interface provided does not support downloading the full image at full resolution but the back end can be cajoled to do so by manually editing the CGI arguments in the URL 1550 Pierre Desceliers PD-old-100 Old maps of Australia |