ANTARCTIC ADVENTURE AND RESEARCH 



To the French must be given the credit for the first 

 serious attempt to discover whether this southern con- 

 tinent really existed. In 1739 on New Year's Day, 

 Bouvet discovered a new land which lay to the south 

 of Capetown some 1,400 miles (see Figure 3). Ow- 

 ing to fog, he was unable to state if it were an island 

 or part of a large continent, but he sailed along the 

 edge of the ice pack in the vicinity for some four 

 hundred miles, feeling sure that a large continent 

 existed just to the south. Antarctica, however, lay 

 still one thousand miles south of his track. It is a 

 noteworthy fact that the small island of Bouvet was 

 thereafter lost until 1898, when the ''Valdivia" found 

 it eight degrees west of the original determination. 

 This is another example of the relative difficulty of 

 fixing longitude, for the latitude (54° S.) was approxi- 

 mately correct. 



The losses of France in Canada in part led to 

 Kerguelen's voyages of 1772 and 1773 when he dis- 

 covered the island (named after him) in the Indian 

 Ocean in latitude 50° S. (see Figure 3). This again 

 had little relationship with the Antarctic continent. 



The greatest achievement of Captain James Cook 

 was not his charting of the best-endowed coast of 

 Australia in 1770, but his wonderful work in delimit- 

 ing the southern boundaries of the three great oceans 

 in his voyages from 1772 to 1775. Cook first came 

 into prominence through his charts of the Saint 

 Lawrence, where he took part in the siege of Quebec. 

 Some of these charts and the copy of his Australian 

 log are the prized possessions of the National Museum 



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