CHAPTER II 



EXPLORING ANTARCTIC SEAS 

 Period 1739- 1774 



IT is always surprising to a scientist to see how long 

 a geographical fallacy will hold ground, while an 

 indubitable scientific fact of equal interest seems to 

 take much longer to attract public attention. For in- 

 stance, I found in Australia that few folk there know 

 anything about the Sahara except the project to render 

 parts of it fertile by flooding large adjacent areas, or 

 of Central Australia save that since Lake Eyre is below 

 sea level much might result from leading the sea into 

 it. Neither of these projects is in the least advisable — 

 or indeed practicable. So also in the early history of 

 southern exploration there was an old legend of the 

 Greeks which it took three hundred years to nullify. 

 This was to the effect that a huge land must neces- 

 sarily be situated south of the equator, to balance the 

 known world in the northern hemisphere. Ptolemy 

 lent it the weight of his authority in his remarkable 

 maps of the Mediterranean and adjacent regions, and 

 the cartographers of the Middle Ages adopted it very 

 generally in the maps published to the end of the 

 sixteenth century. 



In Figure 2a I have sketched the map as published by 

 Mercator in 1587. We can see at a glance that while 



12 



