The _Pacific_ is also one of the great boundaries of the United States. By treaties with Spain and Russia our government possesses sovereignty along the Pacific ocean from latitude forty-two degrees to fifty-four degrees and forty minutes, which is equal to about eight hundred and eighty statute miles. This great ocean extends from Beering’s Straits to the antarctic circle, a distance of three thousand two hundred leagues, and from Asia and New Holland to America. It is separated from the Atlantic and Antarctic oceans only by imaginary lines. Its extreme breadth, a little north of the equator, is four thousand five hundred and fifty leagues; between South America and New Holland, latitude thirty degrees south, it is two thousand nine hundred and seventy leagues. It contains an immense number of islands spread over its surface, particularly between latitude thirty degrees north and fifty degrees south, to which modern geographers have given the general appellation of _Oceanica_. It was first called the _South Sea_ by the European navigators who entered it from the north. Magellan gave it the name of Pacific, on account of the prevalence of calms which he experienced in it; but it by no means deserves the name, as it is remarkable for the fury of its storms, and the agitation of its waters. The trade-winds, which constantly blow between the tropics, render the passage from the western coast of America to Asia very short; but the return is proportionately difficult. The Portuguese were the first Europeans who entered the Pacific, which they did from the east. Balboa, in 1513, discovered it from the summit of the mountains which traverse the Isthmus of Darien. Magellan sailed across it from east to west in 1521.[34] The Pacific, by its general motion, retreats from the coast of America, and flows from east to west; and this motion is very powerful in the vast and uninterrupted extent of that sea. Near Cape Corriantes, in Peru, the sea appears to flow from the land by this single cause. Ships are carried with rapidity from the port of Acapulco, in Mexico, to the Philippine Islands. But in order to return, they are obliged to go to the north of the tropics, to seek the polar current, and the variable winds. On the other side, the south polar current, finding no land to impede it, carries along with it the polar ice even to the latitude where the motion of the tropical current begins to be felt. This is the reason why, in the southern hemisphere, floating pieces of ice are met with at fifty and even at forty degrees.