1 La Terre Australe commue, a romance written by Gabriel de
Foigny (pseud. J. Sadeur), describing the stay of Sadeur on
the southern continent for more than thirty-five years, The
original edition, made in Geneva in 1676, is said to contain
"many impious and licentious passages which were omitted in
the later editions." Sabin (xviii. 220) gives a list of
editions, the first English translation appearing in 1693.
It is possible that the author owed the idea of his work to
Neville's pamphlet.
In most of the older surveys of the known world America counts as the fourth part, naturally coming after Europe, Asia, and Africa. Even that arrangement was not generally accepted. Joannes Leo (Hasan Ibn Muhammad, al-Wazzan), writing in 1556, properly called Africa "la tierce Partie du Monde;" but the Seigneur de la Popellinière, in his "Les Trois Mondes," published in 1582, divided the globe into three parts—1. Europe, Asia, and Africa; 2. America, and 3. Australia. A half century later, Pierre d'Avitz, of Toumon (Ardèche), entitled one of his compositions "Description Générale de l'Amérique troisiesme partie du Monde," first published in 1637.{2} The expedition under Alvaro de Mendana de Nevra, setting sail from Callao, November 19, 1567, and steering westward, sought to clear doubt concerning a continent which report had pictured as being somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The Solomon Islands rewarded the enterprise, and with New Guinea and the Philippines completed a connection between Peru and the continent of Asia. There had long existed, however, a settled belief in the existence of a great continent in the southern hemisphere, which should serve as a counterpoise to the known lands in the northern.
1 A copy is in the Boston Athenaeum.
The geographical ideas of the times required such a continent, and even before the circumnavigation of Africa, the world-maps indicated to the southward "terra incognita secundum Ptolemeum,"{1} or a land of extreme temperature and wholly unknown.{2} The sailing of ships round the Cape of Good Hope dissipated in some degree this belief but it merely placed some distance between that cape and the supposed Terra Australia which was now extended to the south of America, separated on the maps from that continent only by the narrow Straits of Magellan, and stretching to the westward, almost approaching New Guinea.{3}
1 As on the Ptolemy, Ulm, 1482.
2 As in Macrobius, In Sommium Scipionis Expositio, Brescia,
1483. 3 See the map of Oronce Fine, 1522, and Ortelius,
Orbis Terrarum 1592. 4 The "Quiri Regio" was long marked on
maps as a continent lying to the south of the Solomon
Islands.
3 This was first republished at Augsburg in 1611; in a
Latin translation in Henry Hudson's Descriptio ac
Delimeatis, Amsterdam, 1612, in Dutch, Verhael van seher
Memorial, Amsterdam, 1612; in Bry, 1613, and shortly after
in Hulsius; in French, Paris, 1617; and in English, London,
1617. I give this list because even so interesting an
announcement of a genuine voyage did not have so quick an
acceptance as Neville's tract with almost the same title.
Such an expanse of undiscovered land, believed to be rich in gold, awakened the resolution of Pedro Fernandez de Queiros, who had been a pilot in the Mendafia voyage of 1606. By chance he failed in his object, and deceived by the apparent continuous coast line presented to his view by the islands of the New Hebrides group, he gave it the resounding name of Austrialia del Espiritu Santo, because of the King's title of Austria. On the publication of his "Relation" at Seville in 1610, the name was altered, and he claimed to have discovered the "fourth part of the world, called Terra Australis incognita." Seven years later, in 1617, it was published in London under the title, "Terra Australia incognita, or A new Southerne Discoverie, containing a fifth part of the World." It is obvious that geographers and their source of information—the adventurous sea captains—were not agreed upon the proper number to be assigned to the Terra Australis in the world scheme. Even in 1663 the Church seemed in doubt, for a father writes "Mémoires touchant l'établissement d'une Mission Chrestienne dans la troisième Monde, autrement apellé la Terre Australe, Méridionale, Antartique, & I connue."{1} That Neville even drew his title from any of these publications cannot be asserted, nor do they explain his designation of the Isle of Pines as the fourth island in this southern land; but they show the common meaning attached to Terra Australis incognita, and his use of the words was a clever, even if not an intentional appeal to the curiosity then so active on continents yet to be discovered.
1 Printed at Paris by Claude Cramoisy, 1663. A copy is in
the John Carter Brown Library. In 1756 Charles de Brosse
published his Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes
from Vespuccius to his own day, which was largely used by
John Callender in compiling his Terra Australis Cogmta,
1766-68.
Another volume, however, written by one who afterwards became Bishop of Norwich, may have been responsible for the conception of Neville's pamphlet. This was Joseph Hall's "Mundus Alter et Idem sive Terra Australis ante hac semper incognita longis itineribus peregrini Academici nuperrime lustrata." The title says it was printed at Frankfort, and the statement has been too readily accepted as the fact, for the tract was entered at Stationers' Hall by John Porter, June 2, 1605, and again on August 1, 1608.{1} The biographer of Bishop Hall states that it was published at Frankfort by a friend, in 1605, and republished at Hanau in 1607, and in a translated form in London about 1608. It is more than probable that all three issues were made in London, and that the so-called Hanau edition was that entered in 1608. On January 18, 1608-09, Thomas Thorpe entered the translation, with the address to the reader signed John Healey, who was the translator.{2} This carried the title: "The Discovery of a New World, or a Description of the South Indies hitherto unknown."{3} It is a satirical work with no pretense of touching upon realities. Hallam wrote of it: "I can only produce two books by English authors in this first part of the seventeenth century which fall properly under the class of novels or romances; and of these one is written in Latin. This is the Mundus Alter and Idem of Bishop Hall, an imitation of the later and weaker volumes of Rabelais. A country in Terra Australis is divided into four regions, Crapulia, Virginia, Moronea, and Lavernia. Maps of the whole land and of particular regions are given; and the nature of the satire, not much of which has any especial reference to England, may easily be collected. It is not a very successful effort."{4}
1 Stationers' Registers (Arber), in. 291, 386.
2 Ib. 400. Healey made an "exceptionally bad" translation
of St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, which remained the only
English translation of that work until 1871.
3 In the Bodleian Library is a copy of the translation with
the title, The Discovery of a New World, Tenterbelly,
Sheeland, and Fooliana, London, n.d.
4 Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 2d éd., II.
167.
While a later critic, Canon Perry, says of it: "This strange composition, sometimes erroneously described as a 'political romance,' to which it bears no resemblance whatever, is a moral satire in prose, with a strong undercurrent of bitter jibes at the Romish church, and its eccentricities, which sufficiently betray the author's main purpose in writing it. It shows considerable imagination, wit, and skill in latinity, but it has not enough of verisimilitude to make it an effective satire, and does not always avoid scurrility."{1} Like Neville's production, the satire was misinterpreted.