European Perceptions of Terra Australis

Alfred Hiatt, Christopher Wortham, Anne M. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409426059
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317139447
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Terra Australis - the southern land - was one of the most widespread concepts in European geography from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, although the notion of a land mass in the southern seas had been prevalent since classical antiquity. Despite this fact, there has been relatively little sustained scholarly work on European concepts of Terra Australis or the intellectual background to European voyages of discovery and exploration to Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through interdisciplinary scholarly contributions, ranging across history, the visual arts, literature and popular culture, this volume considers the continuities and discontinuities between the imagined space of Terra Australis and its subsequent manifestation. It will shed new light on familiar texts, people and events - such as the Dutch and French explorations of Australia, the Batavia shipwreck and the Baudin expedition - by setting them in unexpected contexts and alongside unfamiliar texts and people. The book will be of interest to, among others, intellectual and cultural historians, literary scholars, historians of cartography, the visual arts, women's and post-colonial studies.

1 Perceptions

Anne M. Scott

DOI: 10.4324/9781315580968-1

To invite a group of scholars from different disciplines to write about ‘perceptions’ of Terra Australis is to give them an opportunity to define the intellectual responses to Terra Australis that have been made across centuries of thought and exploration, to record the personal perceptions of cartographers, geographers, explorers and travellers, and to contextualize these perceptions in their historical moment and cultural environment. The chapters in this collection bring a new dimension to the already wide field of publications dealing with cartography, exploration and the history of discovery in the southern land, Terra Australis. ¹

¹ The wealth of literature is to be found referenced in the bibliography to this volume. Particular mention must be made of two publications which were not available when the chapters in this volume were being written. The first is Douglas Mark Goldie, The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People and Voices (New York, 2010). The second is Avan Judd Stallard, ‘Origins of the Idea of the Antipodes: Errors, Assumptions, and a Bare Few Facts’, Terrae Incognitae, 42 (2010): 34–52.

The term ‘perception’ is richly evocative, for perception is essentially an individual activity. Driven by the mind, it is nourished through the senses, and given expression in as many ways as there are people. To perceive engages the individual in some form of judgement about what is perceived, so a perception becomes an assessment, an appraisal – always a personal activity and therefore, by definition, subjective. But, in being subjective, perceptions transmitted to others become immensely rich, evoking, as they do, the wealth of experience, knowledge and understanding that inform the person making the ‘perception’. This quickly becomes apparent in reading definitions of the term. Isaac Watts says: ‘Perception is that Act of the Mind (or as some Philosophers call it, rather a Passion or Impression) whereby the Mind becomes conscious of any Thing, as when I feel Hunger, Thirst, or Cold, or Heat; when I see a Horse, a Tree, or a Man; when I hear a human Voice, or Thunder’ (Logick I. i, 1725). In this definition, perception is uniquely individual. Seen in this light, the term has proved to be an immensely stimulating one around which to construct an essay collection. It allows for two kinds of individual perception – that of the scholarly author, and that of the historical subject on which the scholar has conducted research. Non-prescriptive, the term also allows for a truly interdisciplinary approach to the topic, for perceptions can be expressed through works of imaginative art and literature, works of scientific observation, personal records and even through national policy-making, all of which present themselves as fruitful fields of scholarly enquiry.

The second major element of the project’s title, Terra Australis, is equally evocative. Never confined to the specific continental landmass that is now known as Australia, the term originates in the speculative thought of antiquity about the material world and man’s geographical place in it. To trace the use of the term Terra Australis through the perceptions of philosophers, poets, artists, writers, geographers, cartographers, explorers, scientists and circumnavigators is to gain insights into a wide variety of cultural and historical experience. The chapters of this volume collectively explore such insights. The epithet ‘European’ is added to the title in acknowledgement of the historical reality that the concept expressed by the two words Terra Australis is essentially European. As will become evident, the south was defined by the ancients in terms of the then known European world, and in the course of the chapters, searching questions are asked about the growing understanding over the centuries in Europe of what might be a Terra Australis, what might be the nature of its peoples, and what might be the responsibility of Europeans towards those peoples.

