Terra Australis: From Ancient Myth to Antarctic Discovery

Terra Australis Incognita, literally “Unknown Southern Land,” is the name once given to a hypothetical circumpolar landmass in the Southern Hemisphere. Believing in a kind of geographical symmetry, ancient Greek philosophers reasoned that such a southern continent must exist as a counterweight to similar landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere. The concept persisted in one form or another for two millennia, and cartographers and globe makers incorporated the land into their creations, although they had no evidence for its existence. In time, however, the European discoveries of Australia, New Zealand, and particularly Antarctica confirmed the speculations of earlier ages.

Based on the arguments of the Greek geographer Hipparchus of Nicaea (c. 190-120 BCE), the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela (fl. first century CE) proposed that the Indian Ocean island known today as Sri Lanka was a northern extremity of the conjectured southern land. In the following century, the Greco-Egyptian polymath Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100-170) correctly identified Sri Lanka as an island but held nevertheless that a southern continent enclosed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The maps of the world included in the writings of Roman philosopher Macrobius (fl. fifth century) also included such a continent.

European scholars obtained copies of Ptolemy’s writings in the early fifteenth century and accepted his belief that the Indian Ocean was enclosed on the south. Then, with the beginning of the Age of Exploration (late fifteenth through eighteenth centuries), the concept of Terra Australis Incognita became linked to the great European voyages of discovery. Cartographers began adding an ever-increasing number of geographical discoveries to their maps while modifying them to retain the southern continent in some form. After the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias (c. 1451-1500) rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1488, for instance, they were forced to push the shores of Terra Australis Incognita farther south.

Another Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521), navigated what we now call the Strait of Magellan near the tip of South America in 1520.

Based on his expedition’s sightings of the islands of Tierra del Fuego, some of whose coasts lie along the strait, geographers assumed that the existence of the long-sought-after continent had finally been confirmed. Following the example of the ancient Greeks, the Flemish-Dutch mapmaker Gerardus Mercator (1512-94) reasoned that a large landmass must lie in the Southern Hemisphere and drew such a continent nearly touching South America in his first map of the world, the Orbis Imago of 1538. Mercator’s Flemish contemporary Abraham Ortelius (1527-98) produced a somewhat similar configuration in his 1570 atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and showed the continent stretching northward into the tropics in the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well. Some cartographers named the continent Magellanica in honor of the explorer, but by the early seventeenth century Tierra del Fuego’s true nature as an archipelago had been determined.

The European discovery of Australia and New Zealand, generally credited to Dutch explorers in the first half of the seventeenth century, provided cartographers with more material but left the question of a landmass nearer the South Pole unresolved. English explorer James Cook’s circumnavigations in the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere in 1772-5 proved that if such a landmass actually existed, it was much smaller than had been supposed. Only in the early 1820s did European explorers sight Antarctica, with American sealer John Davis usually given credit for being the first person to set foot on the continent’s ice shelf, in 1821.

As the continent lying between the Pacific and Indian Oceans was officially named Australia by the British government in 1824, the more southerly landmass came to be known by another name with ancient roots—Antarctica. The term conveys the idea that it is anti-, or opposite, the Arctic, the region around the North Pole named for the large constellation known in Greek as Arktikos. Called the Great Bear in English, the constellation is a prominent feature of the northern celestial hemisphere. Hipparchus had used the term “Antarktikos,” and Renaissance cartographers had sometimes labeled the hypothetical continent Terra Antarctica rather than Terra Australis Incognita. However, the use of the name Antarctica as a noun became common only in the early twentieth century.

FURTHER READING: Eisler, William Lawrence. 1995. The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australis from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Estensen, Miriam. 2006. Terra Australis Incognita: The Spanish Quest for the Mysterious Great South Land. Crow’s Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin.

Scott, Anne M., Alfred Hiatt, Christopher Wortham, and Anne Scott. 2016. European Perceptions of Terra Australis. London: Routledge.

Simpson-Housley, Paul. 2002. Antarctica: Exploration, Perception and Metaphor. London: Routledge.