hore and a Spanish galleon crossed it year by
year from Acapulco to the Philippines. But no effort was made by Spain
to explore the lands that broke its wide expanse; and though Dutch
voyagers, coming from the eastward, penetrated its waters and first
noted the mighty continent that bore from that hour the name of New
Holland, no colonists followed in the track of Tasman or Van Diemen. It
was not till another century had gone by indeed that Europe again turned
her eyes to the Pacific. But in the very year which followed the Peace
of Paris, in 1764, two English ships were sent on a cruise of discovery
to the Straits of Magellan.

[Sidenote: Captain Cook.]

"Nothing," ran the instructions of their commander, Commodore Byron,
"nothing can redound more to the honour of this nation as a maritime
power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the
advancement of the trade and navigation thereof, than to make
discoveries of countries hitherto unknown." Byron himself hardly sailed
beyond Cape Horn; but three years later a second English seaman, Captain
Wallis, succeeded in reaching the central island of the Pacific and in
skirting the coral-reefs of Tahiti, and in 1768 a more famous mariner
traversed the great ocean from end to end. At first a mere ship-boy on a
Whitby collier, James Cook had risen to be an officer in the royal navy,
and had piloted the boats in which Wolfe mounted the St. Lawrence to the
Heights of Abraham. On the return of Wallis he was sent in a small
vessel with a crew of some eighty men and a few naturalists to observe
the transit of Venus at Tahiti, and to explore the seas that stretched
beyond it. After a long stay at Tahiti Cook sailed past the Society
Isles into the heart of the Pacific and reached at the further limits of
that ocean the two islands, as large as his own Britain, which make up
New Zealand. Steering northward from New Zealand over a thousand miles
of sea he touched at last the coast of the great "Southern Land" or
Australia, on whose eastern shore, from some fancied likeness to the
district at home on which he had gazed as he set sail, he gave the name
of New South Wales. In two later voyages Cook traversed the same waters,
and discovered fresh island groups in their wide expanse. But his work
was more than a work of mere discovery. Wherever he touched, in New
Zealand, in Australia, he claimed the soil for the English Crown. The
records which he published of his travels not