3 o SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
was inconvenient to those in authority. It is accordingly 
not surprising to find that many facts to which we now 
have access were unknown to the contemporaries of the 
actors themselves, whose efforts and discoveries were 
thus often left unproductive and lay outside the chain of 
historical continuity. 
The Emperor Charles V. sent out an expedition in 
1525 to repeat the voyage of Magellan and one of the 
caravels, the San Lesmes, encountering one of the violent 
storms that haunt the southern extremity of America, 
was driven far to the southeastward of the entrance to 
the strait, and in latitude 55 0 found an open sea leading 
the captain to believe that he had come to the southern 
end of Tierra del Fuego. This fact never found its way 
into contemporary maps, but the difficulties of the south- 
west passage to the Indies were fully appreciated by the 
Spanish sailors. They had a much easier and safer route 
by Mexico, a route which obviated the storms of the 
Southern Ocean and the tedious and hazardous naviga- 
tion of the Strait, and which also reduced the voyages 
of the Spaniard living at home to the short and easy trip 
to Mexico, while his colonial brother undertook the trans- 
pacific voyage from one of the ports on the west coast of 
America, all of which were bound together by a regular 
service of coasting vessels. For forty years the Span- 
iards deserted the Strait, but diligently continued their 
navigations in the great South Sea. 
The Portuguese trader, Jorge de Meneses, while on a 
voyage from Malacca to Ternate in 1526, was drifted 
out of his course and fell in with the coast of a vast 
projection of the great South Land. The discovery was 
not followed up and twenty years later a Spaniard Ynigo 
Ortiz de Retes, in the San Juan, after passing a number 
