Chica sive Patagonica et Australis Terra

Cornelis Wytfliet was a geographer and legal scholar from Louvain. He earned a licentiate in law from the University of Louvain before moving to Brussels, where he served as secretary to the Council of Brabant. In 1597 he published Descriptionis Ptolemaicae augmentum, conceived as a supplement to Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia because it described the Americas and other lands unknown to the ancient geographer.

The work is divided into two parts. The first gives an account of the discovery, geography, and natural history of America, while the second contains a world map and eighteen regional maps of the Americas and adjacent regions. Dedicated to Philip III of Spain, the text recounts European voyages of discovery, including those of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Sebastian Cabot, Francisco Pizarro, Giovanni da Verrazzano, Jacques Cartier, and Martin Frobisher. The book was quickly reissued, with later editions published in Louvain in 1598 and 1603. This map is one of the most distinctive sheets in Wytfliet’s Descriptionis Ptolemaicae augmentum. It is divided into two sections. The upper part, drawn on a conventional projection, depicts the southern tip of South America, labelled Chica sive Patagonum regio, separated by a strait from a large speculative southern land labelled Australis Terrae Pars. The lower part, drawn in polar projection, presents a vast Terra Australis made up of several peninsulas extending toward the southern limits of the known continents.

One peninsula reaches toward the Cape of Good Hope; another extends into the Indian Ocean, ending south of Java Major and carrying inherited place names such as Maletur Regnum, Beach, and Lucach Regnum. A third reaches toward Nova Guinea, from which it is separated by a narrow strait, while a fourth, incomplete on the map, appears to extend toward South America. The map gives visual form to late sixteenth-century speculation about a fifth part of the world, balancing new geographical reports with inherited cosmographical theory. In the accompanying text, Wytfliet describes Australis Terra as the southernmost of all lands, separated from Nova Guinea by a narrow strait, with shores still only poorly known because few voyages had followed that route. He notes that some believed the land to be so extensive that, if fully explored, it might be counted as a fifth part of the world.

Within the collection, this map is closely connected with the close derivatives by Johannes Metellus (226) and Matthias Quad (198), , which show how Wytfliet’s southern-continent model was quickly copied and circulated.