Antipodes

Front matter

In Search of the Southern Continent AVAN JUDD STALLARD

HAA A M T

1 Is a a n e a e

Contents

List gp RP vi Acknowledgements 1132 222.229.2025 42 192272 12 4 e I AE ORIS EPRS ix Dedtcaloft 4122233933399 es r s Raed sha Res aud bp wes WEI d) Heide xi Preface: Imagining Geographies ci cacy aw we d Ra Gh weed CE E weak xiii Introduction: What Exists Beyond. ieu oh peed Ea e eee ag 1 Chapter One: The World as Palimipsests<i0. eerte ERR ee 19 Chapter Three: lerra Australis Takes Shape si. esos eet 64 Chapter Four: ^ Mercator’s Southern Continent and Theory

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure A: Knowledge of the world per Hecataeus of Miletus,

Dedication

To Mum, for your support, belief, and patience.

Now when someone asks what the boy’s been up to for the last 15 years you can point to this and tell them he’s been searching for the southern continent.

Preface

IMAGINING GEOGRAPHIES

It is not given man to envisage reality. His is the greater gift to brood over chaos and shape it as he will.

Clark Firestone!

The Age of Discovery is known as much for feats of exploration as acts of discovery. Stories of variously brave and foolhardy explorers pursuing grand ideas of irresistible geographies are legion; many of these geographies and the expeditions in their pursuit continue as part of modern lore: treks through jungle and desert toward the Mountains of the Moon, voyages chasing ice through a Northwest Passage, the unending quest for Solomon's gold-rich mines. Their histories comprise true stories about imagined geographies— geographies constructed in rich detail in the mind’s eye regardless of whether they do or do not have a real-world equivalent.

The remarkable thing about the many imagined geographies of the early modern period is that these invented entities were conjured with such likeness to existing geographies and yet such promise of surpassing all that was had and known, that people were driven to commit their lives to their discovery. In the history of those willing to seek out the geographical entities they held true, only a fraction went on to find a reality amenable to their preconceptions; those few were rewarded with glory, vindication and remembrance

1 Clark Firestone, The Coasts of Illusion: A Study of Travel Tales (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers), p. 377.

= Xili = among the great explorers. For the greater number who failed in their quests for an imagined geography—there was only truth, though even that was infrequently appreciated.

This book is about one such imagined geography. A place that existed in the minds of humans both because and regardless of physical reality: the great southern continent.

CO COCO COCO

The name of Charles Sturt is little known outside the oldest continent, but, to an Australian, Sturt’s exploits make him one of the great explorers. Like so many of his ilk, this is both because and in spite of his dogged pursuit of an imagined geography. In 1844 Sturt embarked on a quest of fancy and folly as spectacular in scope as it was cruel in its execution: thirteen gruelling months on foot, thousands of miles covered, and the veil lifted on some of the least hospitable environs of the world in the search for a Mediterranean-style sea in the harsh Australian interior. So sure was Sturt that a navigable inland sea must exist, he dragged a boat across countless miles of stones, sand and desolation, his hopes and expectations always pushing ahead of the unpromising horizon. Suffice to say, Sturt did not launch his vessel, his disappointment couched in the sort of stoicism we have come to expect from the great explorers.

Yet the fact of existence or non-existence and the history of pursuit is only ever half any story about the hunt for an imagined geography. Just as interesting and just as important is the fact that, before any audacious expeditions are embarked, people first figure upon the possibility of such geographies, and then, most stunningly of all, place their faith and trust in their actual existence. Even more extraordinary is that such belief rarely terminates at the intersection with reality. History shows that time and again faith trumps reality: unambiguous evidence is gathered that disproves the ideas or arguments about a particular geography, yet people go on believing anyway—believing

= xiv —

PREFACE in El Dorado, believing in an inland sea, believing in an eastern Eden. That is what makes these stories truly compelling: not the apparent folly of heroic explorers dragging whaleboats through the arid outback, but the facility of imagination and belief that generate geographies so real and so essential, they become more powerful than reality itself.