The unique contribution of this volume is to unite two areas that have traditionally remained separate in scholarly discussions: Terra Australis as an intellectual concept, and the early exploration and conceptualization of Australia. There has been relatively little sustained scholarly work done on the concept of Terra Australis itself, despite the fact that it was one of the most widespread concepts in European geography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time the intellectual background to European voyages of discovery and exploration also remains understudied. It is this intellectual background that acquires definition through the different perspectives that emerge from the chapters in the volume.

The second and the final chapters demonstrate the essential European quality of the term Terra Australis. Alfred Hiatt explains how the classical and medieval ideas of the antipodes exerted an influence, not only upon the imagination of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century explorers, cartographers and writers, but upon decisions they and their paymasters took, and attitudes they formed towards new lands and peoples. Drawing on a variety of sources, cartographic and literary, medieval and early modern, Hiatt suggests that the appeal of Terra Australis lay in its capacity to act both as a mirror and as an outlet for political and cultural ambitions, for dreams of reform – and for mockery of self and others.

Leigh Penman takes the event of the Batavia shipwreck, and traces its treatment in fiction and newspaper reportage as providing a vehicle for Europeans’ fear of the land – Western Australia – and its indigenous inhabitants. The reactions described are those of European visitors, the shipwrecked Dutch and, three centuries after the event, Australians of European descent. In the 1890s, the Batavia wreck became a rallying point for nationalist sentiment in the lead-up to Federation. In the years following the Second World War, the search for the physical remains of the Batavia wreck was employed as something of a metaphor for the nation’s attempt to find its place in the new post-war international scene. And although, during the bicentennial years and afterward, the wreck and its aftermath became the basis for projections of a multicultural reading of Australia’s past, and a potential rallying point for future efforts towards indigenous reconciliation, the European nature of the Batavia icon was fundamental to all interpretations.

The earliest perceptions explored in this volume are those of the intellectual world of imperial Rome and of Hellenistic philosophy and science. The south remained a source of both mystery and speculation to Roman and Greek geographers, philosophers, poets and historians. Was it a space for similarity or antithesis to the north, or for something between the two? In his contribution, Bill Leadbetter demonstrates how much the theorists of antiquity built their concepts of the makeup of the globe on perceptions of symmetry ‘used to generate fictive worlds that existed almost parallel to the empirical world of experience’. These perceptions led some to develop the zone theory that placed the southern lands in an inaccessible place of the utmost heat, an idea that, as Christopher Wortham demonstrates, exerted long-standing cultural influence on later thinkers and writers. The Romans and Greeks were not confined to intellectual and theoretical views of geography; actual exploration took place by land and sea, which demonstrated the reality of land much further south than had been imagined. Yet while authors like Pomponius Mela, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and the third century AD novelist Heliodorus all knew something of the mysterious African south, they were more inclined to fantasize about it than describe it; and the discoveries of the Alexandrian school of pragmatic geographers were overlooked by Roman intellectuals who ‘either missed this work or preferred the versions of Virgil and Cicero’ (Leadbetter). This left the way open for medieval and early modern perpetuation of a mythology of the southern lands and southern peoples. Although the experience of voyagers contradicted some of these myths, such as that which held that the antipodeans lived in a world upside down (Hiatt), nevertheless, the thought processes that had peopled the southern lands with monsters and with creatures beyond salvation lived on in the fear and suspicion with which the peoples of the southern lands were regarded (Wortham, Penman, Hiatt, McCarthy).

Wortham traces the way seemingly elemental fear of peoples from the south, expressed tragically in Shakespeare’s Othello, are based on a deep-rooted perception of the composition of the world that had been portrayed since early medieval times in the mappaemundi, and continued to be developed in early modern cartography. Wortham’s analysis of the mappaemundi in conjunction with his reading of Shakespeare’s Othello makes a convincing case for the way medieval and early modern writers and thinkers equated the lands of the south with areas where excess and unbridled immorality are the norm. Relating his thoughts to the zone theory described by Leadbetter, in which the torrid zone south of Europe is presented as uninhabitable by human beings, Wortham finds further evidence to support medieval and early modern perceptions of the south as unfit for the civilized and inhabited by physically and morally monstrous people.

