Abstract
This essay explores mental journeys that probe the edges of knowledge and experience. Edges are inherently paradoxical and perplexing, marking both safety and danger, access and containment. In the context of travel, maps can be central to the process of ‘locating’ places in the geographical and literary imagination; but cartography is also a practice that exposes where our knowledge begins and ends. Inevitably, there remains the question of what lies beyond the ‘edge’, outside the map of known places. This essay asks the question: how do we deal with terrae incognitae — the unknown or ‘empty’ spaces on the map?
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Notes
Gerald R. Pitzl, Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Westport: Greenwood, 2004), 11.
Robert A. Rundstrom, ‘Mapping, Postmodernism, Indigenous People and the Changing Direction of North American Cartography’, Cartographica 28.2 (1991): 1–12.
See David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis (eds.), The History of Cartography, Vol. 2.3, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
For greater detail, see Glyndwr Williams and Alan Frost (eds.), Terra Australis to Australia (Melbourne and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)
Alfred Hiatt, Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (London: British Library, 2008)
J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain fames Cook (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 107.
James Cook, The Journals of Captain fames Cook, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (London: Hakluyt Society, 1967
G. L. Bracket, ‘At the End of the Earth: How Polar Ice and the Imagination Shape the World’, Terrae Incognitae 42 (2010): 19–33
See Alison Sheridan’s Heaven and Hell: And Other Worlds of the Dead (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2000).
Richard Bradley’s work on liminality includes Altering the Earth: The Origins of Monuments in Britain and Continental Europe (Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1993)
See John Millar Wands’s introduction to Another World and Yet the Same: Mundus Alter et Idem, Bishop Joseph Hall (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), xiii
Alexander Dalrymple, An Historical Collection of the several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (London: Nourse, 1770, 1771).
Vanessa Collingridge, Captain Cook (London, Sydney, Auckland: Parkt own Ebury Press/Random House, 2002), 85–8.
Alexander Dalrymple, Chart of the South Pacifick Ocean (London: printed for the Author, 1770)
See Royal Society, ‘Council Minute Book V, 187–189’, referenced in footnotes 49 and 50 in Andrew S. Cook, ‘Introductory Essay’ to Alexander Dalrymple, An Account of Discoveries Made in the South Pacifick Ocean (1767) (Sydney: Hordem House, 1996), 30.
Klaus Dodds, Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire (London: Taurus, 2002).
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© 2015 Vanessa Collingridge
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Collingridge, V. (2015). ‘The thing which is not’: Mapping the Fantastic History of the Great Southern Continent. In: Kuehn, J., Smethurst, P. (eds) New Directions in Travel Writing Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457257_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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