Humans stepped on Antarctica for the first time during the 1890s, but hundreds of years before that, Antarctica had started appearing on maps. When several explores went on expeditions around the world, they knew that if they went to the South of the world, they come upon some land. But they didn’t know what was on the land exactly. Or how big it is.
This is why when the French explorers, made the world map in the year 1530, they had drawn Antarctica. Look at this map. The Northern Hemisphere is depicted on the left side. And the Southern hemisphere on the right side. The largest land mass in the middle of the Southern hemisphere was named Terra Australis Incognita. It literally meant Unknown Southern Land.
