Terra Australis
Terra Australis was a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Its existence was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the Southern Hemisphere. This theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who used the term Australis on his maps.
Names
Other names for the hypothetical continent have included and , and . Other names were , and . Matthias Ringmann called it the in 1505, and Franciscus Monachus called it the Australis orę. In medieval times it was known as the Antipodes.The French writer Guillaume Postel proposed the name Chasdia, after Noah's grandson Cush, for the hypothetical continent on the basis of it having dark-skinned inhabitants.
Change of name
During the 18th century, today's Australia was not conflated with Terra Australis, as it sometimes was in the 20th century. Captain Cook and his contemporaries knew that the sixth continent, which they called New Holland, was entirely separate from the imagined seventh continent.In the 19th century, the colonial authorities in Sydney re-allocated the name Australia to New Holland and its centuries-old Dutch name eventually fell into disuse. Meanwhile, having lost its name of Australia, the south polar continent was nameless for decades until Antarctica was coined in the 1890s.
In the early 19th century, British explorer Matthew Flinders popularized the naming of Australia after Terra Australis, giving his rationale that there was "no probability" of finding any significant land mass anywhere more south than Australia. The continent that would come to be named Antarctica would be explored decades after Flinders' 1814 book on Australia, which he had titled A Voyage to Terra Australis, and after his naming switch had gained popularity.
History
Origins
In the fourth century B.C. Aristotle hypothesized that the continents of the Northern Hemisphere must be balanced out by an unknown landmass in the Southern Hemisphere.Ptolemy believed that the Indian Ocean was enclosed on the south by land, and that the lands of the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south. Marcus Tullius Cicero used the term cingulus australis in referring to the Antipodes in Somnium Scipionis. The land in this zone was the Terra Australis.
File:Piri reis world map 01.jpg|thumb|upright=1.25|Fragment of the Piri Reis map by Piri Reis in 1513, possibly showing Terra Australis
File:Schöner globe 1520 western hemisphere.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|Western hemisphere of the Johannes Schöner globe from 1520
Image:Map-heart-054.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.3|Oronce Fine 1531 double cordiform map of the world
Legends of Terra Australis Incognitaan "unknown land of the South"date back to Roman times and before, and were commonplace in medieval geography, although not based on any documented knowledge of the continent. Ptolemy's maps, which became well known in Europe during the Renaissance, did not actually depict such a continent, but they did show an Africa which had no southern oceanic boundary, and also raised the possibility that the Indian Ocean was entirely enclosed by land. Christian thinkers did not discount the idea that there might be land beyond the southern seas, but the issue of whether it could be inhabited was controversial.
The first depiction of Terra Australis on a globe was probably on Johannes Schöner's lost 1523 globe on which Oronce Fine is thought to have based his 1531 double cordiform map of the world. On this landmass he wrote "recently discovered but not yet completely explored". The body of water beyond the tip of South America is called the "Mare Magellanicum", one of the first uses of navigator Ferdinand Magellan's name in such a context.
Schöner called the continent Brasiliae Australis in his 1533 tract, Opusculum geographicum. In it, he explained:
Brasilia Australis is an immense region toward Antarcticum, newly discovered but not yet fully surveyed, which extends as far as Melacha and somewhat beyond. The inhabitants of this region lead good, honest lives and are not Anthropophagi like other barbarian nations; they have no letters, nor do they have kings, but they venerate their elders and offer them obedience; they give the name Thomas to their children ; close to this region lies the great island of Zanzibar at 102.00 degrees and 27.30 degrees South.
Mapping the southern continent
Medieval period
During medieval times Terra Australis was known by a different name, that being the Antipodes. First widely introduced to medieval western Europe by Isidore of Seville in his famous book the Etymologiae, the idea gained popularity across Europe, and most scholars did not question its existence, instead debating if it was habitable for other humans. It would later be included on some zonal Mappa mundi and intrigue medieval scholars for centuries.16th century
Explorers of the Age of Discovery, from the late 15th century on, proved that Africa was almost entirely surrounded by sea, and that the Indian Ocean was accessible from both west and east. These discoveries reduced the area where the continent could be found; however, many cartographers held to Aristotle's opinion. Scientists such as Gerardus Mercator and Alexander Dalrymple as late as 1767 argued for its existence, with such arguments as that there should be a large landmass in the south as a counterweight to the known landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere. As new lands were discovered, they were often assumed to be parts of the hypothetical continent.The German cosmographer and mathematician Johannes Schöner constructed a terrestrial globe in 1515, based on the world map and globe made by Martin Waldseemüller and his colleagues at St. Dié in Lorraine in 1507. Where Schöner departs most conspicuously from Waldseemüller is in his globe's depiction of an Antarctic continent, called by him Brasilie Regio. His continent is based, however tenuously, on the report of an actual voyage: that of the Portuguese merchants Nuno Manuel and Cristóvão de Haro to the River Plate, and related in the Newe Zeytung auss Presillg Landt published in Augsburg in 1514. The Zeytung described the Portuguese voyagers passing through a strait between the southernmost point of America, or Brazil, and a land to the south west, referred to as vndtere Presill.
