Terra Australis

According to Wikipedia [link omitted due to annoying blogger cut and paste problems]:

Terra Australis (also: Terra Australis Incognita, Latin for "the unknown land of the South") was an imaginary continent, appearing on European maps from the 15th to the 18th century.

It was introduced by Aristotle. Aristotle's ideas were later expanded by Ptolemy, a Greek cartographer from the first century AD, who believed that the Indian Ocean was enclosed on the south by land. When, during the Renaissance, Ptolemy became the main source of information for European cartographers, the land started to appear on their maps. Although voyages of discovery did sometimes reduce the area where the continent could be found, cartographers kept drawing it on their maps and scientists argued for its existence, with such arguments as that there should be a large landmass in the south as a counterweight to the known landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere. Usually the land was shown as a continent around the South Pole, but much larger than the actual Antarctica, spreading far north -- in particular in the Pacific Ocean. New Zealand, first seen by a European (Abel Tasman) in 1642, was by some regarded as a part of the continent, as well as Africa and Australia.

The idea of Terra Australis was finally corrected by Matthew Flinders and James Cook. [i.e., 1700's]

Below is supposedly the state of [European] knowledge as of approximately 1502, per the Cantino Planisphere, supposedly one of the earliest surviving maps from the Portuguese age of exploration.


And then you have a typical map from the 1570's [i.e., after Magellan's vogage, 1521-1522]:


So, as I suspected, again per Wikipedia, until Drake's vogage, Tierra Del Fuego was thought to be a part of Antarctica:

In 1577, Drake was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to undertake an expedition against the Spanish along the Pacific coast of the Americas. He set sail from Plymouth, England, in December 13 aboard the Pelican, with four other ships and over 150 men. After crossing the Atlantic, one of the ships had to be abandoned on the east coast of South America.

The four remaining ships departed for the Strait of Magellan at the southern tip of the continent. This course established "Drake's Passage", but the route south of Tierra del Fuego around Cape Horn was not discovered until 1616. Drake crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Magellan Strait, after which a storm blew his ship so far south that he realized that Tierra del Fuego was not part of a southern continent, as was believed at that time. This voyage established Drake as the first Antarctic explorer, as his furthest south of at least 56 degrees (as evidenced by astronomical data quoted in Haklyut's "The Principall Navigators", 1589) was not surpassed until James Cook's voyage of 1773, and was the first known occasion that any explorer had travelled further south than any other human being.

So, my point is, as I was beginning to suspect, I don't think there was a time that there was Spanish/Portuguese settlement [which of course I presume from the crosses, the ship, the church, etc.] at the southern tip of South America at a time that the tip itself was so vaguely known as shown by Pete's map, yet at a time when it was known that, that tip of Antarctica stretches up near South America. Knowledge of that tip extending up and the details of Antarctica like that weren't known until much later--1800's or even 1900's. Again per Wikipedia:

Belief in the existence of a Terra Australis--a vast continent located in the far south of the globe to "balance" the northern lands of Europe, Asia and north Africa--had existed since Ptolemy, who suggested the idea in order to preserve symmetry of landmass in the world. Depictions of a large southern landmass were common in maps such as the early 16th century Turkish Piri Reis map. Even in the late 17th century, after explorers had found that South America and Australia were not part of "Antarctica," geographers believed that the continent was much larger than its actual size.

European maps continued to show this land until Captain James Cook's ships, HMS Resolution and Adventure, crossed the Antarctic Circle on January 17, 1773 and again in 1774.[4] The first confirmed sighting of Antarctica can be narrowed down to the crews of ships captained by three individuals. According to various organizations (the National Science Foundation,[5] NASA,[6] the University of California, San Diego,[7] and other sources[8][9]), ships captained by three men sighted Antarctica in 1820: Fabian von Bellingshausen (a captain in the Russian Imperial Navy), Edward Bransfield (a captain in the British Navy), and Nathaniel Palmer (an American sealer out of Stonington, Connecticut). Von Bellingshausen supposedly saw Antarctica on January 27, 1820, three days before Bransfield sighted land, and ten months before Palmer did so in November 1820. On that day the two ship expedition led by Von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev reached a point within 32 km (20 miles) of the Antarctic mainland and saw ice fields there.

In 1841, explorer James Clark Ross passed through what is now known as the Ross Sea and discovered Ross Island. He sailed along a huge wall of ice that was later named the Ross Ice Shelf. Mount Erebus and Mount Terror are named after two ships from his expedition: HMS Erebus and Terror.[10] The first documented landing on mainland Antarctica was by the American sealers John Davis in Western Antarctica on February 7, 1821, and Mercator Cooper in Eastern Antarctica on January 26, 1853.[11]

Which is all to say, I now doubt that Pete's map is showing the southern tip of South America. But I am at a loss as to what it else it could be. And if it is, I'll certainly be fascinated to find out where it fits in history.