Content area
Full Text
Abstract: For more than two centuries Magellanica extended over the northerly expanses of the Terra Australis, enticing geographers, statesmen and explorers to make contact with its imagined antipodean nations: the Periscians, the Southern Brasilians and the inhabitants of the Land of Parrots, Beach and Patalia. The antipodean southern continent described by Franciscus Monachus in 1526 on the basis of discoveries made by Amerigo Vespucci, Pedro Cabral and Ferdinand Magellan inspired generations of subsequent geographers and mapmakers, and eventually led to the establishment of an antipodean colony by Great Britain in New South Wales.
Ferdinand Magellan came no closer to Australia than Mactan, near Cebu in the Philippines, where he died in battle in April 1522, but a glance at the world map of Abraham Ortelius of 1570, Typus Orbis Terrarum [Figure of the Terrestrial Globe] (Fig. 1.), should be sufficient reminder of the relevance of Magellan's expedition to Australia and reason for commemorating it during its quincentennial year with a symposium at the National Library of Australia. Ortelius' world map boldly displayed a huge austral continent, inscribed on the part south of New Guinea: Hanc continentem Australem, nonnulli Magellanicam regionem ab eius inventore nuncupant [This Austral continent is called by some the Magellanic region, after its discoverer]. In the explanatory text on the reverse of his world map, Ortelius said:
Gerard Mercator... in his... Universal Map, divides the Earth into three Continents: the first of which he so calls, is what we say was for the ancients tripartite [Africa, Europe, and Asia], and from whence the human race, according to Holy Writ, took its origin; the second is what we today call America or the West Indies; the third is called Terra Australis, which some call Magellanica, but only a few coastlines of it have yet been revealed.
Ortelius cited the ancient and modern geographers he drew upon to describe the "distribution of the regions and gulfs, mountain ranges and nations of this Earth and Ocean, their customs and other significant matters worthy of note". Among the moderns he named was Franciscus Monachus and his tract on geography in the form of a letter he wrote to his Archbishop.2
FRANCISCUS MONACHUS
Franciscus' letter was published in Antwerp in 1526 by the Archbishop, John Carondelet,...