Antarctica, Southern Waters

Antique Maps of Antarctica and the Southern Waters

This category brings together original antique maps of Antarctica and the Southern Waters — the vast and largely unexplored oceanic region of the high southern latitudes that occupied the geographic imagination of European cartographers and explorers from the earliest printed maps of the 16th century through to the age of systematic Antarctic exploration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These works document the progressive and often highly uncertain geographic understanding of the southern extremities of the globe, from the speculative Terra Australis Incognita of early cartographic theory through to the first accurate delineations of the Antarctic continent.

The concept of a vast southern continent — the Terra Australis Incognita, or Unknown Southern Land — was among the most persistent and consequential hypotheses in the history of European geographic thought. Ancient geographers had proposed the existence of a great southern landmass to balance the weight of the known continents in the northern hemisphere, and this theoretical framework persisted through the medieval period and into the age of print, generating maps that depicted a speculative Antarctic continent of enormous extent across the bottom of the known world. The great cartographers of the 16th and 17th centuries — Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius and their successors — incorporated this theoretical southern continent into their world maps, producing images that were visually compelling even when geographically speculative.

The progressive exploration of the southern hemisphere through the 17th and 18th centuries gradually eroded the theoretical southern continent without immediately replacing it with accurate knowledge of what lay at the bottom of the world. Cook’s second voyage of 1772-75 penetrated further south than any previous expedition, demonstrating the absence of habitable land in the accessible southern latitudes without definitively resolving the question of what lay beyond the ice. The first confirmed sightings of the Antarctic continent in 1820 began a new era of exploration and cartographic documentation that continued through the heroic age of Antarctic discovery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Antique maps of Antarctica and the Southern Waters are collected for their documentation of one of the great geographic puzzles of European cartographic history, their connection to the tradition of polar exploration and the extraordinary visual character of maps depicting a region defined more by imagination than by observation across much of the period they record.