The mythical southern continent has always loomed as one of the most intriguing and most significant imaginative geographies of the recent past. Anyone with a passing interest in early modern cartography will have seen it at the bottom of ornate Renaissance maps—enormous, elusive and transfixing. The continents list of names and guises suggests a pedigree that spans multiple ages and empires: Antipodes, Magellanica, Beach, the Great South Land, Austrialia del Espiritu Santo, Gonneville Land, Jave la Grande, Terra Australis, and the list goes on. In its various iterations, the mythical southern continent has been the single most potent receptacle for European geographical expectation about the southern hemisphere, and one of the shaping forces of early modern history. It pushed men to the farthest reaches of the earth in search of fame, riches, kingdoms, souls, and ultimately truth, in the process revealing worlds hitherto unimagined.

The question is why. To apprehend what happened in the search for a southern continent is nigh meaningless without understanding why it should have been so—why these people sought this imagined geography, why they so often failed to see the realities they encountered, and why this mythic continent held the gaze of an era famed for breaking free the shackles of superstition. To understand all of this is not merely to compare the real with the imagined, or discovery with expectation, but to try to understand the society, the era, and the individual as perceivers and constructors of reality. This is the work of geosophy: “the study of geographical knowledge from any or all points of view.”

2 JohnK. Wright, "Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37, no. 1 (1947), p. 12.

The idea is to follow a narrative from the primary perspective of epistemology rather than ontology; that is, of people's idea of the earth rather than the strict realities of it. The value of such an undertaking is summarised by J. Wreford Watson:

The geography of any place results from how we see it as much as from what may be seen there. Not all geography derives from the earth itself; some of it springs from our idea of the earth. This geography within the mind can at times be the effective geography to which men adjust and thus be more important than the supposedly real geography of the earth. Man has the peculiar aptitude of being able to live by notions of reality which may be more real than the reality itself. Thus mental images should be of prime importance to the study of geography?

Around the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the span of just a few decades, the Antipodes transitioned from a subject of occasional conjecture—as it had been throughout ancient and medieval times—to a geography proclaimed real. Powerful, influential people started believing not just that a

3 J. Wreford Watson, "The Role of Illusion in North American Geography: A Note on the Geography of North American Settlement,” The Canadian Geographer 13, no. 1 (1969), p. 10. Many historical geographers who can be loosely said to follow a geosophical framework of inquiry have contributed key ideas that have informed the present study. See John L. Allen, “An Analysis of the Exploratory Process: The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806," Geographical Review 62, no. 1 (1972); John L. Allen, Passage through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1975); John L. Allen, “Lands of Myth, Waters of Wonder: The Place of the Imagination in the History of Geographical Exploration,” in David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden (editors), Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); John L. Allen, "Introduction to Volume I,” in John L. Allen (editor), North American Exploration, Volume I: A New World Disclosed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); James P. Ronda, The Exploration of North America: Essays on the Columbian Encounter (Washington: American Historical Association, 1992); Martyn J. Bowden, “The Invention of American Tradition,” Journal of Historical Geography 18, no. 1 (1992); Francesc Relafio, The Shaping of Africa: Cosmographic Discourse and Cartographic Science in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Clark B. Firestone, The Coasts of Illusion: A Study of Travel Tales (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1924); J.D. Overton, “A Theory of Exploration,” Journal of Historical Geography 7, no. 1 (1981); Wright, “Terrae Incognitae”; John K. Wright, Zhe Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe (London: Dover Publications, 1965); John K. Wright, Human Nature in Geography: Fourteen Papers, 1925-1965 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966).

— xvi —

PREFACE southern continent might exist, but that a southern continent does exist. So the question is: what changed?

A second issue relates to the inevitable result of belief in a geography that does not exist: people set out to discover it, only to find it is not there. Yet from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, people kept on believing anyway, despite coasts of the southern continent being sailed through and disproved time and time again. Until the voyages of James Cook, there was no amount of violence that could be done to the imaginary southern continent sufficient to stop people believing.

