An Appendix to the Former Work [Cosmographie], endeavouring a discovery of the unknown parts of the World, especially of Terra Australis Incognita, or the Southern Continent.

By Peter Heylin. London : Printed for Henry Seile, 1652. [Extracted from the first edition of Heylyn’s Cosmographie]. Disbound folio, 340 x 235 mm; title-leaf, pp. 191-7, [1 Emendation of the Errata in the Fourth Book]; browned at the edges, some very early annotations and pen trials on the last side.

The idiosyncratic geography of English cleric and historian Peter Heylyn (or Heylin, 1599-1662) was first published in 1652. His Cosmographie is a work recognised for containing some of the earliest discussions in print of Australia, California (as an island), Tierra del Fuego, and other parts of the New World.

Its all-important last section, which is titled An Appendix to the Former Work, endeavouring a discovery of the unknown parts of the World, especially of Terra Australis Incognita, or the Southern Continent, begins: ‘And here we are upon a new and strange Adventure, which no Knight Errant ever undertook before….’. Heylyn, assuming that the continent must be as large as the landmasses of the northern hemisphere combined, expresses surprise that so little is known about it. The voyages of navigators in the South Seas are described, including those of Magellan, Quiros, Le Maire and others, and there are brief accounts of Tierra del Fuego, the Solomons and New Guinea. Finally, Heylyn provides commentary on some of the early seventeenth-century utopian literature relating to Terra Australis Incognita, notably Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem, Thomas More’s Utopia, and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis.

Although its typesetting differs, the text of the Appendix in the first edition is the same as in the second and third editions that followed in the 1660s.