[3] In writing Les Trois Mondes, La Popelinière pursued an explicit geopolitical design by utilizing the cosmographic conjectures, which were at the time quite credible, to theorize a colonial expansion by France into the austral territories.
He affirmed this explicitly, in declaring “to the ambition of the French is promised the Terre Australe, a territory which could not but be filled with all kinds of goods and things of excellence” (Les Trois Mondes, p. 50).
[4] With regard to the austral lands, La Popelinière was inspired by the voyages of Drake, as well as by the accounts of a Portuguese pilot, Bartolomeu Velho, and by a cosmographer of Italian origin, Andrea D’Albagno.
The cosmographer André d’Albaigne claimed to possess: “the secrets, charts and necessary instruments for conquering and reducing to the obedience of His Majesty great extent of lands and realms abundant and rich in gold, silver, precious stones, drugs and spiceries”.
Their name was “Dalbagnio”, according to a notary act of the year 1567, involving their brother Pellegrino, resident at La Rochelle since his marriage to the daughter of the mayor Vincent Nicolas.
From Lisbon, where he was an agent of the Bonvisi, Francisque d’Albaigne betook himself to Paris, to propose the occupation of a “certain very rich new land of very great extent not yet discovered by the kings of Spain and Portugal”.
Warmly recalling how France had come to regret having dismissed Christopher Columbus, he now also promised the discovery of a new part of the world, at seven months voyage, with “realms abundant and rich in gold, silver, precious stones, drugs and spiceries”.
[10] Although the geographical destination of this enterprise was not plainly stated anywhere in the relevant correspondence, the chief modern authority on the matter, E.-T. Hamy, suggested that the real purpose, though concealed in vague and cryptic language, was to explore and colonize the unknown continent of Terra Australis.
South of the Strait of Magellan, Tierra del Fuego appears as in the conventional form of an ambiguous tip of a potential continental mass otherwise not delineated.
[12] The world map in the Cosmography that Velho compiled in 1568 for the benefit of King Charles IX at the request of Francesco d’Albagno is noteworthy for not having any representation whatever of the southern continent, which would appear to confirm that he had no interest in Terra Australis.
In July 1578 he reported that one Gilbert (Humphrey Gilbert) had the queen's permission to make an expedition “par la partie australe où il y a une infinité de terres inhabitées d’autres que de sauvaiges et qui sont en mesme paralelle et climat que la France et l’Angleterre et au plus loing de quarante cinq et cinquante degrez de l’equinoctial, tirant à l’autre Pole, où il y a à faire des Empires et des Monarchies les quelles choses Gilbert en a communicqué avec moy (by the southern part where there is an infinity of lands uninhabited except for savages, which are in the same latitude and climate as France and England and at a distance of forty-five tofifty degrees from the Equator, taken from the other Pole, where there are empires and kingdoms to be made; which matters Gilbert had spoken about with me)”.