Moving from the world of literature to that of personal observation, Michael McCarthy further develops the idea that perceptions are influenced by culture. He compares the unpublished version of Dampier’s journals with that published by James Knapton, and concludes that the much-quoted account of Indigenous Australians as ‘the miserablest people in the world’, ² is at odds with the more neutral words originally penned by Dampier in his unpublished journal. It would appear that the publisher’s entrenched European perceptions that the peoples of the southern lands must be less human than Europeans flatly contradicted the more humane and tolerant account penned by the circumnavigator himself. McCarthy adduces other instances to support his thesis that field drafts and accounts prepared solely for personal reasons and for limited private readership convey perceptions that can often be at variance with those eventually brought to public view. McCarthy’s study of material written by Rose and Louis de Freycinet as well as by Dampier finds evidence of subsequent rewriting and significant alteration of material, according to the perceptions of those who had a particular agenda to promote.

² Quoted in this volume by Hiatt and Wortham, as well by McCarthy.

Approaching their subject through the lens of ‘perceptions’, several authors find remarkable evidence of underlying agendas that have come to light in their researches into voyages of exploration and enlightenment. Exploration has frequently been treated as a form of curiosity-driven research; yet national rivalries, ambitions of empire, the prospect of self-aggrandizement, in addition to what might appear more laudable ambitions of furthering scientific and geographical knowledge, are revealed in the chapters that discuss the perceptions of explorers and travellers. Perhaps the most startling of these agendas is exposed in John West-Sooby and Jean Fornasiero’s chapter which discusses the systematic rewriting of the records and emendation of nomenclature on the maps produced as a result of the Baudin expedition. Baudin’s hydrographers produced detailed maps of the south and west coasts, where they also made a number of important discoveries. It is no surprise to note, then, that this voyage contributed significantly to the list of French names that dot the coasts of modern Australia – names that serve as a reminder of the contribution made by a succession of French mariners to the charting of Terra Australis. In the case of the Baudin expedition, however, the process of conferring names on places visited and discovered was complicated by a variety of factors, mostly political in nature. This chapter offers a striking analysis of the differences between the naming practices of Baudin and those of Freycinet and Péron, highlighting two quite different approaches and ultimately two very different perceptions of Terra Australis.

The Gregory Expedition of 1855–57 was motivated by simpler political intentions. Norman Etherington emphasizes the economic and strategic imperatives that drove the mid-Victorian exploration of Northern Australia by recalling the imperial context of the Gregory expedition – the last major expedition funded by the British Parliament. Even though the exploration of the coasts and interior of Australia was an extremely expensive business, the reasons that British and colonial governments elected to spend vast sums have been relatively neglected in Australian annals. Patrick White’s Voss carries the notion of discovery without gain to its logical conclusion – portraying the expedition leader as so supremely indifferent to practical considerations that he merely shrugs his shoulders when his surveying instruments are lost. Etherington’s study of the imperial context of nineteenth-century exploration reveals a less heroic, more hard-headed, economically driven approach.

While the Dampier, Freycinet, Baudin and Gregory expeditions all took place within the territory that had come to be designated as Terra Australis, maps and memoirs have proved powerful theoretical tools for promoting particular perceptions, as the chapters by Margaret Sankey, W.A.R. Richardson, Mercedes Camino and Katrina O’Loughlin demonstrate. Sankey recounts the strong case built upon conjecture and theory by the Abbé Paulmier who hoped that Pope Alexander VII would grant a mission to the Terres Australes in order to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. Paulmier never achieved this ambition, although, in order to persuade the pope that the Terres Australes did in fact exist, he had summarized and analysed the writings of previous European authors who had written on Terra Australis, as well as exploring a wide variety of cartographic representations. In querying why Paulmier never achieved his ambition, Sankey calls into question the reliability of his interpretation of the sources. Richardson, too, takes up and deals definitively with perceptions based on erroneous interpretations of cartographic features. He argues against some scholars who, rather than regarding the identity of Jave la Grande as a hypothesis to be tested, accept it as true first, and then try to prove it. His chapter, relying primarily on the place-name evidence, shows that Jave la Grande is not a landmass at all, but consists of Java and Sumbawa, to which were attached two very early, differently scaled, Portuguese sketch charts of southwest Java, and southern Vietnam, together with its offshore islands. The French, not surprisingly unable to identify them from their inscriptions and outlines, tentatively sited them as part of Terra Australis Incognita.

