Among the chief sections of his atlas is the Typus Orbis Terrarum, a world map that depicts Terra Australis as being by far the largest landmass in the known world: It fills most of the space south of the Tropic of Capricorn, nearly touching the southern tip of South America, and extends all the way to New Guinea. Ortelius is among the most famed mapmakers of the Dutch golden age of cartography, which occurred between the 16 th and 17 th centuries. Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius’s renowned Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or “Theater of the World,” is a compendium of all the latest maps drawn by his contemporaries, representing the sum of 16 th century cartographical knowledge. One of the most famous maps on which Terra Australis first appears forms a central segment of the world’s first modern atlas. Jodocus Hondius, by Colette Hondius 1570: Abraham Ortelius and the Theater of the World More than mere directional aids, these maps are beautiful fusions of art and science crafted centuries before the benefit of modern navigational equipment. Even so, the centuries-long cartographical transformation of Terra Australis into Antarctica is a fascinating record of the evolution of modern geography.īelow is a list of maps that, while by no means complete, follows this evolution in some of its key phases. It was not until 1820 that a confirmed sighting of Antarctica did occur. None of these names or renderings truly referred to the Antarctica we know today, since it would be hundreds of years before the continent was actually seen, but they did fuel a geographical myth that persisted for centuries.Ī number of later voyages through the late 1700s charted many of the waters into which Terra Australis was thought to extend, and either reduced or eliminated it from maps altogether. Later medieval references to Terra Australis Incognita, or “Unknown Land of the South,” would elaborate on these old-fangled theories, and maps drawn between the 15th and 18th centuries often included it at the bottom. This hypothetical region, which had never been seen much less mapped, even had names: The term “Antarctic,” coined by Greek geographer Marinus of Tyre back in the 2nd century, referred to an imagined area opposite the Arctic Circle and in the 5th century, the Roman scholar Macrobius included a southern territory called Australis (Latin for “of the south”) on his maps. Ptolemy, a Greco-Roman astronomer who lived from roughly 100 to170 CE, thought that an enormous far-southern landmass had to exist to provide a planetary counterweight to the large continents of the north. Long before human eyes ever beheld Antarctica, the ancients were convinced that it existed – or at least something like it. A cartographical history from Terra Australis to Antarctica
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