The voyage of Magellan proved that by the allotment of Alexander the Sixth, the Pacific belonged to Spain. And though for eight generations the Spaniards were hereditary lords of the Pacific, they soon grew greedy and jealous and lazy in their splendid and undisturbed monopoly. Once or twice, it is true, the English devils took the great galleon: but only once or twice in all these years. Lesser spoils occasionally fell into the hands of pirates; for did not Dampier take off Juan Fernandez a vessel laden with “a quantity of marmalade, a stately and handsome mule, and an immense wooden image of the Virgin Mary”? Towns, too, were occasionally sacked. But the Spaniards feared little danger, and ran few risks. They grew richer and lazier, and troubled themselves little in exploring the great expanse of the Pacific. They coasted the Americas as far north as California, which they half-suspected to be an island. The Galapagos, Juan Fernandez, and Masafuera they knew; a part of China, a part of Japan, the Philippines, Celebes, Timor, and the Ladrones. Voyages across the Pacific between Manilla and Acapulco were not infrequent: but these voyages were sterile in discovery. The traditional route, once through the Straits of Magellan, was to touch at Juan Fernandez, coast South America, stand in at Panama, turn out to sea again, appear off Acapulco, and then sail in the parallel of 13° N. to the Ladrones. The Abbé Raynal states that the strictest orders were given by the Spanish Government prohibiting captains on any account to deviate from the track laid down on their charts during the voyage between these places.
In the darkness of this uncharted ocean there was believed to stretch a great southern continent of fabulous wealth and beauty: the Terra Australis Incognita that survived pertinaciously in the popular imagination until the time of Captain Cook. Members of the Royal Society had proved, beyond doubt, that the right balance of the earth required a southern continent; geographers pointed out how Quiros, Juan Fernandez and Tasman had touched at various points of this continent. Politicians and poets agreed that treasures of all kinds would be found there,--though they varied in their appropriation of these Utopian resources. The controversy over the existence of this continent was vehemently revived in 1770 by the appearance of Alexander Dalrymple’s _An Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean_. Dalrymple was an ardent advocate of the reality of the Terra Australis Incognita, and to encourage an experimental confirmation of his faith, he dedicated his handsome quarto: “To the man who, emulous of Magellan and the heroes of former times, undeterred by difficulties and unseduced by pleasure, shall persist through every obstacle, and not by chance but by virtue and good conduct succeed in establishing an intercourse with a Southern Continent.” Dr. Kippis, Captain Cook’s biographer, writing in 1788, says he remembers how Cook’s “imagination was captivated in the early part of his life with the hypothesis of a southern continent. He has often dwelt upon it with rapture.” The year following Dalrymple’s dedication, Captain Cook, back from his first voyage in the Pacific, was commissioned by the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, to go out and settle once and for all the mystery of the Southern Continent. So long as this mystery remained unsettled, the Pacific stretched a great limbo pregnant with the wildest fancies. Between the times of Magellan and Captain Cook there was no certainty as to what revelations it held to disgorge.