Charts of a southern land

Why this is extraordinary

In July 1531 a French mathematician, Oronce Finé, signed a world map in the shape of two hearts. The banner calls it a new and complete description of the world. The left heart is the north. The right heart is the south, and most of it is one great land. The Latin on that land says it was newly discovered and not yet fully known. Rivers and mountains are drawn in the interior, the way a map of a known country would show them. The pole sits in a grid of circles. You are looking at a library sheet, now in the Library of Congress, not at a coast someone walked.

Twenty years earlier, in 1513, an Ottoman admiral had already drawn land running east across the bottom of a parchment. That sheet is a different object, kept in the Topkapı Palace, and it has its own room. It is earlier than the return of Magellan’s ship. It cannot be a copy of the strait Magellan found in 1520. What the bend at the bottom of that parchment might be, South America folded to fit the page or a southern continent, is argued in the Piri Reis map room. This room starts from that argument and then stays with the later charts.

Finé was working after Magellan. In 1520 the fleet passed a strait at the tip of South America and saw land to the south, the country later called Tierra del Fuego. Finé drew that land as if it were the nose of a continent that went on to the pole. Mapmakers of his century already had a place ready for it. A southern land, large enough to balance the continents of the north, had been argued since classical geography, and Renaissance sheets gave it a name, Terra Australis. The label “newly discovered but not yet fully known” fits a shore just reported and then extended. It also fits a survey the maker believed was old. Both readings use the same sentence.

The other reading sets Finé’s outline against Antarctica, and against Antarctica as it would stand if the ice were gone. The likeness, where a reader sees one, appears after the old drawing is turned and scaled to the modern coast. That step is the whole argument. This room does not supply a measured match, bay by bay, and it does not invent one. A heart-shaped grid stretches a coast as it peels a round Earth onto a page. A coast that fits only after that stretch can be an old survey surviving on the sheet. It can also be Tierra del Fuego, plus the balancing continent everyone was already drawing, pulled into a pretty shape.

In 1754 Philippe Buache, geographer to the French king, put a different south on copper. The title of the sheet is a map of the southern lands between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic pole. It carries the year 1754, and it recounts discoveries made in 1739. In January 1739 Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier reported a cape in the fifties south, Cape Circumcision, and a great deal of ice. Buache’s 1754 sheet draws that cape as part of a smaller southern land, with an inset of the cape itself. The larger land, across a frozen sea, takes in New Zealand, which Abel Tasman had met in the 1640s. The sea in the middle is labelled as conjectured. Ice is discussed in the notes, because the voyage had met icebergs.

One reading of Buache says the conjectured sea lines up with the bed. Much of the rock under the West Antarctic ice sits below sea level, so a later bedrock map has water, or low ground, where his sheet has an inland sea. The catch is on the same copper. He tied New Zealand to the polar land, and he drew a reported cape as a continent’s corner. That cape is the island now called Bouvet Island, not the edge of Antarctica. A likeness in the middle of the sheet has to live with coasts that a survey of the real continent does not include. The age of the ice those coasts would have to predate is not re-tried here. It is the subject of Forests and the ice. What a drill has brought back is in Under the ice.