Although the explorations of the Renaissance launched a new paradigm in the realm of geographical representations, sanctioning the notion of a cartography that increasingly relied on empirical verification and accurate measurements, the mappae mundi of early modernity perpetuated the “enchanted thinking” of the Middle Ages by positing the existence of a fantastic southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita. On much acclaimed world maps such as those of Ortelius (1570) or Gerardus and Rumold Mercator (1587), but also in the extraordinary or utopian voyages of early modernity (Joseph Hall, Gabriel de Foigny, Denis Veiras, etc.), the hypothetical continent occupied almost all the southern hemisphere, from the South Pole up to the level of Australia.

According to our analysis, there were two theoretical arguments inherited from ancient and medieval cartography that generated the chimera of Terra Australis Incognita: the theory of the antipodes, which stated that a hypothetical continent was located in the southern hemisphere, symmetrically positioned in relation to the northern oecumene, and the theory of isthmuses, which, based on the idea that the mass of earth was dominant in the world, claimed that the Indian Ocean was surrounded by a strip of land uniting Africa and Asia.

When Magellan discovered, during the first circumnavigation of the world, the strait which bears his name, he assumed that the islands to the left, towards the pole, were the protuberances of another continent, which the Renaissance geographers subsequently named Terra Australe Magallanica, Brasilia Regio, Brasilia inferior, Papagalli Terra, etc. Based on the two geographical theories of the southern antipodes and of Ptolemy’s strip of land, this hypothetical land became “Terra Australis recenter inventa, sed nondum plene cognita”, as geographer Oronce Finé put it (1534).