This book, then, is focused on addressing two elements of a single question: why did people believe, and why did people continue believing, in a great southern continent? The nuances of an adequate answer demand the remainder of this book's pages, but at the heart of it all is a simple proposition. People believed in the southern continent because they wanted it to be real—it was a geography worth believing in. People then continued to believe in the southern continent in the face of overwhelming proof of its non-existence because authorities on the matter had always taught that it was real, and people still wanted it to be so.

There is a danger that this concept, so simply stated, may appear facile and mundane. States of mind, dispositions, tendencies, historical patterns—they can easily be described in a few words or a few sentences, and as a result seem obvious, devoid of any real insight. It is only once you see how those patterns or dispositions play out in terms of the elaborate web of things that people do and conspire to do, that they start to mean something. Thus, the concept might be a simple one, perhaps even making for a basic historical truism— that people (then as now) choose to believe in things that seem worth believing in, and they then work to make those things real—but it is a concept that takes on enormous meaning and significance when it is seen how this has shaped a history that begins in the second century BC and ends in the furious two decades of voyaging that mark the 1760s and 70s.

— xvii —

The focus of this book is the Western tradition during the early modern period—the period when the southern continent transitions from a conceptual entity engaging intellectual curiosity, to an entity of indeterminate geography but cosmographic certitude. It is the period in the history of the southern continent when the possible became the probable and the probable became, for all intents and purposes, real?

4 The term cosmography, as used in this work, relates to the enterprise of sketching a complete picture or conception of the earth's geographies in their entirety. Geography concerns the physical features of a region. The term imaginative geography refers less to the characteristics of a region than to the way in which it is conceived; an existing, corporeal geography can nevertheless be part of an imaginative geography based on how people perceive, interpret and conceptualise that space or place. Any attempt to more rigidly delineate these terms runs afoul because attempts to communicate understandings about place and space are unavoidably coloured by the imprecision of perception and mediation.

5 There is, nevertheless, much to be said about the ancient and medieval periods. As starting points, see Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades, Rudolf Simek, Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages: The Physical World before Columbus, trans. Angela Hall (Woodbridge, 1996); Alfred Hiatt, Terra Incognita: Mapping tbe Antipodes before 1600 (London: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Avan Stallard, "Origins of the Idea of Antipodes: Errors, Assumptions, and a Bare Few Facts," Terrae Incognitae 42, 2010. Also note that there is some discussion of Antipodes in non-Western scholarship of the early modern period, mostly derivative or syncretic of Western materials. As these materials have little or no bearing on the Western tradition they are not discussed.

— xviii —

WHAT EXISTS BEYOND

... truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, not the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

Michel Foucault!

Armed with meagre knowledge of geographies over the horizon, and even less understanding of the universe beyond, somehow the ancients were able to conjure the extravagant hypothesis of southern-hemispheric lands.

The ancient Greek philosophers knew little about the geographies that would one day be found across the earth. To them, the known world (or oikoumene) encompassed the Mediterranean and surrounding lands. The totality of geographical knowledge extended to a mere fraction of the globe’s surface (see Figure A)? That it was a globe at all was a revelation, one that required the deductive thinking for which the ancient Greeks became famous. Just whether it was the sort of knowledge a layperson possessed is not known, but through the fourth century BC enough philosophers were discussing the concept of sphericity— Aristotle and Plato among them—that it soon assumed the mantle within scholarship of cosmographic

1 Michel Foucault, Power (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 131.

2 James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 9-25.

s

EUROPE

Figure A. This map represents the range of knowledge articulated by Hecataeus of Miletus, circa sixth century BC. The representation is based on written, not graphic, sources. Map based on an original by Edward Herbert Bunbury, A History of Ancient Geography among the Greeks and Romans from the Earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1959 [original 1883]), p. 148. This version by Bibi Saint-Pol, released as public domain, available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hecataeus_world_map-en.svg.

orthodoxy.’ In the third century BC another important piece of information came to light when, based on an ingenious method, Eratosthenes proffered a new calculation of the circumference of the earth. His calculation was remarkably accurate. Combined, these three pieces of knowledge revealed to the Greeks what it was they did not know: if the earth is huge, round like a ball, with the lands and seas of the oikoumene occupying but a fraction of its surface, then something must exist beyond—but what?

