ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION. 209 



ANTARCTIC EXPLOEATION. 



By professor J. W. GREGORY, F.R.S., 



UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE. 



I. The Search for the 'Terra Australis.' 



^T^HE search for the supposed great southern continent roused inter- 

 -*- est in the South Polar area, even earlier than the commercial 

 need for the Northeast or Northwest Passage directed the attention of 

 the European nations to the Arctic seas. Long before Hudson had 

 started the northern whale fishery, or Barents had discovered Spitz- 

 bergen, or Willoughby had set out on that 'new and strange navigation/ 

 which, according to Milton, was intended to save England from the com- 

 mercial ruin threatened by foreign competition, Arabian, Dutch and 

 Spanish sailors had searched for a continent in the great southern sea. 



Belief in the existence of this 'Terra Australis' dates from the time 

 of the earliest classical geographies. They regarded it as a corollary 

 of the spherical shape of the earth; for it was thought that terrestrial 

 equilibrium could only be maintained by two land masses acting as 

 counterpoises to the land of the old world. The existence of America 

 was therefore predicted as the necessary western antipodes, and a great 

 southern continent was assumed as the southern antipodes. The land 

 that Ptolemy represented as connecting Africa and southeastern Asia 

 and closing the Indian Ocean as a Mediterranean Sea, was regarded as 

 part of the northern shore of this southern continent. Faith in this 

 'Terra Australis' has survived in spite of the repeated failures to prove 

 its existence; for more than two and twenty centuries the supposed 

 limits of this land have receded as geographical research advanced south- 

 ward. One of the geographical results of the Indian expedition of 

 Alexander the Great was the separation of Ceylon from the southern 

 continent. Ptolemy's land connection between southern Africa and 

 eastern Asia was pushed backward by the Arabian sailors who reached 

 Australia. Confirmation of the theory was however claimed by the dis- 

 covery of Terra del Fuego and Australia; but the passage of Drake's 

 Straits and Tasman's voyage along the southern coast of Australia 

 showed that both areas were bounded southward by the sea. Then it 

 was asserted that New Zealand was part of the southern continent, and 

 de Bougainville was sent in 1763 to discover colonizable parts of it, so 

 that France might replace her lost American possessions by new settle- 

 ments in the south. The French expedition, however, was disappointed 



VOL. LX. — 14. 



