Region and period
Explorers of the Southern Lands in the 18th Century: Cape Horn, Patagonia, the Falklands, the Southern Ocean
In the eighteenth century the South was still ruled by a conviction: somewhere between America, Africa and New Holland there had to be a fertile, populous continent. Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier, a native of Saint-Malo, set out to find it for the French East India Company; on 1 January 1739, in fog and among drifting ice, he sighted a cape that he took for the tip of that land. It was a tiny island, and no one managed to see it again until 1808. As late as 1767 the Scottish geographer Alexander Dalrymple was promising Britain a southern continent of fifty million inhabitants. Every voyage of the century chipped away at the dream.
Cape Horn was the other ordeal. In 1741 George Anson's squadron lost hundreds of men rounding it, and the Wager was wrecked on the coast of Chile; the survivors, among them the young John Byron, brought home tales of mutiny, hunger and survival among the canoe peoples of the channels that were read for generations. Back in 1764 as a commodore, Byron called in Patagonia, and the account published in 1766 described men of gigantic size: the quarrel over the giants stirred learned Europe. In that same year of 1764 Bougainville settled Acadian families at Port Saint Louis in the Falklands; Britain and Spain then fought over the islands until they came close to war in 1770.
Spain answered by occupying the coast. The Jesuits José Quiroga and José Cardiel surveyed it as early as 1745-1746; the Englishman Thomas Falkner, who had spent years among the peoples of the pampas, published a description of Patagonia in 1774. From 1779 the Crown founded settlements on the Río Negro and in San Julián Bay; Basilio Villarino worked his way up the river towards the Andes in 1782-1783, and Antonio de Córdoba charted the Strait of Magellan in 1785-1786 and again in 1788-1789.
Further south, the ocean gave up its islands. In January 1772 Marion Dufresne discovered the Prince Edward Islands and the Crozet archipelago, a few months before he was killed in New Zealand. On 17 January 1773 two British ships crossed the Antarctic Circle for the first time; a year later one of them reached 71° 10' south and turned back before the pack ice. South Georgia, charted in 1775, revealed above all its colonies of fur seals and elephant seals. By the 1790s British and American sealers from Nantucket were arriving by the dozen: the great peopled continent had vanished from the maps, and the South had become a hunting ground.
This collection brings together our editions and a directory of related texts.
Our titles on this subject
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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George Anson, A Voyage Round the World (1748)
Five years before the Strobl-Cardiel-Quiroga expedition, the English commodore Anson set out to sail around the world at the head of a squadron ravaged by scurvy. It is precisely his printed charts that gave rise to the fables of giant rivers and outsized oysters at San Julián which the voyage of 1746 would dismantle. The English account is a masterpiece of naval propaganda: wild Patagonia, the Manila galleon captured, a triumphant return. To read Anson beside Lozano is to see the same coast through two enemy pens, one that magnifies everything, the other that counts fathoms.
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John Byron, relation du voyage du Dolphin (1773)
Twelve years before Viedma, the English admiral enters San Julián Bay and swears he saw men nine feet tall. His account revives in Europe the old fable of the Patagonian giants and sets the engravings circulating. To read Byron and then Viedma is to pass from a tale to a measuring rod: the second measures his hosts in varas, notes that they are tall but by no means outsized, and calmly explains that it was their garment from neck to feet that deceived hasty visitors.
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Thomas Falkner, A Description of Patagonia (1774)
An English physician turned Jesuit spends forty years in the missions of the Río de la Plata and comes home with the first reasoned description of the Patagonian interior, its peoples and its rivers. The book appears six years before the departure from Montevideo, and its shadow hangs over the whole enterprise: it is partly because Falkner showed the English the strategic value of the coast that Madrid decides in haste to plant towns there.
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James Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World (1777)
While Kerguelen defends his February 1772 land at Versailles, James Cook leaves England with the Resolution and the Adventure to settle the question of the southern continent. In January 1773 he crosses the Antarctic Circle; a year later, as the Breton gives up in the fogs of his islands, he pushes on to 71 degrees south before the ice stops him. His sober, numbered account erases from the maps the fertile continent promised by the geographers, the very one whose tip Kerguelen believed he had glimpsed. The two men chase the same chimera with opposite fortunes: Cook keeps his crews free of scurvy, while Kerguelen returns with men ruined by disease.
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James Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784)
In December 1776, bound for the North Pacific, James Cook anchors the Resolution and the Discovery in a bay of the Kerguelen lands, which he names Christmas Harbour. His men find there the message left by the French in 1774, proof of the taking of possession. Cook surveys the coast, describes the low vegetation, the seals and the penguins, and suggests a name that will stick: the Island of Desolation. His account, published after his death, confirms the Breton's discovery just as the latter, condemned by the court martial, writes his defence in the château of Saumur.
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