But Ortelius' maps do depict Terra Australis, a hypothetical southern continent located about where Antarctica turned out to be. Europeans wouldn't stumble across Australia until 30 years after Ortelius published his first edition, and it would take another two hundred years for James Cook to discover Antarctica. Of course, there was a lot that western Europeans in 1570 didn't know about the shape of the world - starting with Australia and Antarctica. The 53 maps in the atlas represented everything western Europeans in 1570 knew about the shape of the world. His family came from Augsburg, wherefore Ortelius frequently referred to himself as 'Belgo-Germanus'. He also included a list of 54 more professional cartographers. A cartographer, geographer, and archæologist, born in Antwerp, 4 April, 1527 died there, 28 June, 1598. So he cited the names of the 33 cartographers whose work he used - another first, in a period when rules about plagiarism would horrify most college professors today. Ortelius did almost none of the actual surveying or drawing for the maps in his book his role was to bring them all together with descriptions and references. It contains one of the earliest allusions to what would later become the theory of continental drift, and it's full of the names of the leading scientists and cartographers of the late sixteenth century - people like Gerardus Mercator, whose method of representing the round globe on a flat map is still in use today. It was the work of cartographer Abraham Ortelius, who collected the maps, added his own notes, and had the book printed from specially-engraved copper plates.
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