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Is Terra Australis a real land mass?
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Terra Australis (Latin: ' Southern Land ') was a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Its existence was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the Southern ...
At the time, this portion of the globe was still largely mysterious to Europeans, but they had an unshakeable belief that there must be a large land mass there – pre-emptively named Terra...
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In 1768, Captain James Cook set out on a voyage from England to the South Pacific Ocean, a joint initiative between the Admiralty and the Royal Society, which was commissioned by King George III. Cook and his men travelled on the HMS Endeavourfrom 1768 to 1771. The official reason for the voyage was to observe the transit of Venus in 1769 from Tahi...
In this lesson, students examine a series of extracts from James Cook’s journal from 1769-1771 along with a couple of maps and secret instructions for Cook from the Admiralty. The first source that students examine are extracts from a document of secret instructions to Cook from the British government, to think about why he was given this secret mi...
This lesson can be used as part of wider discussion relating to British colonial history in Australia and New Zealand. What was the impact of Cook’s voyage for Indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand in terms of the following? 1. Dispossession and population decline (in Australia and New Zealand) 2. Issues around treaties (lack of treaties ...
Teachers could use selected sources, for example the maps or shortened versions of the extracts from the lesson, to support an inquiry into Captain Cook supported by the simplified transcripts for ‘Significant People’.
Ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901. Teachers could use selected sources, for example the maps or shortened versions of the extracts from the lesson, to support an inquiry into Captain Cook supported by the simplified transcripts.
Edexcel GCE History: Britain: losing and gaining an empire, 1763–1914: the work of exploration and mapping (key development: Captain Cook’s exploration of the South Seas, 1768-71).
Although Indigenous Australians had lived here for thousands of years, for the Europeans it was ‘Terra Australis Incognita’, the great unknown land. Early maps of the world showed a single land mass at the bottom of the world to balance, as one would with a set of scales, the land masses of the northern hemisphere.
Before this Europeans had long believed there was a land mass in the southern hemisphere which they called Terra Australia Incognita, meaning Unknown South Land. After Janszoon many Dutch explorers sailed along the northern, western and southern coastline.
An early seventeenth-century view of the undiscovered southern continent. With little or no evidence to confirm its existence, a vast southern continent (Terra Australis, “land of the south”) still figured prominently on European maps from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.
Quick Reference. The name given to the great and unknown southern continent required by the classical Greek geographers, who knew that the earth was spherical, to balance the land mass which was known to exist north of the equator.
