Hi guys. I take my prompt from the contributor who recognized the language as ancient French. Being quite ancient myself, and as a Swiss speaking
several languages, I thought maybe you'd appreciate my version. Here goes:
"Presumed (not witnessed) Antarctic Polar Circle. The inner basin being larger than that of the Northern Arctic Sea, it may contain large rivers of a
size similar to those of Siberia, (those rivers of Siberia) which bring the northern ice through the two Icelandic passages and through the new
passage discovered by the Russians.
There must be, along the coastline, a mountain chain similar to the American Cordelieras or elevated terrain from where large rivers supply the
presumably frozen inner arctic sea with ice."
This reads like campfire stories and is unconfirmed conjecture.
It gets more interesting: some coastline points are named:
"Assassins’ Bay"
and in said bay there is
"Abel Tasman's Harbor"
Down here at the southern tip the person drawing (copying) the map placed the mountain chain/ very high elevated terrain and named it "New
Zealand".
The southern coast is named: "Marie Dzemen Coast"
And at the southernmost tip:
"Three Kings’ Island discovered by Tasman in January of 1643."
End of translation
Not having seen the original subject of this translation, I strongly suspect that this map was a copy of a copy from faulty sources, maybe combined
with hearsay. Either some historians had the habit of giving the same name to different locations to remove clarity (hey, the shilling business is
old) or the person doing the copy got distracted and goofed up big. The Tasmania we know is evidently somewhere else. Maybe the copier was a
conspiracy theorist who revealed his secret belief that the Antarctic and Australia where the same thing
Occam's Razor would lead to think this copy is a hoax two centuries old. On the other hand, if we believe the historians, neither Australia nor
Antarctica were sufficiently known back then by the geographers not to be mixed up by the novice (whose tedious task it would have been to copy maps
for selling).
Hard to select a good one without having access to the original document. Dating the ink and paper might be revealing.
My high regard for modern science forces me not to rule out that discoveries made by ancient seafarers probably were attributed to more recent and
well-known explorers because the old records had been burned by religious loonies. History is written by those who cheat either the best or the
longest. Just take the so-called Mount Sinai aka Jebel el Lawz affair, that theory goes a long way in explaining the difference between opportunism
and history.
Due to finds of tropical fauna and flora in the Antarctic, the claim that the Antarctic as well as Alaska once were at the equator cannot be dismissed
out of hand. Since the main force of this universe is not gravity but electromagnetism, a pole shift of 45° might be observed across the solar system
on a regular basis but never communicated to the sheeple. Hey, electromagnetism is what drives those black project vehicles, therefore it does not
exist for us, the taxpayers.
So-called scientists take ice core samples and declare the ice mantle of the Antarctic to be millions of years old because of "layers", many of
which develop every single arctic day due to temperature fluctuations. You miay be familiar with the story of a Lockheed P-38 named Glacier Girl which
made an emergency landing in the Greenland ice in 1942. When the plane was retrieved only about sixty years later, the thickness of the ice layers
covering it would "prove" that Glacier Girl had made its landing 3850 years ago according to "accepted fact". Science disregarding fact is not
science but religion and about as useful as Einstein's gobbledygook.
Finding out about our true history is an ongoing adventure. I'd love to find the map Piri Reis copied from.