The Search For Terra Australis Incognita

In the Western world, belief in a Terra Australis - a vast continent located in the far south of the globe to "balance" out the northern lands of Europe, Asia and North Africa - had existed for centuries. Aristotle had postulated a symmetry of the earth, which meant that there would be equally habitable lands south of the known world. The Greeks suggested that these two hemispheres, north and south, were divided by a 'belt of fire'[citation needed].

It was not until Prince Henry the Navigator began in 1418 to encourage the penetration of the torrid zone in the effort to reach India by circumnavigating Africa that the exploration of the southern hemisphere began. In 1473 Portuguese navigator Lopes GonÐ"§alves proved that the equator could be crossed, and cartographers and sailors began to assume the existence of another, temperate continent to the south of the known world.

In 1570 a map by Ortelius showed the imagined link between the proposed continent of Antarctica and South America. Note also the proposed landmasses surrounding the North Pole.The doubling of the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 by Bartholomew Diaz first brought explorers within touch of the Antarctic cold, and proved that there was an ocean separating Africa from any Antarctic land that might exist. Ferdinand Magellan, who passed through the Straits of Magellan in 1520, assumed that the islands of Tierra del Fuego to the south were an extension of this unknown southern land, and it appeared as such on a map by Ortelius: Terra australis recenter inventa sed nondum plene cognita ("Southern land recently discovered but not yet known").[citation needed]. In 1513, the Turkish admiral Piri Reis also drew a a map that has been said to show part of the Antarctic continent.

The doubling of Cape Horn by Drake in 1578 proved that the Tierra del Fuego archipelago was of small extent and that any continent which lay to the south must be within the region of perpetual winter. European geographers connected the coast of Tierra del Fuego with the coast of New Guinea on their globes and allowing their imaginations to run riot in the vast unknown spaces of the south Atlantic, south Indian and Pacific oceans. They sketched the outlines of the Terra Australis Incognita ("Unknown Southern Land"), a vast continent stretching in parts into the tropics. The search for this great south land or Third World was a leading motive of explorers in the 16th and the early part of the 17th centuries.

Schouten and Le Maire rediscovered the southern extremity of Tierra del Fuego and named it Cape Horn in 1615. QuirÐ"Ñ-s in 1606 took possession for the king of Spain all of the lands he had discovered in Australia del Espiritu Santo (the New Hebrides) and those he would discover "even to the Pole". Tasman in 1642 showed that New Holland (Australia) was separated by sea from any continuous southern continent.

Map from 1771, showing abstract circular Terres Australis.Voyagers round the Horn frequently met with contrary winds and were driven southward into snowy skies and ice-encumbered