Finding out something new about something old can be a transporting experience, a little like time travel. I felt it when examining this English globe and reconsidering its maker and date, boldly claimed on its cartouches to be Richard Cushee in 1731. The globe has become an object layered with meaning for me.
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On a cartographical level, the globe is important to the library as an example of British mapping of Australia from the period between the Dutch charting of the mid-17th century and Cook's charting of the east coast in 1770, when the map of the continent changed little. On this globe, Australia (named New Holland) has a bulging east coast, like the maps of the French theoretical cartographers who gave the continent an imaginary coastline.
My journey began when I realised that the globe tracks a voyage that took place long after 1731, George Anson's of 1740-1744. Records show Richard Cushee died in his 30s in April 1733. This made me eager to find other Cushee globes, presumably produced when Richard Cushee was still alive. There are not many around, but I found two similar ones in British collections, and with the assistance of their curators, saw that the mapping of Australia's east coast on their globes is altogether different. Cushee has left it blank! The rest of the mapping of Australia is largely identical. I felt this confirmed that Richard's original plates had been updated, probably under the direction of his widow Elizabeth, who until 1745 at least was still selling globes and working in partnership with young globemakers from the Globe and Sun. She married another Mr Cushee and became mother to Leonard Cushee, who eventually also made globes.
So the globe catapulted me headlong through a time tunnel to 18th-century London, to Fleet Street, and imagining a little shop close to Chancery Lane - I could not find any images of it - with the appropriate name of the Globe and Sun. It was here that Richard Cushee worked in the 1720s and early 1730s. I can almost smell the nearby coffee house the ''Temple Exchange'', as well as the somewhat less savoury stench of the street, almost hear the bell of the nearby St Dunstan's church, and imagine the shop's interior, people hunched over their work, others ready to serve the curious customer with a fine sample at hand. Advertisements say Richard's globes were ''done according to the best and most approved Maps and Observations'', suggesting he kept up with the latest information. Was the shop piled high with it? The many surviving newspaper advertisements suggest it was an enterprising business. The evocatively named Fog's Weekly newspaper of Saturday, March 14, 1730 claims he ''Surveys and Draws MAPS of GENTLEMEN'S ESTATES, after the most exact and neatest Manner''.
But, time has moved on. The world has continued to spin. All that's left is the work. Come and see the globe in Mapping our World.
♦ Dr Susannah Helman is co-curator of Mapping Our World: Terra Incognita to Australia at the National Library. The exhibition runs until March 10. Entry is free but bookings are essential at nla.gov.au
