The immediate result of this voyage was to impress Spain’s sovereignty upon the East Indies; but a vaster and more far-reaching consequence was the influence it exerted, by its proof that the world was really a globe, to free men’s minds from blind belief in and guidance by a tradition, which had taught that the earth was a flat plain surrounded by water,—an error sanctioned by St. Augustine and other influential teachers. Magellan impressed a name upon the greatest of the oceans, and has his own name gloriously emblazoned upon both the map of the earth and the map of the sky in the southern hemisphere; but his greatest title to honor, after all, is that he struck dogma the hardest blow it ever received. [Illustration: SEA-SURF AT SANTO DOMINGO.] The sixteenth century seems to have been, outside of the Arctic regions, an era of surveying rather than of exploration by sea, yet some notable work was done in the East, where all nations now entered as competitors in the trade, seizing upon every island or mainland shore that they could, and holding their possessions as long as possible. Even the English entered heartily into this rivalry, the great East India Company having been founded in 1599. With its trading we have nothing to do, but must note that it extended knowledge of Oceanica considerably, and added greatly to Europe’s information as to India, the Malayan peninsula and larger islands, China, and Japan. The Spanish and Portuguese found themselves so busy in defending that to which they already laid claim that they had little time to search for new lands; and this sort of enterprise fell mainly to the Dutch, who, now that the Netherlands were at last free from the long and cruel tyranny of Spain, were energetically making up for lost time. Their captain, Van Noort, went out by way of the Straits of Magellan to the Philippines, and got back to Rotterdam between 1598 and 1601. Another fleet made the same voyage fifteen years later; and in 1616 Cape Horn was rounded by Willem Cornelis Schouten, who gave the name of his home village, Hoorn, to that desolate terminus of South America. For many years geographers had held belief in a vast “southern continent,”—_Terra Australis_,—and most of the islands found in the South Pacific were accidental results of some attempt to reach it. New Guinea had been sighted a century before, and perhaps Australia also, of which several navigators got glimpses here and there early in the sixteenth century, satisfying them that it also was a great island. It was not until this century was half gone, however, that the map of that quarter of the “South Sea” was filled out with any accuracy; and this was due to the skill and labor of an eminent Dutch voyager, Abel Janszen Tasman, who was despatched southward with two ships by the colonial government at Batavia, where the Dutch had already gained political ascendancy.