This supposed "strait" was in fact the Rio de la Plata. By "vndtere Presill", the Zeytung meant that part of Brazil in the lower latitudes, but Schöner mistook it to mean the land on the southern side of the "strait", in higher latitudes, and so gave to it the opposite meaning. On this slender foundation he constructed his circum-Antarctic continent to which, for the reasons that he does not explain, he gave an annular, or ring shape. In an accompanying explanatory treatise, Luculentissima quaedam terrae totius descriptio, he explained:
The Portuguese, thus, sailed around this region, the Brasilie Regio, and discovered the passage very similar to that of our Europe and situated laterally between east and west. From one side the land on the other is visible; and the cape of this region about away, much as if one were sailing eastward through the Straits of Gibraltar or Seville and Barbary or Morocco in Africa, as our Globe shows toward the Antarctic Pole. Further, the distance is only moderate from this Region of Brazil to Malacca, where St. Thomas was crowned with martyrdom.
On this scrap of information, united with the concept of the Antipodes inherited from Graeco-Roman antiquity, Schöner constructed his representation of the southern continent. His strait served as inspiration for Ferdinand Magellan's expedition to reach the Moluccas by a westward route.
He took Magellan's discovery of Tierra del Fuego in 1520 as further confirmation of its existence, and on his globes of 1523 and 1533 he described it as terra australis recenter inventa sed nondum plene cognita. It was taken up by his followers, the French cosmographer Oronce Fine in his world map of 1531, and the Flemish cartographers Gerardus Mercator in 1538 and Abraham Ortelius in 1570. Schöner's concepts influenced the Dieppe school of mapmakers, notably in their representation of Jave la Grande.
In 1539, the King of Spain, Charles V, created the Governorate of Terra Australis granted to Pedro Sancho de la Hoz, who in 1540 transferred the title to the conqueror Pedro de Valdivia and later was incorporated to Chile.
Terra Australis was depicted on the mid-16th-century Dieppe maps, where its coastline appeared just south of the islands of the East Indies; it was often elaborately charted, with a wealth of fictitious detail. There was much interest in Terra Australis among Norman and Breton merchants at that time. In 1566 and 1570, Francisque and André d'Albaigne presented Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, with projects for establishing relations with the Austral lands. Although the Admiral gave favourable consideration to these initiatives, they came to nought when Coligny was killed in 1572.
Image:Cornelius Wytfliet South 1597.jpg|thumb|upright=1.35|Hypothetical Terra Australis in a map by Cornelius Wytfliet from 1597
Image:Mercator World Map.jpg|thumb|upright 1.35|right|Terra Australis occupies a large part of the southern hemisphere in this world map of 1587 by Rumold Mercator, the son of Gerardus Mercator.
Gerardus Mercator believed in the existence of a large Southern continent on the basis of cosmographic reasoning, set out in the abstract of his Atlas or Cosmographic Studies in Five Books, as related by his biographer, Walter Ghim, who said that even though Mercator was not ignorant that the Austral continent still lay hidden and unknown, he believed it could be "demonstrated and proved by solid reasons and arguments to yield in its geometric proportions, size and weight, and importance to neither of the other two, nor possibly to be lesser or smaller, otherwise the constitution of the world could not hold together at its centre".
The Flemish geographer and cartographer, Cornelius Wytfliet, wrote concerning the Terra Australis in his 1597 book, Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum:
The terra Australis is therefore the southernmost of all other lands, directly beneath the antarctic circle; extending beyond the tropic of Capricorn to the West, it ends almost at the equator itself, and separated by a narrow strait lies on the East opposite to New Guinea, only known so far by a few shores because after one voyage and another that route has been given up and unless sailors are forced and driven by stress of winds it is seldom visited. The terra Australis begins at two or three degrees below the equator and it is said by some to be of such magnitude that if at any time it is fully discovered they think it will be the fifth part of the world.
Adjoining Guinea on the right are the numerous and vast Solomon Islands which lately became famous by the voyage of Alvarus Mendanius.
Juan Fernandez, sailing from Chile in 1576, claimed he had discovered the Southern Continent. The Polus Antarcticus map of 1641 by Henricus Hondius, bears the inscription: "Insulas esse a Nova Guinea usque ad Fretum Magellanicum affirmat Hernandus Galego, qui ad eas explorandas missus fuit a Rege Hispaniae Anno 1576 ".