Terrifying monsters and semi-human creatures had traditionally inhabited the imagined underworld of hell throughout centuries of artistic representation in painting, sculpture and scripture. Through long-established mythologies, the undiscovered worlds of the southern hemisphere came to be associated with that underworld. The first examples of imaginary voyages to the antipodes appearing from the start of the seventeenth century deliberately blurred distinctions between Christian beliefs, pure fantasy and tentative facts, reflecting fascination with the idea that there may actually be a hell on earth or, indeed, a heaven on earth, in the unexplored southern regions. Some considered such expressions to be heretical. They were trespassing into the moral and spiritual spaces that had long been claimed by religious iconography. These literary works were not merely whimsical extravaganzas of the imagination; they were arenas for critical comment on politics, the church, social systems and customs of the day and, perhaps initially by chance, they also began to construct a moral framework for colonial expansion into the antipodes. At the same time, these early imaginary voyages laid the foundations for the literary genre's development, closely linked to real exploration but fundamentally a form of fiction.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, geographical discoveries in the region of present-day Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific added a new dimension to the myths and associations attached to the great southern continent of Terra Australis and its antipodean inhabitants.