Vasco da Gama’s voyage of 1497 is too well known to need description.  After him came men like Cabral and Vespucci, who increased our knowledge, and de Gonneville, who added to the romance of exploration.

We then meet with the greatest of the older explorers, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese by birth, though sailing in the service of Spain.  Setting out in 1519, he discovered the connection between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the strait that bears his name.  No one before him had penetrated so far South —­ to about lat. 52deg.  S. One of his ships, the Victoria, accomplished the first circumnavigation of the world, and thus established in the popular mind the fact that the earth was really round.  From that time the idea of the Antarctic regions assumed definite shape.  There must be something in the South:  whether land or water the future was to determine.

In 1578 we come to the renowned English seaman, Sir Francis Drake.  Though he was accounted a buccaneer, we owe him honour for the geographical discoveries he made.  He rounded Cape Horn and proved that Tierra del Fuego was a great group of islands and not part of an Antarctic continent, as many had thought.

The Dutchman, Dirk Gerritsz, who took part in a plundering expedition to India in 1599 by way of the Straits of Magellan, is said to have been blown out of his course after passing the straits, and to have found himself in lat. 64deg.  S. under high land covered with snow.  This has been assumed to be the South Shetland Islands, but the account of the voyage is open to doubt.

In the seventeenth century we have the discoveries of Tasman, and towards its close English adventurers reported having reached high latitudes in the South Atlantic.

The English Astronomer Royal, Halley, undertook a scientific voyage to the South in 1699 for the purpose of making magnetic observations, and met with ice in 52deg.  S., from which latitude he returned to the north.

The Frenchman, Bouvet (1738), was the first to follow the southern ice-pack for any considerable distance, and to bring reports of the immense, flat-topped Antarctic icebergs.

In 1756 the Spanish trading-ship Leon came home and reported high, snow-covered land in lat. 55deg.  S. to the east of Cape Horn.  The probability is that this was what we now know by the name of South Georgia.  The Frenchman, Marion-Dufresne, discovered, in 1772, the Marion and Crozet Islands.  In the same year Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec —­ another Frenchman —­ reached Kerguelen Land.

This concludes the series of expeditions that I have thought it proper to class in the first group.  “Antarctica,” the sixth continent itself, still lay unseen and untrodden.  But human courage and intelligence were now actively stirred to lift the veil and reveal the many secrets that were concealed within the Antarctic Circle.