Forthcoming · 2027 · Harper (US) · HarperNorth (UK)
The Lost
Continent
The Quest for Earth’s Greatest Secret at the Bottom of the World
From Pythagoras to Cook
Nigel’s forthcoming book, The Lost Continent (Harper US and HarperNorth UK, 2027), is the story of an idea that began in ancient Greece and took sail in the Renaissance and Enlightenment: the search for a vast southern continent that was populated, civilized, and immeasurably rich.
The book traces the genealogy of this belief as it gripped individuals and nations and launched some of the most spectacular voyages in the Age of Discovery. Crossing adventure narrative with intellectual history, it continues his fascination with outsiders who are thrust against the boundaries of the known.
- c. 500 BC – AD 150 Pythagoras to Ptolemy A round earth must be balanced: a great land in the south to mirror the north. Ptolemy draws the Indian Ocean as a closed sea, hemmed in by an unknown southern shore. Ptolemy, Geographia, 15th-century copy
- 1547 The Dieppe mapmakers French chartmakers draw Terre Australe as a rich, peopled coast of spices, parrots and strange beasts — a continent nobody had seen. Vallard Atlas, Dieppe, 1547
- 1570 Ortelius Terra Australis Nondum Cognita sprawls across the bottom of the first modern atlas, larger than any continent known. Ortelius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, 1570
- c. 1640 Hondius The Dutch chart the bottom of the world. Hondius draws the Antarctic pole ringed by the first fragments of New Holland’s coast — and beyond them, still, Terra Australis Incognita. Hondius, Polus Antarcticus, c. 1640
- 1772–1775 Cook Three summers below the Antarctic Circle. The idea finally sinks beneath the ice. Zatta, Nuove Scoperte nel Mare del Sud, 1776
Scroll to follow the voyage
Crossing adventure narrative with intellectual history, The Lost Continent continues Nigel’s fascination with outsiders who are thrust against the boundaries of the known.
