Terra Australis (Latin for 'Southern Land') 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.
Names Other names for the hypothetical continent have included Terra Australis Ignota and Terra Australis Incognita (transl. the unknown most southern land), and Terra Australis Nondum Cognita (transl. the most southern land not yet known). Other names were Brasiliae Australis (transl. the most southern Brazil), and Magellanica (transl. the land of Magellan). Matthias Ringmann called it the Ora antarctica (transl. antarctic land) in 1505, and Franciscus Monachus called it the Australis orę (Austral country). 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 (Cush's traditional descendants).
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 (today's Australia), which they called New Holland, was entirely separate from the imagined (but still undiscovered) seventh continent (today's Antarctica). 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 (2nd century AD) 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 ("southern zone") in referring to the Antipodes in Somnium Scipionis ("Dream of Scipio"). The land (terra in Latin) in this zone was the Terra Australis.
Legends of Terra Australis Incognita—an "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 which therefore might extend all the way to the South Pole), 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 (heart-shaped) 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 [cannibals] 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 [after St Thomas the Apostle]; 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
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