Mercedes Camino brings new material to bear on the influential reporting of Spanish explorations in the Pacific. The term Spanish Pacific has been mostly used to refer to the Philippines, which are often treated as an outpost of the Americas, but within this context, much interesting graphic and visual material produced during the early modern Spanish voyages to the Pacific remains unknown. Camino’s chapter analyses the perceptions of Pedro Fernández de Quirós who represented the Pacific as a Terrestrial Paradise, using terms which feminize the land, as well as the peoples encountered. The influence of this perception is recognizable in subsequent and little known prints and bird’s-eye views produced during seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish voyages to the Pacific which catalogue the shift from a concept of discovery that rested largely on the enactment of rituals to an enlightened belief based on representation and classification of geographical and ethnographic data. Nevertheless, both the earlier and later interpretations gendered the relative positions between the voyagers and the indigenous land and peoples subject(ed) by a masculine eye/I.

O’Loughlin writes on what is perhaps the most personal of all the records explored in this volume. Like Rose de Freycinet, but a few years before her in 1791, Mary Ann Parker joined her husband Captain John Parker on a voyage to the fledgling colony at Port Jackson. The Gorgon, under Parker’s command, accompanied the transport vessels of the Third Fleet, carrying critical supplies and manpower for the fragile community: her passengers included Philip Gidley King, the new Governor of Norfolk Island, and a fresh corps of soldiers for the convict settlement. On her return to England, the recently-widowed Parker published her small travel book by subscription, reluctantly, and ‘solely for the benefit of her little flock’. Her tentative and rather self-deprecating Voyage provided not only the first account of the colony written by a woman, but the first published impressions of Port Jackson by a private individual.

O’Loughlin’s chapter explores Parker’s perceptions of the landscape and indigenous peoples of Terra Australis in the contexts of contemporary discourses of landscape aesthetics, and heated debates about the politics of slavery and sovereignty across Europe and her colonies. In particular, it explores the way Parker’s narrative reflects the role of writing and travel in articulating forms of subjectivity and self-representation for women and Britons in the late modern period. She deliberately recasts the travel narrative as an alternative technology of historical cartography: the Voyage constitutes a powerful form of cultural description which is oriented toward the fertile location Terra Australis, but perhaps more reliably maps late eighteenth-century British preoccupations and subjectivities.

Conclusion

This volume makes a new contribution to our understanding of the concept Terra Australis. Because the project is interdisciplinary, it brings together the work of experts in a variety of fields, and provides a context in which each chapter can explore ‘perceptions’ in a way appropriate both to the discipline and to the subject of the research. The chapters bring new evidence to bear on the reactions of early travellers to what they found, and provide thought-provoking explanations for the intellectual basis of what was written, or interpreted in maps and images. The explorers of many nations find their way into the chapters: Portuguese, Dutch, French and British; and Indigenous Australians have a strong, if often incomprehensible, presence. But the book attempts neither to give a chronological account, nor to cover all the facets of early exploration of Terra Australis. Acknowledging its debt to existing scholarship, the volume sheds new light on familiar texts, personages and events by setting them alongside unexpected contexts and unfamiliar texts and people (the Abbé Jean Paulmier, Rose de Freycinet, Mary An...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• European Perceptions of Terra Australis
• European Perceptions of Terra Australis
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Perceptions
• 2 Terra Australis and the Idea of the Antipodes
• 3 The Roman South
• 4 Meanings of the South: From the Mappaemundi to Shakespeare’s Othello
• 5 Terra Australis, Jave la Grande and Australia Identity Problems and Fiction
• 6 Mapping Terra Australis in the French Seventeenth Century: The Mémoires of the Abbé Jean Paulmier
• 7 Ceremonial Encounters: Spanish Perceptions of the South Pacific, 1567–1794
• 8 Naming and Shaming: The Baudin Expedition and the Politics of Nomenclature in the Terres Australes
• 9 Who Do You Trust? Discrepancies Between the ‘Official and Unofficial' Sources Recording Explorers’ Perceptions of Places and Their People
• 10 ‘My Own Slender Remarks’: Global Networks of Slavery and Sociability in Mary Ann Parker’s Voyage to New South Wales (1795)
• 11 Recovering the Imperial Context of the Mid-Victorian Exploration of Northern Australia, 1855–57
• 12 The Wicked and the Fair: Changing Perceptions of Terra Australis through the Prism of the Batavia Shipwreck (1629)
• Bibliography
• Index