Terra Australis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Terra Australis is the large continent proposed on the bottom of this map of 1570.

Terra Australis (also: Terra Australis Incognita, Latin for "the unknown land of the South") was an imaginary continent, appearing on European maps from the 15th to the 18th century.

It was introduced by Aristotle, an ancient philosopher. Aristotle's ideas were later expanded by Ptolemy, a Greek cartographer from the first century AD, who believed that the Indian Ocean was enclosed on the south by land. During the Renaissance, Ptolemy was the main source of information for European cartographers as the land started to appear on their maps. Although voyages of discovery did sometimes reduce the area where the continent could be found, cartographers held Aristotle's idea. Scientists 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. Usually the land was shown as a continent around the South Pole, but much larger than the actual Antarctica, spreading far north -- in particular in the Pacific Ocean. New Zealand, first seen by a European (Abel Tasman) in 1642, was regarded by some as a part of the continent, as well as Africa and Australia.

Map showing pencilled land labelled Terra Australis Incognita, where Antarctica is situated. At the bottom of the map are incomplete New Zealand and New Holland (Australia).

The idea of Terra Australis was finally corrected by Matthew Flinders and James Cook.

Cook circumnavigated New Zealand, showing it could not be part of a large continent. On his second voyage he circumnavigated the globe at a very high southern latitude, at some places even crossing the south polar circle, showing that any possible southern continent must lie well within the cold polar areas. There could be no extension into regions with a temperate climate, as had been thought before.

Flinders took command of an expedition to investigate the coastline of Australia in 1801, which he circled in an anti-clockwise direction, threading the Great Barrier Reef through what is now called Flinders Passage and surveying the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north. His charts of the coastline were remarkably accurate. After completing his work in 1803, he sailed for England. His ship was wrecked on an uncharted reef, however, and he returned to Australia in the ship's cutter, a remarkable 1,130-km (700-mile) journey. Although practically unheard of in his native England, Flinders is well known in Australia, where he has more statues erected in his honour than anyone else, with the exception of Queen Victoria.

The country of Australia was first termed Terra Australis by Flinders when he wrote a book of this title containing the maps he had made on his several voyages, and the name Australia is derivative of the word Australis, which means southern in Latin.