The question of what exists beyond the bounds of present knowledge—be it in the realms of geography, divinity, astronomy, teleology or countless other fields of wonder—has been the unceasing driver of imaginations for as long as humans have possessed writing. That the ancients did eventually hypothesise lands on the other side of the globe is, perhaps, surprising more for the late

3 See William Arthur Heidel, The Frame of the Ancient Greek Maps (New York: Arno Press, 1976 [original 1937]).

4 Aubrey Diller, “The Ancient Measurements of the Earth,” Isis 40, no. 1 (1949), pp. 7-9.

zu date at which it came than the fact they should have reached such a position. Based on contemporary knowledge, there were, after all, only three likely possibilities for the composition of the southern hemisphere: land, water, or land and water. The prospect of unknown lands carried the potential fascinations of new worlds; the prospect of endless seas promised nothing.

As for just who it was to first ask the question and offer the answer of a southern continent, historians cannot be sure. It was not Pythagoras, and nor is there any evidence for priority in the frequently misunderstood writings of Plato and Aristotle. The man who brilliantly calculated the earth’s circumference—Eratosthenes—is a possible candidate, but his extant writings are inconclusive.” The fact is, because most ancient treatises have not survived the ravages of time, only a skerrick of ancient knowledge is now known. Trying to establish chronologies, let alone determine the progenitor of a given idea, is fraught with difficulty and often leads to misattribution. Conclusions about priority may reflect no more than the earliest extant work, or the most popular work that followed others breaking new ground.

With those caveats established, the most defensible candidate for progenitor of the idea of southern lands is Crates of Mallos, a scholar of the second century BC who not only posited the possibility of southern lands, but argued for their actual existence. Crates’ original works are lost, but he is known through Strabo, writing two centuries later, commenting with what scholars trust is fidelity on what are hoped to be Crates’ original words and not those of one or more intermediaries. The surprising thing about Crates is that he was not a famed cosmographer pushing the bounds of his discipline; he was a respected Homeric scholar who conjured southern lands as part of his efforts to mount a defence of Homers sixth-century epic, Odyssey.

To impugn the cosmographical coherency of the Odyssey would have been to impugn the wisdom of its author, a state of affairs Crates repudiated. The confounding passage appears in Book I of the Odyssey and seems innocuous

5 For a fuller discussion of this subject see Stallard, “Origins of the Idea of Antipodes,” pp. 35-38.

at first glance: “the Ethiopians that are sundered in twain, the uttermost of men, abiding some where Hyperion [the sun] sinks and some where he rises” However, an issue arose because Homer authored this remark in the sixth century BC, before it was known that the earth was a sphere. Crates was now compelled to make sense of this statement in full cognisance of second-century BC knowledge. At that time, the “Ethiopians” were considered to be those humans inhabiting the African part of the oikoumene in the land called Libya (see Figure A). In order to sunder the Ethiopians in twain—or separate them into two groups—Crates conjectured a geographical barrier that effected this separation. That geographical barrier would be the great river Ocean that Homer and many other philosophers mention. Crates’ positioning of that barrier turned on the belief that no people could live in the sun-scorched equatorial “torrid zone”; thus, Crates posited Ethiopians in the distant “temperate zone” of the southern hemisphere, sundered from the oikoumene by a river Ocean running along the equator (see Figure B, a diagram representing the ancient Greek zonal theory of climate).

torrid torrid

Figure B. Representation of the theory of zones in its simplest version. Only the temperate zones are, in principle, habitable. Drawn by the author.

6 Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, Done into English Prose, trans. Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906), p. 2.

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That gave Crates—and more importantly, Homer—two distinct landmasses, and two distinct groups of people, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere. But there was more. The Ethiopians were said by Homer to abide both where the sun rises and sets, which is to say, in east and west. Crates interpreted this to mean that the group of Ethiopians in the southern hemisphere must, in fact, exist as two separate populations—separated by another river Ocean running north-south. In sum, then, the Cratesian cosmography found in Strabo’s Geography comprises, at the least, the oikoumene in the northern hemisphere, and two additional landmasses within the temperate zone of the southern hemisphere. It is possible that Crates also had a fourth landmass in mind, a counterpart in the northern hemisphere to the oikoumene, but if he did Strabo neglects to mention it.

