Terra Australis, the conjectured south

What you are looking at

The region of the southern hemisphere within which European maps drew a continent, for roughly two and a half centuries before anyone saw one.

It is a latitude envelope. It is not a coastline, and it is not any particular map’s coastline.

How to read this layer

The outline is dashed, which in this family always means Terra Chartarum drew it rather than a source. It may not be measured, and no point on it corresponds to anything an engraver put on a plate.

The layer is drawn as an outline rather than a filled area on purpose. Filling it would put a continent on the map, and the argument of this whole programme is that there was no continent to put there yet.

Historical scope

1531 to 1775. The lower bound is the generation of printed world maps that carried the southern continent widely; the upper is the voyage that bounded it.

Sources and evidence

The evidence class is conjectured: land drawn because reasoning and inherited authority implied it should exist, not because anyone reported it.

No map in the object register has been examined. Four candidates are recorded - Fine, Mercator, Ortelius and a seventeenth-century comparator - and for none of them has a holding copy or a plate state been identified. Until that happens there is nothing to digitise, which is why this layer holds an envelope.

Reconstruction and uncertainty

Confidence is low and the review state is raw. The honest reading of this layer is: maps put a continent somewhere in here. Anything more precise would be Terra Chartarum’s invention rather than the period’s.

Editorial decisions

Drawing a plausible southern coastline would have been easy and would have looked better. It would also have manufactured exactly the false confidence the essay exists to examine, and a reader would have had no way to tell our line from an engraver’s. The envelope is deliberately too crude to be mistaken for evidence.

Data fields

evidenceClass, geometryProvenance, confidence, reviewState and act. See the Antarctic data fields.

Data and downloads

CC BY 4.0 for the compiled record. The layer is in review: nothing in it has been read against a source, and it may not be cited as established evidence.