While names such as Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton are synonymous with Antarctic exploration, relatively little is known about the French geographer who first theorised on the icy nature of this continent, 66 years before its actual discovery.
Philippe Buache was a well-regarded cartographer in France, becoming geographer to the king in 1729. Furthermore, he helped to pioneer a new academic approach to mapmaking. One such example of this bold new thinking came with the arrival of his theoretical map of the South Pole. That Buache had surmised so much about this frozen continent with very little direct evidence remains a remarkable scientific feat.
The vision revealed
Around 1754, at a time when no-one had even ventured south of the polar circle, Buache began work on a new Carte de Terres Australes (Map of the Southern Lands), gathering observations from the few explorers and pirates who had sailed deep into the Southern Ocean.
His initial and purely observational-based version from 1739, below, was redrawn, filling in what was originally empty space at the South Pole with the silhouette of a theoretical Terres Antarctiques. At the heart of this continent, he also placed a conjectured frozen sea that he called ‘Mer Glaciale’.
Buache had been ruminating on these ideas for many years, with hints to his thought process dropped in previous publications. For example, within the notes of his 1746 map showing the North and South poles overlapping each other, Buache was already speculating on where giant icebergs sighted in the Southern Ocean came from.
Rivers of ice
To produce these ‘giant floating islands of ice’, Buache had hypothesized great rivers were required, and even greater mountain ranges from which this water could flow from. These southward-flowing rivers would then freeze near the pole, with the broken icebergs then directed into the Pacific and Atlantic via two straits that split the continent in two.
Buache expanded on this thought process within a memoir published by the Académie des Sciences in 1757 (also later translated into English for the 1763 edition of The Gentleman’s Magazine).
Although Buache failed to realise these icebergs were glacial ice from a giant ice sheet, surprisingly, his Terres Antarctiques bear a canny resemblance to the mountainous topography found beneath the Antarctic ice sheet today. This fact has not been lost to some conspiracy theorists who have speculated that Buache copied secret maps drawn by a highly developed and ancient civilization.
Terra Australis
Conspiracies aside, the foundations for Buache’s map can be traced back to the Ancient Greeks – notably from Aristotle, who in the fourth century BC hypothesized that the continents of the northern hemisphere must be balanced by an unknown landmass in the southern hemisphere.
Influential cartographers through the Age of Discovery continued to hold on to Aristotle’s opinions, including Gerardus Mercator, who believed a sizable Terra Australis (southern land) must exist…
…otherwise the constitution of the world could not hold together at its centre.
Walter Ghymm, Vita Gerardi Mercatoris (1595)
Sightings from the Southern Ocean
Terra Australis thus remained a common fixture on maps through the 16th century, motivating many explorers southwards to uncover its potential riches. The information these sailors brought back provided tantalising clues that Buache would go on to use in his new map.
A new continent discovered?
One major line of fresh evidence Buache leaned upon was that of the 1738-9 expedition led by the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier.
On 1 January 1739, through murky fog, De Lozier saw land – the first ever confirmed south of the 50° parallel. Convinced he had reached Terra Australis, De Lozier named it Cap de la Circoncision.
For 12 days they tried to land or circumnavigate the discovery. But conditions were never favourable and he was thus unable to prove if the land was connected to a larger continent.
In fact, De Lozier had discovered the world’s most remote island – now called Bouvet Island. Unfortunately, the coordinates he shared on his return were so inaccurate that the island was lost again until its ‘rediscovery’ 69 years later.
Within the vicinity of this ‘cape’, De Lozier had also sighted many sizable icebergs, up to 3 leagues (17 km) in circumference and 300 feet (91 m) high. Buache highlighted these in the corner space of the map (below), as the presence of large icebergs at 52°S was key evidence to support his vision of a frozen sea at the South Pole.
Pirates in the Pacific
Tales of massive icebergs deep in the Southern Ocean were well known prior to De Lozier’s expedition, also coming from those trying to round Cape Horn. Buache incorporated two such reports, from the English pirates Davis and Sharp.
In 1687, Edward Davis had been carrying out raids on Spanish settlements along the coasts of Mexico, Peru and Chile (it was on this voyage that he also supposedly sighted the phantom island Davis Land). While attempting to round Cape Horn on his route home, severe storms forced Davis south to almost 63°S. It was here they met with a stream of icebergs:
The biggest seemed, as we sailed by them, which we did before the wind for several days, to be about 4 or 500 feet high (120–150 m). We sounded near them but found no ground, so that it may reasonably be concluded they were afloat; and perhaps reached as deep into the water, as their height was above it.
