During this period a number of vessels, mainly those of English buccaneers, on passing through the Straits of Magellan had suffered the common fate of being caught by northerly storms and driven to the south. Little enough, however, emerges from their exiguous and indefinite records excepting vague pictures of peril from tempest and ice. Thus Sir Francis Drake was carried to about 57° S. in 1578, and afterwards made northward to discover some of the islands of the Fuegian archipelago; but even these took their place on the maps as part of the southern mainland; and it may be added that the same fate befell the remote and tiny Easter Island when it was observed by Edward Davis more than a century later--if Easter Island was indeed his landfall; his observations were not sufficiently definite to enable us now to determine. The Dutchmen Jacob Lemaire and Willem Cornelis Schouten, however, successfully aimed at discovering a passage into the Pacific south of the Straits of Magellan, saw and named Cape Horn, and passed across the ocean through the Paumotu and Tongan archipelagoes by New Pomerania to the East Indies in 1615–17. To an intervening date (1598) is assigned the disputed episode of the voyage of a ship commanded by Dirk Gerrits, one of a Dutch squadron which was said to have been driven south to 64° and there to have fallen in with a mountainous snow-clad coast, identified later with the South Shetland Islands. The story is typical of the uncertainty and misunderstanding associated with all the early southern voyages; it seems probable that Kaspar Barlæus, who in 1622 translated into Latin a history of the “Doings of the Spaniards in America,” was misled by the confusion of a later voyage of one of Gerrits’s shipmates (in the account of which, however, no mention occurs of a far southern land) with that of Gerrits himself. However this may be, another mythical point was duly established on the mythical coast-line of the Antarctic continent running westward athwart the southern Pacific. And the old theory held its place in spite of the strong proofs adduced by William Dampier, during his voyage round the world in 1699–1701, of the inaccuracy of the continental coast as laid down according to the cartographers’ theories. Dampier, after sharing to the full in the adventures of the buccaneers in the Pacific, was under the orders of the admiralty on this voyage, in the course of which he approached Australia directly from the Cape of Good Hope, and made careful explorations in the Shark’s Bay area of the west coast. In 1721 Jacob Roggeveen, leading an expedition on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, was satisfied of the neighbourhood of land about 64° S., south of Tierra del Fuego; and subsequently, after voyaging north-westward into the Pacific and (as is generally supposed) discovering Samoa, believed that he had located promontories of the long-sought continent.