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Maps? People still use those things? Well, not only do people still use them, but people like Kevin Brown even specialize in rare antique maps dating all the way back from the 15th century to the mid-20th century. And the stories these maps lead to are fascinating. Silver Shorts presents Geographicus Terra Australis.

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I think calling it the largest continent that never was is actually a really good descriptor because the size of it, if it actually matched what was mapped on some early maps, would have been enormous. My name is Kevin Brown. I'm the owner of Geographicus Rare Antique Maps. We are specialists in antiquarian cartography with material dating from the 15th century all the way up to the mid-20th century. We can be found at www.geographicus.com.

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one of the largest online archives and stores for rare maps. As a dealer in rare maps, every once in a while, a map will come across my desk and I'll sit down to start researching it and I will look at it. And the first thing you look at when you see a map is the stuff you know. It's like, okay, there's Mexico and America, Gulf of Mexico. And then you look at what you don't know. And that's where the fun starts. That's where the exploration and discovery starts.

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If you're looking at a giant map of the world by any of the great cartographers of the Dutch Golden Age or Tilius, Mercator, or the French period, Saint-Saëns, Jaliot, Cook, even Vaugan-D, sometimes you see people pop up with these maps showing Antarctica and there's two separate islands. You see this massive continent and it draws the eye and then you start questioning.

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It's that, you know, what the fuck is that moment? When you're looking at a map and you're like, okay, I recognize there's America, there's Asia, I recognize there's Africa. What the hell is that? What is that? What am I looking at?

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It was a land that was then called Terra Australis Incognita, meaning Southland unknown. Terra Australis was common on maps going back to late 1500s. You start seeing it on maps. It's based upon this idea that can be traced to Greek philosophy, specifically to Aristotle. 322 to 384 BC, which are Aristotle's life years.

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Aristotle hypothesized that the world was a place of balances, so that the weight of the Northern Hemisphere, the land masses of Asia and Europe and North Africa, must be counterbalanced by a similar land mass in the South. Aristotle would not have known about North America, but just focusing on the Old World, there was some speculation that there must be a lot of land down there, otherwise the whole world would be thrown off balance. So,

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How can this ancient geographical idea last so long? It's because of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This is a period where Greek scholarship and knowledge was held at the absolute apex of intellect. And the goal was rediscovering this knowledge more so than advancing existing knowledge. There's a whole series of maps called Ptolemaic maps. And they are essentially Greek maps based on the work of Claudius Ptolemy.

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Claudius Ptolemy was a Greek mathematician and supposedly geographer, cartographer, cosmographer, in the second century AD. His interest was mapping the known world to him, Africa, Europe, and Asia. The significance of Ptolemy for our purposes is that he laid out a groundwork for geographical presentation of the world.

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We don't know if Ptolemy himself actually made maps, but he made instructions on how to make maps using this coordinate system and a projection that Ptolemy invented. They provide the foundation for what we know as modern cartography. As Europe fell into the dark ages, this knowledge was preserved in the Arab world where the scholarship and education was extremely high. So the Islamic scholars preserved it and an Islamic ambassador, Al-Isidri, took this information to Europe and

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Europeans started making maps based upon the Ptolemaic instructions, the Ptolemaic guides and models. Europeans began copying it and it became very important as the underpinning of European cartographic thought. Ptolemy did not attempt to map Terra Australis incognita. That starts showing up in the early 1500s and becomes a cartographic trope that lasts until the mid 1700s.

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Even early sightings of Australia and New Guinea were starting to be incorporated into Terra Australis. So imagine a continent that covered the entire southern part of the world, stretching as far north as New Guinea in some places. When exploration began to sort of see the world, cartographers were like, where is all this weight that has to be down there? So they started mapping what they assumed must be there, this giant continent.

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that covers the entire south part of the globe from essentially the tip of South America south and some places extends up north quite a ways into even Southeast Asia. They admit that we don't know, they've never been there, but it did appear on maps and they even named places, capes, bays. Some people even speculated on the kind of people who might live there, but the truth is no one had been there and there was no pretense that there was actual knowledge of this land.

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It was merely an intellectual foil that made its way onto old maps because they believed it had to be there. And they believed strongly enough that expedition after expedition was sent to look for it.

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Magellan on the maps resulting from his voyage and he went through the Straits of Magellan, he assumed that Tierra del Fuego was the northern tip of Terra Australis and on early maps by Ortelius and others, it's connected to Terra Australis. And shortly thereafter, Francis Drake sailed south of Tierra del Fuego through Drake's passage, showing that, not connected. Captain Cook was sent to look for it. Cook reached New Zealand in 1769.

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He was sent to explore and one of the missions that he has was to discover if this Terra Australis existed and he did not discover it. This was the beginning of the end for Terra Australis. When you start having to change maps and it starts to diminish its size over time and then it disappears entirely eventually. Even in the mid 1600s, there just tends to be a partial coastline that gets mapped in the South Pacific. It disappears.

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It disappears for a while. Cook sighted a few parts of Antarctica, and then you have Wilkes and Scott down there in the mid-19th century doing a real comprehensive mapping of the coast. There was no political need for Terra Australis because it was not really known to be a resource-rich place. It was too far from Europe to think of it as a place to go and conquer, especially since no one really knew if it existed at all.

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It was really an academic mapping among map scholars. This kind of idea, it's been picked up by pseudo scholars who look at this and be like, oh, look at this. This map was made in 1600, but it shows Antarctica. So somebody must have gone there and explored it. What gets me going, I suppose, is there is something interesting here. It's not Antarctica, but you know, there's kind of like...

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an opportunity to stand against your pseudo-scholars of the world. And at the same time, there's an interesting story to tell.

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To me, looking at an old map and seeing things that we know are wrong always just asks the question, well, why? What's going on there? And it's a mystery to explore. It's an opportunity to understand the thinking of another generation. And while this kind of thought doesn't appeal to everyone, for those who kind of think of themselves as little historians or treasure hunters or those who think of themselves as very serious, it's something that's fun to explore and learn about. And it informs us on

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The progression of cartography, progression of our understanding of the world that we live in and how that evolved over the course of hundreds of years.

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Geographicus, What the Fuck is That, Episode 2, Terra Australis. Hosted by James Brown Orleans. Featuring Kevin J. Brown from Geographicus Rare Antique Maps. Produced by Corey Choi, Christian Cucinello, and Tom Fama. Music by L. Boodoo and Luke Allen. Sound by Silversound.