The Dutch East India Company held from the Government the exclusive privilege of trading in the Great South Sea,--all private citizens being prohibited from entering those waters by the Cape of Good Hope on the east or the Strait of Magellan on the west. This prohibition stimulated rather than checked the commercial ardor of the country, and it soon became the study of navigators and merchants to discover some safe means of eluding the law, it being hard, they said, that Government should close up the channels which Nature had left free. Isaac Lemaire, a rich trader of Amsterdam, was the first to whom the idea occurred of seeking another passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific than the Strait of Magellan. He imparted his views to William Cornelison Schouten, who had been three times to the East Indies in the different capacities of supercargo, pilot, and master. He too was convinced that to the south of Terra del Fuego lay another passage from one ocean to the other. Could they find this passage, they might legally trespass upon the monopoly held by the Company. They determined to attempt the discovery, and Lemaire advanced half the necessary funds, Schouten and his friends furnishing the other half. Two ships were fitted out, the larger,--the Concord,--of three hundred and sixty tons, being manned by sixty-five men, and pierced for twenty-nine guns of small calibre; the Horn, of one hundred and ten tons, carrying eight cannons, four swivels, and twenty-two men. Schouten was master and pilot of the expedition, and James Lemaire, the son of Isaac, supercargo. The object of the voyage was kept a profound secret, the officers and men being bound by their articles to go wherever they should be required, and, in compensation for this unusual condition, receiving a considerable advance upon the ordinary wages. The little fleet was equipped in the port of Horn, and left the Texel on the 14th of June, 1615, proceeding towards the coast of Africa.