THE SEARCH FOR THE SOUTH LAND A belief in a southern continent surrounding the pole and extending into temperate and tropical latitudes had found ex pression in the maps of European cartographers since the time of Magellan whose Tierra del Fuego was held to be part of it. Many explorers were drawn by the magnet of this illusion into the unknown parts of the great oceans. Pedro Fernandez de Quinos and Luiz Vares de Torres were sent out in 16o5 by the Viceroy of Peru to take possession of the supposed Southern con tinent and on reaching the New Hebrides Quinos believed he had gained his goal and took possession with great ceremony of "Australia del Espiritu Santo," the first appearance of the name Australia on the map. In returning Torres passed through the Strait which bears his name discovering the northern end of Australia and exploring part of the coast of New Guinea. The great period of Dutch voyages began with the formation of the Dutch East India Company in 1602 though Dutch merchant ad venturers, sailing by the Cape of Good Hope, were active on the coast of Japan by i600 and soon of ter were successful rivals to the Portuguese already established in India and the Malay Archi pelago. The Company in 1614 determined to find a way into the Pacific south of Magellan Strait and sent out Jacob Lemaire in the "Eendracht" and Willem Schouten in the "Hoorn." These ships passed south of Tierra del Fuego proving that it was no part of a southern continent, named Staten Land (not recognising it as an island), and navigating Strait Lemaire saw and named Cape Horn on January 31, 1615. Lemaire and Schouten crossed the Pacific, sailed along the north coast of New Guinea and reached the Moluccas. Other Dutch mariners working from the north discovered the west coast of Australia, still supposed to be a projection of a vast southern continent, Dirk Hartog reach ing 26° S. on that coast in 1616. Anthony Van Diemen, governor of the Dutch East Indies, resolved in 1642 to explore the coast of the Southern Continent and sent out Abel Janszoon Tasrnan to carry out the task. The voyage was the greatest contribution to maritime exploration since Magellan. He sailed westward across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, then in a great sweep south ward and eastward he came on high land which he named after Van Diemen though it is now known as Tasmania. Sailing farther east he came on the west coast of another lofty land which he _lamed Staten Land, believing it to be part of the Southern Con tinent continuous with Schouten's Staten Land off South America. It was really New Zealand. He sailed on to the Fiji Islands and returned along the north coast of New Britain and New Guinea to Batavia. In 1643 he went out again with three ships when he explored in some detail the south coast of New Guinea and the north and west coasts of Australia which he called New Holland. In 1699 William Dampier, a noted buccaneer in his early days, made an important voyage on H.M.S. "Roebuck" along the west and north of Australia and the north of New Guinea, rediscovering and naming New Britain. His voyages were remarkable for his extraordinarily keen observations of natural phenomena: in some respects he was the pioneer of scientific exploration. The Dutch man Roggeveen in 1721 and the Frenchman Bouvet in 1738 set out expressly to discover and annex the South Land and the latter took an ice-clad islet of the South Atlantic to be part of it.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the methods of naviga tion had greatly improved and the introduction of the quadrant gave new precision to determinations of latitude. The great bug bear of long voyages was scurvy, supposed to be an inevitable result of life on board the small craft of those days and often fatal to the larger part of the crew. In the second half of the eighteenth century scientific geographers in Europe secured a more systematic system of exploration in which adventure, though still encountered, was subordinated to research. Already in the first year of the century the astronomer Halley had been sent in command of a British war-ship to the South Atlantic in order to study the variation of the compass. In 1764 John Byron was sent on a circumnavigation for discovery and on his return a larger expedition was despatched under Samuel Wallis and Philip Car teret and was absent from 1766 to 1769 discovering Tahiti and many other islands in the Pacific. A French expedition under Bougainville followed and for half a century there was keen rivalry between France and Great Britain in the Pacific. Mean while the Royal Society had planned an expedition to observe the transit of Venus of 1769 from some point in the Pacific and ap proached the Admiralty to obtain a ship to be placed under the command of Alexander Dalrymple a civilian and a fervent be liever in the existence of a vast temperate southern continent. The expedition was sanctioned in time to instruct Wallis to look out for a suitable position in the Pacific ; but the Admiralty by a stroke of unconscious genius