This important collection, published in two volumes in 1770–1 and reissued here in one, contains accounts of notable Iberian and Dutch voyages in the southern hemisphere, translated and edited by Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808). Hydrographer to the Admiralty from 1795, Dalrymple produced this work as part of his research into the belief at the time that there existed an undiscovered continent in the South Pacific. These volumes were intended to demonstrate the knowledge of the region to date. The first volume covers sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese voyages, beginning with Ferdinand Magellan and including those of Juan Fernández, Álvaro de Mendaña y Neira and Pedro Fernandes de Queirós. The second volume contains the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch voyages of Jacob Le Mair and Willem Schouten, Abel Tasman and Jacob Roggeveen. This volume also contains a chronological table of discoveries in the southern hemisphere since 1501.
