Ordonce Map of Finé: a fictional continent and / or reality?

2 20. 04. 2023
6th international conference of exopolitics, history and spirituality

In 1531, the French mathematician and cartographer Ordonce Finé (Latin: Orontius Finnaeus) the map of the world, which is interesting by the fact that the southern pole is plotted on it. For some advocates of alternative views of history, it is one of the proofs that Antarctica was known to some of the old civilizations from which the author drew it. It is often supported by the claim that the shape exactly matches Antarctica without ice (see article Map Piri Reise).

At the request of Suenei, I add my comment:

When I looked at the map, it seemed to me that Antarctica was too big there. Therefore, I took the known outline of Antarctica today and inserted it into the map so that it corresponds as closely as possible to the latitude coordinates (see the picture in the introduction). I estimated the longitude (rotation) so that the Antarctic Peninsula lies in relation to South America in a way we know. It is clear from the picture that the size and shape of the continent in the Final Map does not correspond to reality even remotely. In addition, Australia is missing from that map.

What does this mean? Did the author really know the exact location and shape of Antarctica from any ancient secret maps? I don't think so. Of course, the author had old maps from antiquity, the Middle Ages and, in addition, data from sailors of the just beginning modern age. He already knew the discoveries of sailors from the Fernão de Magalhães expedition (a strait in South America, the open ocean roughly on the line from South America to the Philippines), he may have known about the voyages of Willem Janszoone and other Dutch who discovered the north coast of Australia, but what is further south , he probably had to guess.

Maybe he was inspired by Ptolemy, who assumed that the Indian Ocean is similar to the Mediterranean:

Perhaps he also thought of symmetry that the mainland in the south corresponds to the land of the north. He could take this idea from Aristotle, who had been pushing it for two millennia earlier.

In my opinion, the author simply devised the vast continent and had good reasons for both philosophical (symmetry) and historical (the tradition of conceiving unknown parts of the map).

The fact that the mainland is only hypothetical, I also included in the inscription: Terra Australis re inuenta led nondu plene cognita. Southern Countries whose central area is not yet fully known.

Comments:

  1. Terry Pratcchet used the idea of ​​a continent that provides symmetry in his Discworld to describe the "Balancing Continent" of gold (to make it heavy enough).
  2. The vast southern mainland, extending from the Pole to the Tropic of Capricorn, remained on some maps until the first half of the 1th century - despite the fact that Abel Tasman podplul Australia as early as 1642. (For example, Fig. 03 or Fig. 04)
  3. A possible theory that the size of Antarctica could change with the height of the oceans will have to explain the fact that just behind the relatively narrow shelf around Antarctica, the bottom of the Southern Ocean falls to a depth of over 4 kilometers and at that depth directions. (see fig. 08)
  4. The author redrawn his map later into one heart instead of two - see Figure 05.
  5. There are later Mercator maps where the southern mainland is even bigger - see Figure 06 and Figure 07.

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