Terra Australis, the southern continent drawn before it was seen
For two thousand years European geographers reasoned that a great southern land must balance the northern continents, and Renaissance maps such as Abraham Ortelius's world map of 1570 drew it as a vast 'Terra Australis' long before anyone had seen Antarctica.
1570 CE · -78.00, 30.00 · status: legend
The account
Aristotle argued for a southern counterweight and Ptolemy imagined the Indian Ocean closed by land to the south. Oronce Finé (1531), Gerardus Mercator (1538) and Ortelius (1570) gave the idea a shape, and Mercator and, as late as 1767, Alexander Dalrymple still defended it. James Cook's second voyage shrank the imagined land, and Matthew Flinders later moved the name to Australia. The real Antarctica turned out to be smaller, colder and much further south than the continent on the maps. Position is notional.
The sceptical view
The continent on these maps was a theory drawn as fact; that a real landmass existed near the pole is a coincidence of reasoning, not evidence of lost knowledge.
Connections in the atlas
- Ui-te-Rangiora and the 'sea foaming like arrowroot'
- First sight of the continent, 1820
- Cook crosses the Antarctic Circle
- Oronce Finé's world map and the 'ice-free Antarctica' claim
- Philippe Buache's frozen southern sea
- The Piri Reis map 'shows Antarctica'