Lionel Wafer, ship’s surgeon, writing in 1699
Source: lin padghamSeven years earlier, in 1680, Bartholomew Sharp had also been pillaging the Spanish in the Pacific. According to Sharp’s diary, they faced a similar fate while rounding Cape Horn with foul weather compelling their ship far to the south. On 17 November at 58° 23’S, they encountered ‘Islands of Ice‘, the biggest of which were two leagues (11 km) round.
A dubious sighting of land
As well as the repeated encounters with giant icebergs by sailors, Buache used further historical sightings of land from past centuries to speculate on the outline of his Terres Antarctiques.
Just a decade after the discovery of the New World, some geographers believed the famous Portuguese explorer Amerigo Vespucci had reached Terra Australis. This early sighting of land is described in a letter supposedly written by Vespucci a few years later. Here, he recounts that during his third voyage, some 500 leagues (2778 km) from their last port in South America and at 52°S, they encountered a dangerous storm…
And while going along in this tempest, on the seventh day of April we sighted new land, about 20 leagues of which we skirted; and we found it all barren coast; and we saw in it neither harbor nor inhabitants. I believe this was because the cold was so great that nobody in the fleet could withstand or endure it.
Amerigo Vespucci writing to Piero Soderini of Florence in 1504
Drakes lost harbour
Another observation of land Bauche used was that of the English explorer Sir Francis Drake. Having sailed through the Straits of Magellan near Cape Horn in 1578, Drake found himself blown south by a series of storms. At 57°S, they encountered an island where they could shelter, remaining there for 3-4 days.
The ship’s chaplain gave a good description and sketch of the island, describing it as c. 30 miles north to south, almost square, and with a lake at its centre. Nevertheless, this Elizabeth Island was never found again.
New Zealand connected
In the decade before Buache started drawing his map, Abel Tasman and his crew became the first Europeans to reach New Zealand. By failing to recognise this discovery as an island, many cartographers, including Buache, optimistically connected it to a hypothesised southern continent. It would take another century before this mistake was identified and corrected.
The height of the mountains Tasman noted in New Zealand was also compelling evidence for Buache that could explain how such large rivers could exist at the South Pole.
…for the promontories of ice just mentioned, can be produced only by rivers which have a long course, at least 400 leagues (2,200 km), like those of Siberia.
Buache on potential rivers flowing from New Zealand (The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1763).
Legendary Captain Cook forces a rethink
Just a few decades after Buache published his theoretical map, Captain James Cook’s second voyage around the world between 1772 and 1775 effectively consigned it back to the drawing board.
Tasked with circumnavigating the globe as far south as possible, Cook sailed over much of Buache’s theorised continent (including rounding New Zealand) without ever finding new land. However, numerous icebergs were still encountered.
By also becoming the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle, Cook proved there was no Terra Australis in temperate latitudes, thus permanently reshaping the world map.
Buache’s theoretical continent only appeared on one other map, published by fellow Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Louis Clouet and just barely visible as a faint dotted line; the overlaid route of Cook’s voyage emphatically highlighting the numerous inaccuracies of Buache’s map.
Antarctica finally discovered
Despite the obvious overestimations of the coastline of Terres Antarctiques, new voyages during the 19th century would affirm just how close Buache’s predictions were.
On January 27, 1820, Admiral Fabian Gottlieg Thaddeus von Bellingshausen finally became the first ever person to sight Antarctica. While leading a Russian expedition circumnavigating the entire continent, Bellingshausen observed “an ice shore of extreme height” that has been interpreted as the Fimbul Ice Shelf of Queen Maud Land.
It would be many decades more until anyone would first set foot on this continent, with the first undisputed landing on Antarctica occurring on 24 January 1895 at Cape Adare during the whaling voyage of the ship Antarctic, led by Henryk Bull.
Unfortunately, Philippe Buache died in 1773, 47 years before Bellingshausen’s first sighting of this new continent. In a way, the giant frozen rivers and icy sea Buache had imagined near the South Pole are not too dissimilar to the flows of thick glacial ice and ice shelves that Nansen and others would navigate many decades later. To have approximated the geography for an entire continent just from scientific deduction, before even the birth of modern glaciology, remains an impressive milestone in Antarctic cartography.
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