We pass over the period when the antipodean theory was maintained only by the freest of Christian thinkers, and resume the antarctic story at the point where Bartolomeu Diaz demonstrated by experience that the torrid climatic belt is not impassable, and entered a temperate belt to the south of it. After this, the discovery of Brazil, the frequent enforced voyages south of the Horn by mariners driven thither by storms, and the exploration of the Pacific, are all intimately associated with the antarctic problem. Spanish and Portuguese voyagers at the beginning of the sixteenth century revealed Brazil as continental land; a Portuguese expedition in 1514 reported the southern extremity of South America to be in 40° S., and asserted that the coast of a southern continent was observed beyond this. Ferdinand Magellan, again, passing in 1521 through the straits which bear his name, between the South American mainland and Tierra del Fuego, proved nothing as to the continental or insular character of the latter; but the general tendency of geographical theory favoured the idea of a continent. It took various shapes. We find its coastline roughly coincident with the Antarctic Circle according to Leonardo da Vinci’s globe constructed in 1515; this was at least a better estimate of its extent than that of Orontius of 1531, wherein the west of Terra Australis (“lately discovered but not yet fully known,” as it is ingenuously labelled) approaches close to the southern American promontory about 55° S., runs thence eastward between 50° and 60° S. to the south of Africa, extends northward to the latitude of southern Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, where the “region of Brazil” is found, and to the south-east of Malaysia reveals a vast peninsula (Regio Patalis), which has suggested some obscure conception of the existence of Australia. A little later, in the middle of the century, New Guinea took its place as a northward promontory of the southern continent, after the discovery of part of its coast by Inigo Ortis de Retes, a Spanish navigator.

Pursuing the course of Pacific exploration so far as it affects the Antarctic problem, we find that after Mendaña’s researches in that ocean had resulted in the discovery of some of its many islands, his Portuguese pilot on his second voyage, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, was inspired to petition for the command of a great expedition to the South Land, obtained his desire by promising the Pope and the King of Spain an untold expansion of their realms, respectively spiritual and temporal, and sailed in 1605 from Callão to discover an island of the group afterwards known as the New Hebrides, from which he returned satisfied in the belief of having performed his self-allotted task, and having taken possession of his “Australia del Espiritu Santo” in the name of his masters. Torres, his companion in command, proceeded through Torres Strait, and thus cut off New Guinea from the supposed continent, as afterwards Tasman did Australia itself, crowning the work of the Dutch navigators who had gradually unveiled the western shores of that vast island, working from the direction of the Malay Archipelago (Chapter VII). Tasman proceeded to discover the west coast of New Zealand, which thereupon succeeded to the position formerly occupied in the minds of the theorists by Java, New Guinea, and Australia as the northward extension of the Antarctic continent in these seas. Such ideas died hard: at the end of the previous century the conception of even Java as continental land survived, after a number of voyagers had sailed the seas to the south of it.

During this period a number of vessels, mainly those of English buccaneers, on passing through the Straits of Magellan had suffered the common fate of being caught by northerly storms and driven to the south. Little enough, however, emerges from their exiguous and indefinite records excepting vague pictures of peril from tempest and ice. Thus Sir Francis Drake was carried to about 57° S. in 1578, and afterwards made northward to discover some of the islands of the Fuegian archipelago; but even these took their place on the maps as part of the southern mainland; and it may be added that the same fate befell the remote and tiny Easter Island when it was observed by Edward Davis more than a century later—if Easter Island was indeed his landfall; his observations were not sufficiently definite to enable us now to determine. The Dutchmen Jacob Lemaire and Willem Cornelis Schouten, however, successfully aimed at discovering a passage into the Pacific south of the Straits of Magellan, saw and named Cape Horn, and passed across the ocean through the Paumotu and Tongan archipelagoes by New Pomerania to the East Indies in 1615–17. To an intervening date (1598) is assigned the disputed episode of the voyage of a ship commanded by Dirk Gerrits, one of a Dutch squadron which was said to have been driven south to 64° and there to have fallen in with a mountainous snow-clad coast, identified later with the South Shetland Islands. The story is typical of the uncertainty and misunderstanding associated with all the early southern voyages; it seems probable that Kaspar Barlæus, who in 1622 translated into Latin a history of the “Doings of the Spaniards in America,” was misled by the confusion of a later voyage of one of Gerrits’s shipmates (in the account of which, however, no mention occurs of a far southern land) with that of Gerrits himself. However this may be, another mythical point was duly established on the mythical coast-line of the Antarctic continent running westward athwart the southern Pacific. And the old theory held its place in spite of the strong proofs adduced by William Dampier, during his voyage round the world in 1699–1701, of the inaccuracy of the continental coast as laid down according to the cartographers’ theories. Dampier, after sharing to the full in the adventures of the buccaneers in the Pacific, was under the orders of the admiralty on this voyage, in the course of which he approached Australia directly from the Cape of Good Hope, and made careful explorations in the Shark’s Bay area of the west coast. In 1721 Jacob Roggeveen, leading an expedition on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, was satisfied of the neighbourhood of land about 64° S., south of Tierra del Fuego; and subsequently, after voyaging north-westward into the Pacific and (as is generally supposed) discovering Samoa, believed that he had located promontories of the long-sought continent.

