But the information at the command of the adventurers in one country was not always available to those of another; indeed, within any one country there were shipmasters who carried in their heads working charts of coastal waters wholly unknown to the geographers and cartographers who sought to serve the larger interests of the nation.
"The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624"
Wesley Frank Craven
And yet the philosophers, and later the cartographers, true to their instinct for this pedestrian kind of imagination, put mythical lands and islands to the westward of the known islands as though they were really trying to make a way, to sink stepping stones into the deep sea that would lead their thoughts across the unknown space.
"Christopher Columbus, Complete"
Filson Young
Terra Australis was the playground of the cartographers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
"Terre Napoleon A history of French explorations and projects in Australia"
Ernest Scott