What makes Crates’ role as progenitor in the history of Antipodes doubly important is that due to the scholarly rigour of Strabo we are afforded an explanation of the reasoning behind Crates’ conception of the earth. Why this should matter—and, indeed, why locating this progenitor is more than a matter of trivial interest—is apparent when one considers the current explanations for the ancient conjecturing of southern lands. The standard view is that the Greeks subscribed to a notion of cosmographic symmetry. Symmetry in ancient Greek times would entail the presence of either two or four landmasses: either an additional antipodal landmass on the opposite side of the globe to the oikoumene, or a landmass in each quadrant of the globe. Alongside this notion stands the equally popular explanation of hemispheric balance, or what is referred to in this book as the theory of equipoisure: a southern landmass was postulated because philosophers believed the earth would be imbalanced without a counter to the oikoumene. That is, the land-heavy north would topple over without an equally land-heavy south.

Modern representations (not reconstructions) of what a Cratesian map or globe might have looked like are now commonplace. To the best of knowledge, Crates only posited three landmasses on the sphere, and when it comes to their specific location all that is said is that there is one landmass (the oikoumene)

in the northern temperate zone, and two landmasses in the southern temperate zone. There is no indication of how far apart the latter two landmasses are, their configuration, size, shape and so on. We know almost nothing. If one was to map this cosmography it might look like Figure C (or something similarly austere) and should be clearly labelled as an original production, not as an actual reproduction of a globe produced by Crates about which nothing is known. Yet modern authors have ventured much more compelling maps than is justified, intimating very specific knowledge about Crates’ cosmography that simply does not exist. Consider Figure D, an elegant drawing that presents a system of oceans and lands that look to be symmetrical, and includes a fourth continent. Such representations of Crates’ globe have taken a lot of the attention away from the only existing evidence of Crates’ cosmography, which is strictly limited to written texts.

The present ubiquity of these elegant but speculative maps accompanied by elegant but unsubstantiated explanations is what makes Strabos record of Crates’ reasoning so valuable. Crates conjectured the Antipodes as a matter of literary fealty; his Antipodes, and at least one other southern landmass besides, were created in an act of Homeric interpretation. Crates conjectured it, other scholars adopted the idea, and throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages no scholar had need for, and no scholar expressed, theories of symmetry or equipoisure.’ It was perfectly adequate for each succeeding generation of scholars to perpetuate the idea of southern land on the basis of tradition and authority alone. How or why modern historians came to believe that ideas of symmetry and balance drove this conjecture is not clear. From the first century BC the concept of a quadripartite cosmography is evident (that is, a landmass in each of the four quadrants of the globe). Perhaps the symmetrical agreement of this cosmography led historians to mistakenly assume that a commitment to symmetry was the actuating factor behind quadripartite cosmographies—thus misplacing effect as cause.

7 Benjamin Olshin has also identified the lack of evidence for a guiding principle of symmetry in Greek and Roman scholarship in his excellent but regrettably little-known thesis, Benjamin Olshin, “A Sea Discovered: Pre-Columbian Conceptions and Depictions of the Atlantic Ocean,” PhD thesis (University of Toronto, 1994). For a more detailed discussion of the confusion around the ancient origins of Antipodes see Stallard, “Origins of the Idea of Antipodes”.

LANDMASS LANDMASS

Figure C. One possible interpretation of Crates’ cosmography, drawn by the author. This diagram is intentionally spare. It conveys information about Cratesian concepts, but is rather less inspiring than Figure D. It is not hard to imagine how more arresting maps might easily mislead.

Figure D. Reconstruction of Crates’ globe in Oliver J. Thomson, History of Ancient Geography (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1965), p. 203.

