also another object in view:  in all the maps of the world of the sixteenth century, a great southern continent is laid down.  In 1606, Quiros, a Spanish navigator, had searched in vain for this continent; and La Maire and Schouten, in their voyage, resolved to look for it, as well as for a new passage to India.  In 1615 they sailed from Holland with two ships:  they coasted Patagonia, discovered the strait which bears the name of La Maire, and Staten Island, which joins it on the east.  On the 31st of January next year, they doubled the southern point of America, having sailed almost into the sixtieth degree of south latitude; this point they named Cape Horn, after the town of which Schouten was a native.  From this cape they steered right across the great southern ocean to the northwest.  In their course they discovered several small islands; but finding no trace of a continent, they gave up the search for it, and steering to the south, passed to the east of the Papua Archipelago.  They then changed their course to the west; discovered the east coast of the island, afterwards called New Zealand, as well as the north side of New Guinea.  They afterwards reached Batavia, where they were seized by the president of the Dutch East India Company.  This voyage was important, as it completed the navigation of the coast of South America from the Strait of Magellan to Cape Horn, and ascertained that the two great oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic, joined each other to the south of America, by a great austral sea.  This voyage added also considerably to maritime geography, “though many of the islands in the Pacific thus discovered have, from the errors in their estimated longitudes, been claimed as new discoveries by more recent navigators.”  In the year 1623, the Dutch found a shorter passage into the Pacific, by the Straits of Nassau, north-west of La Maire’s Strait; and another still shorter, by Brewer’s Straits, in the year 1643.

The success of the Portuguese and Spaniards in their discoveries of a passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, and of America, induced, as we have seen, the other maritime nations to turn their attention to navigation and commerce.  As, however, the riches derived from the East India commerce were certain, and the commodities which supplied them had long been in regular demand in Europe, the attempts to discover new routes to India raised greater energies than those which were made to complete the discovery of America.  In fact, as we have seen, the east coast, both of South and North America, in all probability would not have been visited so frequently, or so soon and carefully examined, had it not been with the hope of finding some passage to India in that direction.  But it was also supposed, that a passage to India might be made by sailing round the north of Europe to the east.  Hence arose the frequent attempts to find out what are called the north-west and north-east passages; the most important of which, that were made during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we shall now proceed to notice.