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Rh 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