Lumen 22-4

Continental Conspiracy

Posted – June 26, 2022

Irrelevant tid bit – New Guinea has 1,060 different spoken languages.  Of course, that is an estimate because when most people were asked, “What language do you speak?” they did not understand the question

 

 

While not being occupied with anything important, I observed that six of the names of our seven continents start with the letter “A”.  I wondered about the significance of this since we

Aristotle

have 26 letters in the English alphabet and only the “A” gets this special continental honor.  This has all the trappings of a Continental Conspiracy, which prompted me to investigate this affront to common sense.

 

Australia and Antarctica - These two continents have complicated, intertwining naming histories.  Much of the complication comes from the now strange Medieval notion that the north and south portions of our planet should have balanced sizes of their land areas.  Following this idea, because Eurasia is so large, there must be a large landmass in the southern hemisphere.  This is apparent, and sensible, because certainly an unbalanced globe would topple out of control as it orbits the Sun… would it not?

 

Australia - The name Australia is derived from the Latin australis, meaning "southern", and specifically from the hypothetical Terra Australis, the imagined (but undiscovered) land mass that was thought in pre-modern geography to surround the south pole.  The name has been applied to two continents; originally, it was applied to the south polar continent, now known as Anarctica, and only later to what is now known as Australia.

 

As they did in so many other things, European mapmakers followed Aristotle’s ancient writings: the Arktos, or the northern lands, were undoubtedly counterbalanced by the Anti-Arktos.  Greco-Roman astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, also wrote of a Southern Continent linking India and Africa, but declared it was beyond a hot and dry desert, and inhabited by monsters.  He labelled it the Unknown Southern Land – later Latinized as “Terra Australis Incognita”.

 

Although not based on any actual surveying of such a landmass but rather on the hypothesis that continents in the northern hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south, Terra Australis appeared on maps complete with descriptions that must have been pulled from the nether world.

 

The first depiction of Terra Australis on a globe was probably on Johannes Schöner's lost 1523 globe of the world where he called the landmass Brasilia Australis, and in his 1533 tract, Opusculum geographicum, gave this wild fictional description:

 

            Brasilia Australis is an immense region toward Antarcticum, newly discovered but not             yet fully surveyed, which extends as far as Melacha and somewhat beyond. The                         inhabitants of this region lead good, honest lives and are not Anthropophagi                            [cannibals] like other barbarian nations; they have no letters, nor do they have kings,                but they venerate their elders and offer them obedience; they give the name Thomas to             their children [after St Thomas the Apostle]; close to this region lies the great island of             Zanzibar at 102.00 degrees and 27.30 degrees South.

 

The most influential maps showing the Southern Continent were those of the cartographers Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, who were contemporaries and friends in late 1500’s Belgium. Mercator calculated the two-dimensional map projection of a spherical globe that is used overwhelmingly today and published it in a world map designed for practical navigation.  A detailed depiction of a Great Southern Continent is included, coming close to the tip of South America at the Straits of Magellan and labelled as Tierra del Fuego.  He adds a Latin inscription for the Southern Continent, “It is certain that there is a land here, but its size and the limits of its boundaries are uncertain.”

 

Mercator believed in the existence of a large southern continent on the basis of the then common cosmographic reasoning.  Though the Austral continent still lay hidden and unknown, he believed it could be "demonstrated and proved by solid reasons and arguments to yield in its geometric proportions, size and weight, and importance to neither of the other two, nor possibly to be lesser or smaller, otherwise the constitution of the world could not hold together at its centre".

 

The Flemish geographer and cartographer, Cornelius Wytfliet, wrote (while under the influence of ??) in his 1597 book, Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum:

 

            The terra Australis is therefore the southernmost of all other lands, directly beneath the             antarctic circle; extending beyond the tropic of Capricorn to the West, it ends almost at             the equator itself, and separated by a narrow strait lies on the East opposite to New                    Guinea, only known so far by a few shores because after one voyage and another that             route has been given up and unless sailors are forced and driven by stress of winds it is             seldom visited.  The terra Australis begins at two or three degrees below the equator                and it is said by some to be of such magnitude that if at any time it is fully discovered                they think it will be the fifth part of the world.

