due the first crossing of the Equator, about 1470.

With Bartholomew Diaz another great step in advance was made. Sailing
from Lisbon in 1487, he reached Algoa Bay, and without doubt passed
the fortieth parallel on his southward voyage.

Vasco da Gama's voyage of 1497 is too well known to need
description. After him came men like Cabral and Vespucci, who
increased our knowledge, and de Gonneville, who added to the romance
of exploration.

We then meet with the greatest of the older explorers, Ferdinand
Magellan, a Portuguese by birth, though sailing in the service of
Spain. Setting out in 1519, he discovered the connection between the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the strait that bears his name. No one
before him had penetrated so far South -- to about lat. 52deg. S. One
of his ships, the Victoria, accomplished the first circumnavigation
of the world, and thus established in the popular mind the fact that
the earth was really round. From that time the idea of the Antarctic
regions assumed definite shape. There must be something in the South:
whether land or water the future was to determine.

In 1578 we come to the renowned English seaman, Sir Francis
Drake. Though he was accounted a buccaneer, we owe him honour for the
geographical discoveries he made. He rounded Cape Horn and proved
that Tierra del Fuego was a great group of islands and not part of
an Antarctic continent, as many had thought.

The Dutchman, Dirk Gerritsz, who took part in a plundering expedition
to India in 1599 by way of the Straits of Magellan, is said to have