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.
Ant Hills
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.