The voyage of Commodore Byron, who sailed from England in 1764, was altogether one of discovery, his special instructions being to ascertain whether there was reason to believe “that lands and islands of great extent, hitherto unvisited by any European power, were to be found in the Atlantic Ocean between the Cape of Good Hope and the Magellanic Strait, within the latitudes convenient for navigation, and in the climates adapted for the produce of commodities useful to commerce.” He was further ordered to seek for “His Majesty’s islands called Pepys’s Island and Falkland’s Island,” about the position, or even the existence, of which there had previously been considerable doubt. Byron having already had some experience of the southern latitudes under Anson, gives an account of his voyage and adventures homewards after the wreck of the _Wager_ on the coast of Chili, a narrative which is one of the most romantic stories in naval history. He shows that there was no ground for believing in the existence of Pepys’s Island; but, during a passage through the Falkland Islands and a considerable part of the Straits of Magellan, he furnishes much interesting information regarding the native Patagonians and the intricate navigation of these then scarcely known straits. Thence he made his way across the Pacific, passing and naming various small groups of islands, till he at length anchored in the harbour of Tinian, where Anson had been twenty years before, reaching England early in May 1766 after an absence of twenty months. The careful survey of the Straits of Magellan, which (contrary to the later judgment of Captain Cook) he prefers to rounding the Horn Islands, may be deemed the chief geographical result of Byron’s expedition, that being the course almost universally adopted at the present day, especially by steamers. On the coasts of Patagonia, in the Straits, and in the Falkland Islands, Byron met with enormous quantities of penguins, quaintly described by Sir John Narborough (an earlier navigator in these parts) as “like little children standing up with white aprons on.” Commodore Anson was followed in the same year by Captains Wallis and Carteret, the former of whom was the first to give any account of Otaheite (sometimes called King George’s Island), and the latter to discover Pitcairn’s Island, the home, till recently, of the descendants of several of the mutineers of the _Bounty_. [Sidenote: Captain Cook.] [Sidenote: His first voyage in the _Endeavour_.]