642 COSMOS. 



passage to Cathai (China), led him to think at "some future 

 time of an expedition to the north pole" (6. lo del polo arctico}.* 

 The more it became gradually recognised that the newly- 

 discovered land constituted one connected tract, extending 

 from Labrador to the promontory of Paria, and as the recently 

 found map of Juan de la Cosa (1500) testified, beyond the 

 equator, far into the southern hemisphere, the more intense 

 became the desire of finding some passage either in the south 

 or in the north. Next to the re-discovery of the continent of 

 America and the knowledge of the extension of the new 

 hemisphere southwards from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, 

 discovered by Garcia Jofre de Loaysa,f the knowledge of the 

 South Pacific, which bathes the western shores of America, 

 was the most important cosmical event of the great epoch 

 which we are here describing. 



Ten years before Balboa, on the 25th of September, 1513, 

 first caught sight of the Pacific from the heights of the Sierra 

 de Quarequa at the Isthmus of Panama, Columbus distinctly 

 learnt when he was coasting along the eastern shores of Ve- 

 ragua, that to the west of this land there was a sea " which 

 in less than nine days' sail would bear ships to the Cher- 

 sonesus aurea of Ptolemy and to the mouth of the Ganges." 

 In the same Carta rarissima, which contains the beautiful 

 and poetic narration of a dream, the admiral says, that " the 

 opposite coasts of Veragua, near the Rio de Belen, are situated 

 relatively to one another as Tortosa on the Mediterranean, 



* Examen crit., t. iii. pp. 244-248. 



^ Cape Horn was discovered by Francisco de Hoces in February, 

 1526, in the expedition of the Commendador Garcia de Loaysa, which, 

 following that of Magellan, was destined to proceed to the Moluccas. 

 Whilst Loaysa was passing through the Straits of Magellan, Hoces with 

 his caravel, the San Lesmes, was separated from the flotilla, and driven 

 as far as 55 S. latitude. " Dijeron los del buque, que les parecia que 

 era alii acabamiento de tierra." (Navarrete, Viages de los Espcbholes, 

 t. v. pp. 28 and 404--488.) Fleurieu maintains that Hoces only saw the 

 Cabo del Buen Successo, west of Staten Island. Towards the end of the 

 sixteenth century such a strange uncertainty again prevailed respecting 

 the form of the land, that the author of the Araucana (canto i. oct. 9) 

 believed that the Magellanic Straits had closed by an earthquake, and 

 by the upheaval of the bottom of the sea; whilst, on the other hand, 

 Acosta (Historia natural y moral de laslndias, lib. iii. -cap. 10) regarded 

 the Terra del Fuego as the beginning of a great south polar land. (Com- 

 pare also p. 428.> 



