The Enlightenment was populated with fantasies about magical lands occupied by foreign monsters, including Muslims. Until James Cook's second voyage during the years 1772–1775, the myth of terra australis incognito remained a formative influence on European map-making. The theory was that this continent, located in the Southern Hemisphere, balanced the earth so it would not tip over. Even when this myth was disproved, others emerged—for instance, of the perfect humans who lived in Otaheite (accompanied by exaggerated reports of public orgasmic rituals and massive cannibalistic occasions), the giants of Fiji, and other magical places and peoples.

QUESTION: Interesting that Enlightenment map-making still invoked a balancing-continent theory — worth exploring how unproven cosmologies shaped colonial exploration rhetoric.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 368