It was the Greeks who 'invented' Antarctica, thereby enabling it to be discovered almost 2,000 years later. Everything in the world, so taught the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) has somewhere its equivalent, as if ordained by a law of symmetry. As there was in the north of their imaginary sphere-shaped world, under the starry picture of the Bear (Gr. arktos), a cold zone, the Arctic, there must likewise be a correspondingly cold zone on the southern half of the sphere. The ancient geographers took up the model and developed five climatic zones. Cold ones in the north and south, adjacent to that temperate zones, which again were separated from one another by a hot one. But only the temperate latitudes were habitable. In the northern hemisphere this meant the area between the Baltic Sea in the north and the Sahara Desert in the south.
Claudius Ptolemaeus (c. 100-161), the most famous exponent of ancient geography, added two substantial amendments to this model. In his writings he maintained that the southern latitudes would be fruitful and richly populated, but nevertheless separated from the northern hemisphere by a hot girdle of fire. Both additions increased the ambition to search for the unknown southland: the key to the riches was courage.
In the Christian Middle Ages this blueprint was not developed further. Mostly, people believed that the world was a flat disc. Theologically, the existence of people in the inaccessible hemisphere was also not justified, for how could these have descended from Adam and Eve and thus be God's creation.
Not until the fifteenth century, when the age of discovery dawned, did men reconsider Ptolemaeus. The Portuguese voyagers did not only want to find India, as they slowly groped their way southwards down along the African coast, but also the 'Terra Australis Incognita', the unknown southland.
To begin with everything seemed to agree with Ptolemaeus. The tropical heat equated well with his girdle of fire. But Africa was not a new continent separated from the northern hemisphere. Vasco da Gama proved that as he sailed round the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and actually found the sea route to India.
Interest now turned to South America, whose eastern coast the Spanish explored. In 1519 Magellan discovered the strait later named after him, the through way to the Pacific, and reported that he had sighted mountains with many fires in an unknown land in the south, which he named Tierra del Fuego. Was this the northern tip of the undiscovered Terra Australis? At about the same time the French seafarer Paulmyer de Gonneville returned to the little northern French harbour Honfleur. He reported miraculous things. True stories? On the voyage to America he had been driven ever further southwards by a mighty storm. At last he had reached the coast of an unknown land. For him this was without doubt the sought-after Terra Australis. For six months he had dwelt in this country. Loudly he proclaimed he had found Eden, a paradise, in which people lived in contentment and did not need to work. As proof he produced furs of unknown type, pigments and plumes. The effect of his report was enormous. It lasted for over two centuries. The hope of material gain, of gold, drove on ever more new expeditions. Amundsen expresses this frankly, almost cynically, when he says, 'Power hungry rulers hoped to enlarge their possessions. Men, who struggled for fortune, dreamed of fantastic quantities of the alluring metal.' Time and again French expeditions attempted to verify Gonneville's report. In vain.
Finally, the English queen Elizabeth I was induced to send her admiral Sir Francis Drake on the search. Drake reached Tierra del Fuego, set course southwards and ascertained that, south of Cape Horn, Atlantic and Pacific flowed into one another. Here too Terra Australis was not to be found.
