ANTARCTIC  REGION

History of Antarctic Exploration.—Although the Antarctic region was not reached by the first explorer until the Arctic region had been for centuries a resort of adventurers in search of the route to the East, the discovery of Lae "South Land . " the south polar region was really the more direct outcome of the main stream of geographical exploration . It was early understood by the Greek geographers that the known world covered only a small portion of the northern hemisphere and that the whole southern hemisphere awaited exploration, with its torrid, temperate and frigid zones repeating the climatic regions familiar in the northern hemisphere, the habitable land of the south temperate zone being separated from the known world by the practically impassable belt of the torrid zone . During the middle ages the sphericity of the earth came to be viewed as contrary to Scripture and was generally discredited, and it was not until Prince Henry the Navigator began in 1418 to encourage the penetration of the torrid zone in the effort to reach India by circumnavigating Africa that the exploration of the southern hemisphere began . The doubling of the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 by Bartholomew Diaz first brought explorers within touch ever died a harder death . It is not to the purpose here to describe of the Antarctic cold, and proved that the ocean separated Africa in detail how Schouten and Le Maire rediscovered the southern from any Antarctic land that might exist . The passage of extremity of Tierra del Fuego and named Cape Horn in 1615, Magellan's Strait in 1520 showed that America and Asia also how Quiros in 1606 took possession for the king of Spain of all the were separated from the Antarctic continent, which was then lands he had discovered in Australia del Espiritu Santo (the New believed to extend from Tierra del Fuego southward . The Hebrides) and those he would discover " even to the Pole," or -doubling of Cape Horn by Drake in 1578 proved that the Tierra how Tasman in 1642 showed that New Holland (Australia) was del Fuego archipelago was of small extent and that any continent separated by sea from any continuous southern continent . which lay to the south must be within the region of perpetual winter . Before this, however, vague reports of land to the south of the Malay archipelago had led European geographers to connect on their globes the coast of Tierra del Fuego with the coast of New Guinea, and allowing their imaginations to run riot in the vast unknown spaces of the south Atlantic, south Indian and Pacific oceans, they sketched the outlines of a vast continent stretching in parts into the tropics .