World map of 1531 by the French mathematician and cartographer Oronce Finé, in a double cordiform projection, showing a large southern continent named Terra Australis.
The claim
Charles Hapgood argued in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings that the southern continent’s coastline, with its rivers and bays, matches the subglacial contour of Antarctica, and Fingerprints of the Gods carries the argument as the second exhibit after the Piri Reis Map. On that reading the map preserves a survey made before the ice.
The cartographic answer
Terra Australis is a speculative continent that appears on many sixteenth-century maps, drawn on the theoretical ground that the northern landmasses required a southern counterweight, and its outline varies freely from mapmaker to mapmaker. Where Finé’s coastline is compared to Antarctica the comparison requires selecting which features to match and rescaling to fit, and the map’s own legends and the surrounding conventions place it in that speculative tradition. The methodological objection to Hapgood is the same one Gregory McIntosh made about the Piri Reis map: an assumption that the source charts were accurate, with every mismatch attributed to copyist error.
Connections
Piri Reis Map · Charles Hapgood · Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings · Fingerprints of the Gods · Graham Hancock · Earth-Crust Displacement · Lost Civilization Hypothesis