CHAPTER III 
SEARCHING FOR THE SOUTH LAND 
“We left behind the painted buoy 
That tosses at the harbour mouth; 
And madly danced our hearts with joy, 
As fast we fleeted to the South ; 
How fresh was every sight and sound, 
On open main or winding shore ! 
We knew the merry world was round, 
And we might sail for evermore.” 
— Tennyson. 
F OR two hundred years the fair image of the South 
Land fled before the bold sailors who entered the 
southern seas in quest of trade or plunder. They 
ever kept a watchful eye to southward in the hope of 
lighting upon the Third World, the richness and attrac- 
tiveness of which seemed to increase from generation to 
generation. 
Unfortunately it is difficult to unravel the stories of the 
voyagers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It 
is true that “ the men loomed large on the long trail, the 
trail that is always new,” but their forms are rarely 
distinct. The vagueness of their original narratives 
often set down from hearsay by another hand, the uncer- 
tainty of determining latitude to a single degree by 
means of the clumsy back-staff or cross-staff, and the 
wild guesses at longitude that were alone possible, makes 
the story of any particular voyage hard to follow, and the 
contests as to priority of discovery very difficult to 
28 
