CartoCuriosity - Terre Australis, the Great Southern Continent

Centuries before Young John Gore, Captain James Cook’s cabin boy on his second voyage, supposedly climbed the mast and became the first to glimpse Antarctica, mapmakers in Europe were already charting a vast southern continent. But how did they imagine a land no one had seen — and what exactly were they mapping? This episode explores how early European cartographers, drawing on the writings of classical antiquity, constructed and populated the mythic realm of Terra Australis Incognita - a continent born not from discovery, but from belief, speculation, and imagination.

Kevin J. Brown, Cory Choy, Tom Fama, Christian Cuciniello