Even the British naval explorers, John Byron in 1765 and Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret in 1767, had it in command to continue the search. The French were now taking a share in Pacific exploration, and Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1768 passed across the Pacific by way of the Paumotu, Society, Samoan, and New Hebrides groups to the south coast of New Guinea. But these and other voyages only served to add to the map the archipelagoes of the Western Pacific, when they did not actually cause confusion by imperfect position-finding and by the practice of successive voyagers of renaming islands previously discovered.

The French voyager Lozier Bouvet, supplied with vessels by the French East India Company, sailed in 1738 to discover the continent, and battled long and bravely with the Antarctic ice about 55° S. for no positive reward save the discovery of Bouvet Island (whose insularity, however, he himself did not recognize) and the negative one of abolishing the imaginary coastline from the chart of the South Atlantic. Hope of future great discoveries was revived by the observation of the Marion and Crozet islands during the expedition under Marion-Dufresne in 1772; but the chapter closes with the bitter disappointment of Yves de Kerguelen-Trémarec, who, after a first voyage in 1772, during which a too vivid imagination led him to regard his discovery of the island now called Kerguelen as revealing the “central mass of the Antarctic continent,” and a land of promise, was hopelessly disabused on his second visit (1773) to that inhospitable shred of land, whose name he changed from Southern France to the Land of Desolation.

Chapter IX.
JAMES COOK AND HIS SUCCESSORS

The name of Captain James Cook stands above those of all others who voyaged in the southern half of the globe, for he finally laid to rest the myth of the southern continent, and brought the first definite news to the world of the great island of Australia and of New Zealand. His first voyage was undertaken under the auspices of the Government in 1768 with the object of observing under the most favourable circumstances the transit of Venus, and was thus not primarily one of exploration. An immense amount of work was done, however; the transit was successfully observed at Tahiti, and the Society Islands were discovered. Six months were spent in a thorough exploration of the coast of New Zealand, and of 2,000 miles of the east coast of New Holland, or Australia. Thence he sailed to Batavia, and proved what Torres had stated in 1607, that New Guinea was not, as had been supposed, a part of Australia. In 1772 he started on another journey under Government auspices, designed for the special purpose of finally solving the question of the southern continent. This object was thoroughly accomplished, as Cook sailed from the Cape of Good Hope to New Zealand, passing twice within the Antarctic circle on the way, and thence he sailed three times across the Pacific. He first cruised about to the south-west of New Zealand, reaching as high a latitude as 71°, and finally touching at Easter Island. He then visited for the first time New Caledonia, Norfolk Island, and the Isle of Pines, besides gaining a clearer knowledge of the Marquesas, New Hebrides, and Tonga groups, and again reached New Zealand. Finally he voyaged from New Zealand to Tierra del Fuego and the Cape of Good Hope, exploring and touching at many little-known points. This journey, from which he returned in 1775, was remarkable as much for Cook’s splendid success in combating scurvy, the scourge of ocean travellers, as for the great discoveries made. During the long voyage, equalling three times the circumference of the earth, only one life was lost, and this striking result of his precautions did much to encourage and help explorers who followed after him.

Cook’s third voyage, which was undertaken primarily with the idea of forcing a way through the north-west passage, has already been mentioned in the chapter on Polar Exploration. But it must be noticed here that on his way to the Arctic region, besides revisiting many of his previous discoveries and finding the larger islands of the Cook Archipelago, he sighted for the first time since the sixteenth century the Hawaiian group. These important islands are supposed to have been discovered by the Spaniard Gaetano in 1555, but had long been forgotten; it was here that Cook was murdered by the natives in 1779. His work was of extreme importance in several directions: he made known to the world a larger area of the globe than perhaps any other man before or since; he overcame the disease which had previously been one of the greatest obstacles in the way of explorers, and he laid the foundation of the British Australasian Empire. It is said that had he returned from his last voyage he would have received honour from the King; it would have been due, and overdue.

Cook’s work in the Pacific was ably carried on after his death by several other explorers, of whom the best known was J. F. G. de la Pérouse, who set out in 1785 to fill in the gaps left by Cook on his voyages, and particularly to explore the great sea between North-west America and Japan. He made a successful exploration of Manchuria and the islands to the north of Japan, which were then little known, and he visited Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, whence he sent home the journals of his voyage. He then voyaged to the east of Australia, touching at Samoa, and reached Botany Bay. Then disaster overtook the expedition, and no one returned to tell how its members perished somewhere to the north of the New Hebrides. In 1791 d’Entrecasteaux set out to search for La Pérouse; and though he was unsuccessful, he advanced to a large extent the knowledge of the islands north-east of Australia. During the following hundred years many explorers and scientists worked in the Pacific, filling in the gaps left by the pioneers in the region. In 1803 the Russians came on the field, with Adam Krusenstern, followed by Otto von Kotzebue (1816), and Fabian von Bellingshausen (1819–21). The French followed in 1818 with L. C. D. de Freycinet, and later with Louis Duperrey and Dumont d’Urville. In 1839 the first important American expedition sailed under Charles Wilkes. Much scientific work for purposes of research was carried on in Oceania in the nineteenth century; but with the exception of the famous “Challenger” expedition (Chapter XIV) it is beyond the scope of this book.