Even the British naval explorers, John Byron in 1765 and Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret in 1767, had it in command to continue the search. The French were now taking a share in Pacific exploration, and Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1768 passed across the Pacific by way of the Paumotu, Society, Samoan, and New Hebrides groups to the south coast of New Guinea. But these and other voyages only served to add to the map the archipelagoes of the Western Pacific, when they did not actually cause confusion by imperfect position-finding and by the practice of successive voyagers of renaming islands previously discovered. The French voyager Lozier Bouvet, supplied with vessels by the French East India Company, sailed in 1738 to discover the continent, and battled long and bravely with the Antarctic ice about 55° S. for no positive reward save the discovery of Bouvet Island (whose insularity, however, he himself did not recognize) and the negative one of abolishing the imaginary coastline from the chart of the South Atlantic. Hope of future great discoveries was revived by the observation of the Marion and Crozet islands during the expedition under Marion-Dufresne in 1772; but the chapter closes with the bitter disappointment of Yves de Kerguelen-Trémarec, who, after a first voyage in 1772, during which a too vivid imagination led him to regard his discovery of the island now called Kerguelen as revealing the “central mass of the Antarctic continent,” and a land of promise, was hopelessly disabused on his second visit (1773) to that inhospitable shred of land, whose name he changed from Southern France to the Land of Desolation. CHAPTER IX. JAMES COOK AND HIS SUCCESSORS