In 1740 a naval commander, George Anson, was dispatched to the Pacific to take part in that ocean in the naval war against Spain. Apparently, after rounding the extremity of South America, he was content at first to proceed up the coast of Peru and plunder the Spanish towns on the western coast of Tropical Africa. He then sailed across the Pacific with his Spanish prizes by way of the Spanish route to the Philippines, making no new discoveries on his way, but passing through the Malay Archipelago to the Cape of Good Hope. Twenty-two years afterwards a British fleet, conveying 6000 soldiers, sailed across the Indian Ocean and took possession of Manila, but failed to conquer the Philippine archipelago, owing to the bravery of the small Spanish garrison of 600 men. But when this war drew to a close, Vice-Admiral John Byron (the grandfather of Lord Byron, the poet) was sent out in the _Dolphin_ in 1764 to explore the Pacific Ocean and make some search for the Great Southern Continent. This journey, however, like that of Lord Anson's, resulted in no gain to geographical knowledge, for he simply sailed by the northern tropical route from Mexico to the Ladrone Islands, and then came back along much the same course to South America and the Atlantic. After his return his ship, the _Dolphin_, together with a vessel called the _Swallow_, were once more dispatched to the Pacific Ocean through the Straits of Magellan, but this time under the command of Captain SAMUEL WALLIS. The Tahiti archipelago, which was to play such an important part as a basis for Cook's discoveries in the Pacific, had apparently been seen by the Spanish navigator de Quiros, as early as 1606, and named "Sagittaria". It was rediscovered in 1767 by Wallis on this voyage of H.M.S. _Dolphin_. Wallis named Tahiti Island "King George III Island", and stayed on its coasts for a month. On his north-westward journey he discovered the Marshall Islands. In the following year there arrived at Tahiti the great Bougainville, the first French explorer of the Pacific Ocean. France, through her enterprising Norman and Breton seamen, was not slow to interest herself in Far Eastern discoveries, and in 1528 defied the Papal bull and worried the Portuguese in Malaysia, just as she followed up Spaniards and Portuguese along the east coast of the Americas. Early in the sixteenth century her mariners, following the Portuguese, had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and adventured themselves in the Indian Ocean to snatch a small share in the trade which was so jealously monopolized by the Spaniards and Portuguese. It is even said (see p. 57) that the first hint of the existence of a Great Southern Continent is due to a French navigator, le Testu, who returned in 1532 from the eastern seas with stories of a Greater Java which lay to the south of the islands of the Malay Archipelago.