FOR THE SOUTH LAND 
5i 
expeditions of circumnavigation which were about to be 
renewed under the command of Lieutenant Cook, R. N. 
Nor was it the French alone who believed in and desired 
to find the Southern Continent. When Byron started 
for his voyage of circumnavigation in 1764, and Wallis 
and Carteret two years later the British Admiralty in- 
structed them to look for the land which “ there was 
reason to believe might be found ” in the South At- 
lantic and South Pacific. Byron and Carteret both 
searched in vain for the Davis Land of the charts and 
the great French explorer Bougainville shortly afterwards 
was naturally no more successful. The voyage of Car- 
teret in particular was one of enormous difficulty on 
account of his being left by his colleague in a small and 
ill-found ship with insufficient stores and a scurvy- 
stricken crew, and no British captain ever acquitted 
himself with greater valour in his command. 
When, in 1772, Marion-Dufresne was sent out by the 
French government with two small vessels for the pur- 
pose of taking a young Tahitian who had been brought 
to France by Bougainville back to his home, he had in- 
structions to visit the Southern Continent and New Zea- 
land on the way. The former he failed to find though 
he lighted on some small islands between 46° and 47 0 S., 
now known as the Marion and Crozet Islands (Crozet 
being one of Marion’s officers), but named at the time 
Terre d’Esperance, on account of the hope inspired that 
they lay off the coast of a continent. 
Yves Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec was the last of 
the explorers to find anything which could even for a 
moment strengthen the illusion of a temperate Southern 
Continent. A noble of Brittany, he had long cherished 
the hope of visiting the fair south land of his fancy and 
