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Imagining a South Land

Historians and archaeologists are still debating when the first Australians reached these shores. Aboriginal people have lived for many centuries on the continent now known as Australia. They developed a vast store of knowledge about the land, its animal and plant life, climate and geography that was unknown to people in the Northern Hemisphere.

From the time of the early Greeks, European philosophers and geographers had speculated that there might be antipodean continents, and peoples with whom they might trade.

When sailors from countries like Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands travelled to the East Indies (south and south-east Asia) in search of gold, spices and precious stones, they were also searching for a legendary southern land. The theory prevailed up until the 1600s, when Dutch sailors began charting to the north, west, south and east of Australia.

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Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius [fifth century AD]
World Map After Macrobius
The inhabited world north of the equator balanced by a southern continent and divided from it by water.
woodcut; 12.3 cm diameter
Venice: Joannes Rubeus Vercellensis, 1492
State Library of New South Wales

The concept of an enormous continent occupying much of the Southern Hemisphere had been around since the time of Pythagoras. Maps drawn by the early Greeks and Romans showed the world shaped like a sphere, with the three known continents of the Northern Hemisphere balanced by a similar landmass to the south of the equator.

Fifth-century Roman philosopher Macrobius believed the Earth was divided into three climatic zones, with a massive continent (antipodum) covering much of its southern, and temperate, hemisphere. 'Why should we not assume that there are men living there as well where similar conditions always obtain?' Macrobius asked.

The theory of a large southern continental mass, or 'Terra Australis', strongly influenced cartographers of the Renaissance period. Voyages of exploration to the Americas (thought to be China) and across the Pacific Ocean did nothing to erase belief in a greater southern continent.

Following the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci between 1499 and 1502, the controversy surrounding the western Antipodes (Americas) had been settled. But even after Ferdinand Magellan discovered Tierra del Fuego in 1520 and knowledge of the continental landmass began to take shape, South America was still thought to be connected to the unknown South Land.

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Oronce Finé (1491–1555)
Nova, et integra universi orbis descriptio
Double heart-shaped world map, including Terra Australis, ‘recently discovered but not yet explored’.
engraving; 17.0 x 23.5 cm
Basel: Christian Wechel, 1540 [1531]
State Library of New South Wales

In 1531, cartographer Oronce Finé produced one of his famous heart-shaped maps, Nova, et Integra Universi Orbis Descriptio. The double-cordiform projection depicted recent Spanish and Portuguese discoveries of passages to the Indian Ocean, along with Magellan's imagined glimpses of an unknown southern continent beneath the Americas. Finé's representation of the continent was accompanied by the legend: 'The south-land, recently discovered, but not fully known yet.'

Finé and others benefitted from the work of Gerard Mercator, who had transformed land surveying. Mercator's research and calculations enabled him to calculate more accurately the longitudinal length of Europe and Asia (he reduced the length dramatically), and his unique application of map projection allowed sailors to plot compass bearings in straight lines for the first time. Thanks to the cartographer's vision, the sixteenth-century view of the known world was changed forever.

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Caarte vande Zuijdzee ver tonende wat wech Willem Schouten
Track chart showing a new route west pioneered by Willem Schouten and Jacob le Maire.
engraving; 17.0 x 40.0 cm
Amsterdam: Willem Schouten, 1618
State Library of Queensland

By the late 1500s, Portuguese and Spanish explorers had opened the sea route to India and the East Indies. Competition for such routes was fierce, and in 1615 a Dutch expedition conceived of a new passage to the Indies from the east. A pioneering voyage by Willem Schouten and Jacob le Maire through Cape Horn and up the western coast of Chile to the southern Pacific Ocean suggested that South America was not part of a vast southern continent. The tracks of thier voyage can be seen on the Caarte van de Zuijdzee.

By the mid-1500s, Portuguese and Spanish explorers had explored most of New Guinea's coastline and had begun to chart lands in the South Pacific. The Spanish had expected to find a second Peru or India (the Spanish viceroy of Peru had authority over the whole Pacific), and commissioned voyages to discover and colonise the continent and islands west of South America.

At the same time, in the French port of Dieppe, chart makers imagined a rich and vast southward-reaching Java and began depicting a so-called 'Java la Grande'. Believers in a great South Land were in the majority, and in 1570, Abraham Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum detailed the vast southern landmass, 'Terra Australia Nondum Cognita' (south land not yet known) along with the land of 'Beach pars continentis Australis'. Based on Marco Polo's texts suggesting a land below Java, 'Beach' on Terra Australis had been a goal of explorers such as Francis Drake.

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Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598)
Typus orbis terrarum
World map specifically engraved for the atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.
engraving; 33.5 x 49.8 cm
Antwerp: Plantjin, 1587 [1570]
National Library of Australia

http://nla.gov.au/nla.map-nk10001

Before long, the Spanish had reached the Solomon Islands. In the early 1600s, Spanish sailors landed on New Hebrides, declared the islands the long-sought-after South Land and named them La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. Without realising it, the Spanish and Portuguese were rounding in on Australia's north-east. Meanwhile, trade in the East Indies was increasing European interest in the lands beyond.

The Dutch discoveries that followed owed much to the Portuguese and Spanish, their commercial rivals. For most of the 1500s, they were the only Europeans to venture into the Pacific. With the establishment of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), in 1602, however, Dutch enterprises competed for the East Indies spice markets and launched exploration farther afield, and in 1606 first set foot on Australian soil.

Thanks to Dutch sailors during the 1600s, Terra Australis, the South Land, would soon give up its secrets. Their sightings of the continent and occasional landings, both deliberate and accidental, led to the discovery of the entire coastline of the Gulf of Carpentaria, much of the continent's north-west coast, all of the western coast, and most of the southern coast.

Moreover, the voyages of Abel Tasman in 1642 and 1644, like Cook's voyage 130 years later, would prove once and for all that all-encompassing southern continent—the South Land—was nothing more than a myth.

With the help of their intricate charting and elegant mapmaking, Dutch adventurers and spice traders would begin to unveil the continent we now call Australia.

 

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