The great aim of Magalhaens, and of the Spaniards in general, its first navigators, being merely to arrive, by this passage, at the Moluccas, and the other Asiatic spice islands, every intermediate part of the ocean that did not lie contiguous to their western track, which was on the north side of the equator, of course escaped due examination.  And if Mendana and Quiros, and some nameless conductors of voyages before them, by deviating from this track, and steering westward from Callao, within the southern tropic, were so fortunate as to meet with various islands there, and so sanguine as to consider those islands as marks of the existence of a neighbouring southern continent, in the exploring of which they flattered themselves they should rival the fame of De Gama and Columbus, these feeble efforts never led to any effectual disclosure of the supposed hidden mine of a New World.  On the contrary, their voyages being conducted without a judicious plan, and their discoveries being left imperfect without immediate settlement, or subsequent examination, and scarcely recorded in any well-authenticated or accurate narrations, had been almost forgot; or were so obscurely remembered, as only to serve the purpose of producing perplexing debates about their situation and extent, if not to suggest doubts about their very existence.

It seems, indeed, to have become a very early object of policy in the Spanish councils, to discontinue and to discourage any farther researches in that quarter.  Already masters of a larger empire on the continent of America than they could conveniently govern, and of richer mines of the precious metals on that continent than they could convert into use, neither avarice nor ambition furnished reasons for aiming at a fresh accession of dominions.  And thus, though settled all along the shores of this ocean, in a situation so commodious for prosecuting discoveries throughout its wide extent, the Spaniards remained satisfied with a coasting intercourse between their own ports; never stretching across the vast gulph that separates that part of America from Asia, but in an unvarying line of navigation, perhaps in a single annual ship, between Acapulco and Manilla.

The tracks of other European navigators of the South Pacific Ocean, were, in a great measure, regulated by those of the Spaniards, and consequently limited within the same narrow bounds.  With the exception, perhaps, of two instances only, those of Le Maire and Roggewein, no ships of another nation had entered this sea, through the Strait of Magalhaens, or found Cape Horn, but for the purposes of trade with the Spaniards, or of hostility against them, purposes which could not be answered, without precluding any probable chance of adding much to our stock of discovery.  For it was obviously incumbent on all such adventurers, to confine their cruises within a moderate distance of the Spanish settlements, in the vicinity of which alone they could hope to exercise their commerce,