ANTARCTICA
General
ANTARCTICA, the south polar region, is almost covered by the ocean, the only extensive land being far to the south. It was of course entirely un known to the ancients and to the early navigators of modern Europe, although a theory prevailed among geographers that a great continent existed round the south pole, the "Terra Australis Incognita."
Lope Gareia de Castro, the governor of Peru, sent his nephew Alvaro Mendaña in search of it, who sailed from Callao in 1567. Another expedition under Pedro Fernandez de Quiros left Callao in 1605, and discovered land in April 1606, which he called Australia del Espiritu Santo, now known to be one of the New Hebrides group. These were the first regular expeditions in search of the supposed southern continent.
Fun Fact
The long-imagined (but undiscovered) south polar continent was originally called Terra Australis, sometimes shortened to Australia as seen in a woodcut illustration titled "Sphere of the winds", contained in an astrological textbook published in Frankfurt in 1545.
In the nineteenth century, the colonial authorities in Sydney removed the Dutch name from New Holland. Instead of inventing a new name to replace it, they took the name Australia from the south polar continent, leaving it nameless for some eighty years.
During that period, geographers had to make do with clumsy phrases such as "the Antarctic Continent". They searched for a more poetic replacement, suggesting various names such as Ultima and Antipodea.
Eventually Antarctica was adopted as continental name in the 1890s—the first use of the name is attributed to the Scottish cartographer John George Bartholomew.