He pioneered a new form of theoretical geography and, in 1755, was appointed Professor of Geography. In 1729 he became geographer to the king, then geographer in the Académie des Sciences, successor to his former teacher and father-in-law, Guillaume Delisle (1675-1726). He subsequently joined the Ministry of the Navy, where his drafting skills enabled him to concentrate on cartography. Philippe Buache de la Neuville was born in Neuville-en-Pont (France) on 7th February 1700 and studied at the Académie des Sciences, where he won the first prize for architecture in 1721. The claims of Bad Archaeologists about Buache’s map ignore a crucial fact: he was the foremost theoretical geographer of his generation, whose published works include hypotheses about the Antarctic continent. This makes the claims that Buache’s map shows an ice-free Antarctica all the more bizarre, but it is clear that none of the Bad Archaeologists have bothered to read the French legends that cover the map. Bouvet’s Cape of the Circumcision, where he was unable to land owing to the icebergs, is now known to be the island that was named after him by the American whaler Benjamin Morrell (1795-1839) in 1822. The map frequently mentions icebergs, freezing temperatures and glaciers icebergs are even drawn in places.
Moreover, the text describes Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier’s (1704-1786) voyage to the south, which lasted from 19 July 1738 to 24 June 1739. Despite the frequent Bad Archaeologists’ statements that the map was published in 1737, it gives the date of publication as 5 September 1739.
According to the title of the map, it is a ‘ Carte des Terres Australes comprises entre le Tropique du Capricorne et le Pôle Antarctique où se voyent les nouvelles découvertes faites en 1739 au Sud du Cap de Bonne Esperance’ (‘Map of the Southern Lands contained between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Pole, where the new discoveries made in 1739 to the south of the Cape of Good Hope may be seen’). Philippe Buache’s map (supposedly of 1739, although, as we shall see, there are complications with the date) has suffered the same fate as Piri’s and Orontius Finaeus’s maps, to be used as evidence for an ancient civilisation that mapped Antarctica when it was free from ice. Philippe Buache’s map of the Antarctic lands: a version found only in the Library of Congress
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