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Updated: June 23, 2025
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.
The discoveries made by this circumnavigator, will, however, be deemed much more important, if the opinion of Fleurien, in his remarks on the austral lands of Drake, inserted in the Voyage of Marchand, in which opinion he is followed by Malte Brun, be correct; viz. that Drake discovered, under the name of the Isles of Elizabeth, the western part of the archipelago of Terra del Fuego; and that he reached even the southern extremity of America, which afterwards received, from the Dutch navigators, the name of Cape Horn.
It was also in his contemplation to run as far west as the Tierra Austral del Espiritu Santo, which was discovered by Quiros, and to which M. de Bougainville has given the name of the Great Cyclades. From this land, it was the captain's plan to steer to the south, and so back to the east, between the latitudes of fifty and sixty.
That this is the case with the atolls in the Southern Pacific as far as their range is concerned, seems highly probable, when we observe that the three principal groups are directed in north-west and south-east lines, and that nearly all the land in the S. Pacific ranges in this same direction; namely, N. Western Australia, New Caledonia, the northern half of New Zealand, the New Hebrides, Saloman, Navigator, Society, Marquesas, and Austral archipelagoes: in the Northern Pacific, the Caroline atolls abut against the north-west line of the Marshall atolls, much in the same manner as the east and west line of islands from Ceram to New Britain do on New Ireland: in the Indian Ocean the Laccadive and Maldiva atolls extend nearly parallel to the western and mountainous coast of India.
And more than this again; the temperature had fallen sensibly: this was probably a forewarning of the austral winter. The summit of our ice-mountain was lost in vapour, in a fog which would not resolve itself into rain, but would continue to muffle up the horizon. “Bad luck!” said the boatswain, “for now if we were to pass by land we should not perceive it.” ”And our drift?”
From that time, however, Christianity spread rapidly, and the converted natives were eager to go forth themselves as missionaries, not only to neighbouring islands, such as the Paumotre, the Austral, and Hervey groups, but to Raratonga and Samoa, and, still farther, to the New Hebrides, Loyalty Islands, and New Caledonia and Penryn Islands.
Nor is the furniture universal in Australia, as one would naturally suppose, after the style of that in Italy and the South of France. The frowsy carpets and heavy solid chairs of England's cold and foggy climate reign supreme beneath the Austral sun.
"Monsieur Lesseps, who projected this wonderful enterprise, and whose energy and perseverance carried it through to its completion, made a voyage through the canal in the Austral, one of the largest of the Orient Line, though not so large as the one ahead of us, for the purpose of observing any defects.
It looks as if both race and a dash of culture had a good deal to do with his exploitation of geographical opportunity. How did the Australians and their Negrito forerunners invade their Austral world, at some period which, we cannot but suspect, was immensely remote in time? Certain at least it is that they crossed a formidable barrier.
His object was to discover the imagined austral continent; but his discoveries were confined to Otaheite, which he named Sagittaria, and an island which he named Terra del Esperitu Sancto, which is supposed to be the principal of the New Hebrides. The Ladrones were discovered by Magellan in 1521.
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