 

In 1602 China, an Italian missionary, Matteo Ricci, worked with the Wanli Emperor to create, “The Map of the World’s Myriad Countries”.  A southern continent was clearly shown, occupying as much of the Earth’s surface as the known continents of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas combined.

 

Alexander Dalrymple, the Examiner of Sea Journals (What a title, see Lumen 21-9) for the English East India Company, based on captured Spanish documents published the Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean in 1770–1771.   His is another wild, mystical description of a place no European had ever been to:

 

            The number of inhabitants in the Southern Continent is probably more than 50                        millions, considering the extent, from the eastern part discovered by Juan Fernandez,                to the western coast seen by Tasman, is about 100 deg. of longitude, which in the                    latitude of 40 deg. amounts to 4596 geographic, or 5323 stature miles.  This is a greater             extent than the whole civilized part of Asia, from Turkey to the eastern extremity of                China.  There is at present no trade from Europe thither, though the scraps from this                 table would be sufficient to maintain the power, dominion, and sovereignty of Britain,              by employing all its manufacturers and ships.  Whoever considers the Peruvian                         empire, where arts and industry flourished under one of the wisest systems of                             government, which was founded by a stranger, must have very sanguine expectations             of the southern continent, from whence it is more than probable Mango Capac, the first             Inca, was derived, and must be convinced that the country, from whence Mango Capac             introduced the comforts of civilized life, cannot fail of amply rewarding the fortunate                people who shall bestow letters instead of quippos (quipus), and iron in place of more             awkward substitutes.

 

Dalrymple's claim of the existence of an unknown enormous continent aroused widespread interest and prompted the British government in 1769 to order James Cook to seek out the Southern Continent to the South and West of Tahiti.  In regard to the quest for the Southern Continent, Cook wrote in his journal on March 31, 1770 that the voyage "must be allowed to have set aside the most, if not all, the Arguments and proofs that have been advanced by different Authors to prove that there must be a Southern Continent…"

 

Over the centuries the idea of Terra Australis gradually lost its hold as explorers looked and looked, but could not find it!  A lot of wasted effort just to follow an idea of Aristotle. Scholars were infatuated by anything Aristotle wrote: he was the Greek god of ideas.  (Were there no thinkers in Europe between Aristotle and the Renaissance?)  Finally, the scholars concluded that the Terra Australis as hypothesized by Aristotle and Ptolemy did not exist.

 

Now back to the name thing.  The Dutch were the first Europeans to lay claim to what they called New Holland, now modern Australia, but they did not follow their claim with any settlements or developments.  Consequently, the British moved in and took over.  After British colonization, the name New Holland was retained for several decades and the south polar continent continued to be called Terra Australis, sometimes shortened to Australia.  In the early 19th century, the colonial authorities in Sydney rejected the Dutch name of New Holland for their continent.  But, instead of inventing a new name to replace it, they took the name Australia from the south polar continent, leaving it nameless for some eighty years.  During that period, geographers had to make do with clumsy phrases such as "the Antarctic Continent".  

 

Antarctica - Poor Antarctica all those years without an identity.

 

The name Arctic comes from the Greek word Arktos, which means bear.  The bears in

question are not polar, but celestial: the Great Bear and the Little Bear, constellations visible only in the Northern Hemisphere.  Antarctica is thus the opposite of “the land of the bear” and is situated on the other side of the planet.  Antarctica was finally sighted in the hypothetical area of Terra Australis in 1820 and the name “Antarctica” was adopted about 1890. 

 

Africa – Barely not connected to Europe at Gibraltar and barely connected to Asia at the Isthmus of Suez, Africa is sometimes called the Dark Continent.  I interpret this to mean that we do not know much about the continent and not as a racial designation.  The phrase itself was actually popularized by the British explorer Sir Henry M. Stanley (of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame), with an eye to boosting sales of his accounts "Through the Dark Continent," and another, "In Darkest Africa."

 

However, race does have a place in this myth, but it is not about skin color. The myth of the Dark Continent referred to the savagery that Europeans said was endemic to Africa, and even the idea that its lands were unknown came from erasing centuries of pre-colonial history, contact, and travel across Africa.