gave the command to James Cook and thereby created a new era in exploration and raised the fame of British maritime enterprise to a unique place in the esteem of the world. Cook was accompanied by the great naturalist Joseph Banks, D. C. Solander (a student of Linnaeus) and two astrono mers. The expedition, which was absent from 1767 to 177o, did all that was required of it and much more. It discovered many island groups in the Pacific, sailed round New Zealand proving it to be no part of the Southern Continent and surveyed much of the east coast of Australia so accurately that the charts are still serviceable. A second voyage was determined on, to settle the question of the Southern Continent and Cook set out again in the "Resolution" and "Adventure" in 1772. The voyage lasted until 1775; Cook penetrated far to the south of the Antarctic Circle at several points proving beyond question that there was no habitable land, save a few sterile islands south of the known continents, but his most important discovery was that scurvy was preventible by proper diet and care. Immediately on his return a third great voyage was planned to endeavour to find a passage by sea from the North Pacific to the Atlantic ; the old ghost of a North West Passage still walked. Cook sailed in 1776, visited Kerguelen Island in the South Indian Ocean which had been discovered three years before and proceeded to survey the northern extremity of the west coast of North America passing through Bering Strait until stopped by the ice in 7o° N. Thus Cook had spanned the earth through more than 140 degrees of latitude as well as through all longitudes. On retiring to Hawaii for the winter Cook was killed by the natives in 1779, but Edward Clarke his second in command spent another season in the effort to penetrate the Arctic Sea from Bering Strait and returned to England in 1780. Cook's voyage round the Antarctic continent was supplemented by a great Rus sian expedition under Bellingshausen in 1819-1821; and by a group of hardy American and British sealers in the first third of the nineteenth century, chief among them Weddell who in 1823 reached 73° S. in the sea named after him, and Biscoe in 1831-32 who made a complete circumnavigation discovering the most southerly land so far known.
Port Jackson, the present Sydney, was founded as the first settlement in Australia in 1788 and the coasts were explored by such daring boat-travellers as Flinders and Bass, the latter prov ing that Tasmania was an island in 1795. Cook was followed on the west coast of North America in 1792-1794 by Vancouver who extended northward from Cape Mendocino the work of Spanish explorers and made exact surveys along the coast. The French expedition of La Perouse in two ships spent the years 1785 to 17$8 in crossing and recrossing the widest part of the Pacific but never returned and many efforts were made to discover its fate, the most extensive being that made by Entrecasteaux in 1791— 1793.
The 18th century saw the completion of the great task of outlining the continental shores ; even those of the Arctic Sea had been traced out by Russian travellers like Bering (by birth a Dane), Dezhneff and Chelyuskin, whose name remains on the most northerly cape of the old world. The Spaniards had made known the broad lines of the geography of South America, Central America and the southern part of North America, the central and northern portions of which had been penetrated in all directions by French and British pioneers. The interior of Australia re mained totally unknown as were the Arctic regions north of 8o° N. and the Antarctic south of the Polar Circle. In the Old World Asia had been traversed in all directions although large areas re mained unvisited between the trade routes and the tracks of ex plorers. China was mapped by Jesuit missionaries in the early years of the century, and the accurate mapping of India was in full swing before its close. Africa was the least known of the con tinents and the French geographer D'Anville despairing of recon ciling the conflicting accounts of the interior drawn from tradition and the stories of Arab traders, who had undoubtedly penetrated far into the interior, swept the map clear of all features which had not been seen by European travellers and left a blank of "Unexplored Territory" within the coast line from Morocco and Abyssinia on the north to Cape Colony and Natal on the south. James Bruce explored the Blue Nile from its source in Abyssinia to its junction with the White Nile and before his death a strong effort was made in England by the founding of the African As sociation which enabled John Ledyard to make a great journey across the Sudan from east to west and Mungo Park to trace much of the course of the Niger. Scientific geography was power fully advanced by the determination of the size and figure of the earth by the measurement of arcs of the meridian near Quito on the equator by a French commission under C. M. de la Condamine in 1735-43 and another in the far north under P. L. M. de Maupertuis in Lapland in 1738.