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Terra Australis Incognita
Dec. 16th, 2014 01:00 amIt was proposed by Aristotle, apparently, that there must be a continent of some size surrounding the South Pole—for reasons that we nowadays would think of as not very strong, and certainly not based on direct physical evidence of the existence of such a continent. Nevertheless, the idea caught on, and if it was not universally believed in the West it was still influential enough that it is not hard to find maps from the early modern period that assume its existence, cartographers drawing coastlines for it based on, for the most part, no coastlines that had been sighted by human sailors. It was often given a name like Terra Australis Incognita: 'Unknown Southern Land'. Here's Johannes Schöner's 1553 map of the Southern Hemisphere:
And here's Hendrik Hondius's 1630 world map:
As exploration of the seas of the Southern Hemisphere continued, landmasses such as Tierra del Fuego and New Zealand were at times thought to be the northern extremities of the unknown southern continent until these Western explorers realized that they were islands, and the hypothetical maximum size of Terra Australis Incognita shrank. Eventually in 1814, Matthew Flinders, having recently circumnavigated New Holland, the largest landmass within the Southern Hemisphere known then to exist, proposed giving it the name "Australia", on the grounds that "There is no probability, that any other detached body of land, of nearly equal extent, will ever be found in a more southern latitude"—i.e., there was simply no evidence that any continent surrounding the South Pole existed, and so the continent of New Holland was the one most deserving of the "Terra Australis" name.
Less than 10 years later, the continent of Antarctica was first sighted.
This creates an interesting epistemological conundrum: who was more correct about Terra Australia, Schöner or Flinders? It's a situation where the field of Western geography started with a belief that was correct basically by accident—"there is a continent surrounding the South Pole"—and then as people gained more knowledge, they had less and less reason to believe this proposition… until suddenly it turned out to be true after all.
And here's Hendrik Hondius's 1630 world map:
As exploration of the seas of the Southern Hemisphere continued, landmasses such as Tierra del Fuego and New Zealand were at times thought to be the northern extremities of the unknown southern continent until these Western explorers realized that they were islands, and the hypothetical maximum size of Terra Australis Incognita shrank. Eventually in 1814, Matthew Flinders, having recently circumnavigated New Holland, the largest landmass within the Southern Hemisphere known then to exist, proposed giving it the name "Australia", on the grounds that "There is no probability, that any other detached body of land, of nearly equal extent, will ever be found in a more southern latitude"—i.e., there was simply no evidence that any continent surrounding the South Pole existed, and so the continent of New Holland was the one most deserving of the "Terra Australis" name.
Less than 10 years later, the continent of Antarctica was first sighted.
This creates an interesting epistemological conundrum: who was more correct about Terra Australia, Schöner or Flinders? It's a situation where the field of Western geography started with a belief that was correct basically by accident—"there is a continent surrounding the South Pole"—and then as people gained more knowledge, they had less and less reason to believe this proposition… until suddenly it turned out to be true after all.
