1487 by Bartholomew Diaz first brought explorers within touch
of the Antarctic cold, and proved that the ocean separated Africa
from any Antarctic land that might exist. The passage of
Magellan's Strait in 1520 showed that America and Asia also
were separated from the Antarctic continent, which was then
believed to extend from Tierra del Fuego southward. The
doubling of Cape Horn by Drake in 1578 proved that the Tierra
del Fuego archipelago was of small extent and that any continent
which lay to the south must be within the region of perpetual
winter. Before this, however, vague reports of land to the south
of the Malay archipelago had led European geographers to connect
on their globes the coast of Tierra del Fuego with the coast of
New Guinea, and allowing their imaginations to run riot in the
vast unknown spaces of the south Atlantic, south Indian and
Pacific oceans, they sketched the outlines of a vast continent
stretching in parts into the tropics. The search for this great
south land or Third World was a leading motive of explorers in
the 16th and the early part of the 17th centuries, and no illusion
ever died a harder death. It is not to the purpose here to describe
in detail how Schouten and Le Maire rediscovered the southern
extremity of Tierra del Fuego and named Cape Horn in 1615,
how Quiros in 1606 took possession for the king of Spain of all the
lands he had discovered in Australia del Espiritu Santo (the New
Hebrides) and those he would discover “even to the Pole,” or
how Tasman in 1642 showed that New Holland (Australia) was
separated by sea from any continuous southern continent.
Voyagers round the Horn frequently met with contrary winds and were driven southward into snowy skies and ice-encumbered seas; but so far as can be ascertained none of them before 1770 reached the Antarctic circle, or knew it, if they did. The story of the discovery of land in 64° S. by Dirk Gerritsz on board the “Blijde Boodschap” in 1599 has recently been shown to be the result of the mistake of a commentator, Kasper Barlaeus, in 1622. Much controversy has arisen as to whether South Georgia was sighted in 1675 by La Roche, but the point is of no importance in the development of the history of exploration. It may