As for the concept of equipoisure (hemispheric balance), it was not introduced into literature until the sixteenth century AD. In time it would play a role in the discourse of southern lands, though only at the very end of the Antipodean narrative when good reasons for believing in the southern continent were becoming harder to find. That the theory of equipoisure was not important in the first one thousand nine hundred years that the concept of Antipodes was around is a jarring proposition, but a few uncontroversial facts offer quick confirmation. The notion of balance relates to movement—if something lacks balance then it is liable to move, in the globe's case perhaps topple, perhaps roll away into space, perhaps just spin with an unpleasant wobble. Throughout the medieval Christian era and right up to the seventeenth century there were certain biblical tenets that were not to be challenged. Chronicles 16:30: “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” Psalms 104:5: “Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever.” Building upon the dominant ancient conceptions of geocentrism, this is the era of the fixed earth. It was not that the earth did not move, it was that the earth could not move—what God fixes stays fixed. In such a paradigm the earth could be as misshapen as an old basketball torn at the seam, bladder bulging out, and it would still not tumble, nor roll, nor wobble. A fixed earth, whether due to theories of geocentrism or biblical inerrancy, is impervious to the quibbles of equipoisure, a concept that did not firmly take hold until after Copernicus, Galileo and others had argued the case for heliocentrism.*

The point to explaining what people did not believe goes back to one of the driving questions outlined in the preface: if the idea of a southern continent persisted as an abstract, amorphous cosmographical postulate for the better part of two millennia, what was it in the first few decades of the sixteenth

8 The detailed reasoning behind these conclusions about symmetry and equipoisure is available in Stallard, "Origins of the Idea of Antipodes,” and Stallard, “Antipodes to Terra Australis,” PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2011. It is relevant to note that the former article is, to the best of my knowledge, the first published work to challenge the role of symmetry and equipoisure in the context of belief in a southern continent (noting, of course, the earlier unpublished comments in Olshin, “A Sea Discovered”), and as such these arguments await challenge or corroboration from other historians.

century that caused this postulate to form into one of the most extravagant geographies ever imagined, thereafter attracting obsession, devotion and unwavering belief? Denied the explanations of symmetry and equipoisure, new avenues of inquiry are not just opened, but demanded. Evidence can be examined afresh; standing interpretations of important events can and should be challenged; context becomes essential in piecing together the motivations and understandings of peoples and periods.

The first piece of the puzzle is establishing why ancient knowledge lasted till the early modern period, and why that knowledge was actively sought and used by the early moderns. While Crates originally proposed a concrete vision of peoples and lands, in the centuries that followed the question of southern hemispheric lands was treated as an open inquiry by most scholars. The Antipodes operated not as a place at that point in history, but a space: intangible, unknown, unknowable. Observe the comments of Cleomedes (thought to have written sometime between the first century BC and 44 AD) who posits other lands and other peoples on the basis of theory and reason:

The theory of Nature teaches us that circumhabitants, antipodes, and contrahabitants must exist, since none of these are described by direct reports. We simply cannot travel to our circumhabitants because the Ocean separating us from them is unnavigable and infested by beasts; nor to the inhabitants of the contratemperate zone, since we cannot traverse the torrid zone. Yet the regions of the Earth that are equally temperate are necessarily inhabited to an equal extent, given that Nature loves Life, and Reason requires that all of the Earth, where possible, be filled with animal life, both rational and irrational. (1.1.262)?

As is the case with a number of scholars, Cleomedes makes clear to his readers that antipodality is a normal and necessary fact of spherical geometry:

9 Cleomedes, Cleomedes’ Lectures on Astronomy: A Translation of The Heavens with an Introduction and Commentary, ed. and trans. Alen C. Bowen and Robert B. Todd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Our antipodes become contrahabitants of our circumhabitants, since such relations resemble those of friends and brothers, rather than those of fathers and children, or slaves and masters; that is, they convert, in that we become circumhabitants of our circumhabitants, antipodes of our antipodes, and similarly contrahabitants of our contrahabitants.

(1.1.209)"°

So Europeans are antipodeans, too. Indeed, we are all antipodeans to someone, a relativist concept that predates postmodernity by millennia.