 

One thing we do not know about Africa is how it got that name.  While many theories have been proposed, the most likely is the Roman Theory.  The word "Africa" came from the Romans, who named the land they discovered on the opposite side of the Mediterranean after a Berber tribe living in the Carthage area (now modern day Tunisia).  Different sources give different versions of the tribe's name, but the most popular is Afri.  It is thought that the Romans called the region Afri-terra, meaning "the land of the Afri."  Later, this could have become contracted to form the single word "Africa."

 

North America and South America – America is the operative continental word, the “north” and “south” are subdivisions, so “A” continents are still the meaningful proposition.

 

The naming of the Americas, or America, occurred shortly after Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Americas in 1492.  It is generally accepted that the name derives from Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer, who explored the “new” continents in the following years.  However, some have suggested other explanations, including being named after a mountain range in Nicaragua.

 

The earliest known use of the name America dates to 1507, when it was applied to what is now known as South America.  It appears on a small globe map, together with the largest wall map made to date, both created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller; these were the first maps to show the Americas as a land mass separate from Asia.  An accompanying book, Cosmographiae Introductio, states, "I do not see what right any one would have to object to calling this part [that is, the South American mainland], after Americus who discovered it and who is a man of intelligence,  Amerigen, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women". 

 

Between 1497 and 1504, Vespucci participated in at least two voyages of the Age of Discovery, first on behalf of Spain (1499–1500) and then for Portugal (1501–1502).  In 1503

and 1505, two booklets were published under his name, containing colorful descriptions of these explorations and other alleged voyages.  Both publications were extremely popular and widely read across much of Europe.  Although historians still dispute the authorship and veracity of these accounts, at the time they were instrumental in raising awareness of the new discoveries and enhancing the reputation of Vespucci as an explorer and navigator.

 

Spain officially refused to accept the name America for two centuries, saying that Columbus should get credit, and Waldseemüller's later maps did not include it; however, usage was established when Gerardus Mercator applied the name to the entire New World in his 1538 world map.

 

Another idea is that America is named after a Nicaraguan mountain range.  In 1874, Thomas Belt proposed that the name derives from the Amerrisque Mountains of present-day Nicaragua.  In 1875, Jules Marcou suggested a derivation from indigenous American languages where "Amerrique" originally named the prominent mountain range.

 

In this view, native speakers shared this indigenous word with Columbus and members of his crew, and Columbus made landfall in the vicinity of these mountains on his fourth voyage.  The name America then spread via oral means throughout Europe relatively quickly even reaching the cartographer Waldseemüller who was  preparing a map of newly reported lands for publication in 1507. 

 

Asia - The word Asia originated from the ancient Greek word Ἀσία, first attributed to Herodotus (about 440 BCE) in reference to Anatolia or to the Persian Empire, in contrast to Greece and Egypt.  It originally was just a name for the east bank of the Aegean Sea, an area known to the Hittites as Assuwa.  In early Classical times, the Greeks started using the term "Asia" to refer to the whole region known today as Anatolia (the peninsula which forms the Asian portion of present-day Turkey).  The Roman Empire referred to the entire Lydian region of what is now northwestern Turkey as the province of Asia.  Eventually, however, the name had been stretched progressively further east, until it came to encompass the much larger land area with which we associate it today, while the Anatolian Peninsula started being called "Asia Minor" or "The Lesser Asia" instead.

 

Europe – Europe is the odd man out, no initial letter “A”.  First let’s recognize that geographically Europe is not a continent, just part of Asia.  I suspect it is only considered to be

a continent because Europeans were making the maps.  When this is entered into the equations, all of the continents have an “A’ as their first letter.

 

The name Europe likely comes from the Latin “Europa”, which in turn derives from the Greek Εὐρώπη.   In Greek mythology, Europa was the beautiful daughter of a Phoenician king named Agenor or Phoenix.  When Zeus saw her, he transformed himself into a bull and approached her playing friends.  She climbed onto the bull's back and it swam off to Crete, where she had three sons with it. 

 

Conclusion – After this careful consideration, I am forced to conclude that the Continental Conspiracy is a clever hoax that the mapmakers have purported for their self-glorification.  Initial letter “A” for all the continents is just an alphabetic anomaly or possible an alphabetic algorithm.  (OK, I admit I don’t know what that means.)

 

I want to thank my California brother for editing and improving this Lumen.