PART II. THE SOUTHERN OCEAN. 



CHAPTER i. NAME, RANGE, AND GENERAL 

 CHARACTERS. 



When on 25th September, 1513, Nunezde Bal- 

 boa and Francisco Pizzarro, "silent from a peakin 

 Darien," discovered the great ocean that divides 

 the western from the eastern world, the part 

 they saw lay to the south of them. So they 

 called it the Mar del Zur, the South Sea. That 

 inappropriate name was replaced by Magellan's 

 more attractive title of the Pacific Ocean, which 

 was given eight years later ; and though the 

 South Sea Islands is still a familiar expression, it 

 was only in modern times that the name of 

 Southern Ocean was revived for the unbroken 

 belt of sea that encircles the southern hemis- 

 phere. The title of the Southern Ocean to 

 recognition is not yet universally admitted. A 

 committee of the Royal Geographical Society,* 

 which, in 1 845, considered the nomenclatureof the 

 oceans, recommended their division into five 

 the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Ant- 

 arctic. The Southern Ocean was divided among 

 the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic, along arbitrary 



*The report of this Committee was not published at the time, but its 

 minutes have been issued in a note entitled " Nomenclature of the 

 Oceans." Geographical journal. Vol. I., London, 1893, pp. 535-6. 



