Map-Makers, Having No Certain
Data Concerning This Vast Uncharted Area, Commonly Sprawled Across The
Extremity Of The Southern Hemisphere A Purely Fanciful Outline Of
Imaginary Land.
Terra Australis was the playground of the cartographers
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
They seemed to abhor blank
spaces. Some of the most beautiful of the old maps make the oceans busy
with spouting whales, sportive dolphins, and galleons with bellying
sails; but what to do with the great staring expanse of vacancy at the
bottom their authors did not know. So they drew a crooked line across the
map to represent land, and stuck upon it the label Terra Australis, or
one of the other designations just mentioned. The configuration of the
territory on different maps did not agree, and not one of them signified
a coast with anything like the form of the real Great Southern Continent.
To the period of fancy succeeded that of patchwork. Came the Dutch, often
blown out of their true course from the Cape of Good Hope to the Spice
Islands, and stumbling upon the shores of Western Australia. To some such
accident we probably owe the piece of improved cartography shown upon
Emmerie Mollineux's map, which Hakluyt inserted in some copies of the
second edition of his Principal Navigations, and which Shakespeare is
supposed to have had in mind when, in a merry scene in Twelfth Night, he
made Maria say of Malvolio (3 2 85): "He does smile his face into more
lines than is in the new map with the AUGMENTATION OF THE INDIES."* (*
See Mr. Charles Coote's paper in Transactions of New Shakespeare Society,
1877 to 1879.
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