1598, but already the
custom was forming itself of directing those navigators of almost unknown
seas by explicit instructions from those who remained on shore, and who
had never navigated the ocean at all. The consequence on this occasion
was that the voyagers towards the Straits of Magellan spent a whole
summer on the coast of Africa, amid pestiferous heats and distracting
calms, and reached the straits only in April of the following year.
Admiral Mahu and a large proportion of the crew had meantime perished of
fevers contracted by following the course marked out for them by their
employers, and thus diminished in numbers, half-stripped of provisions,
and enfeebled by the exhausting atmosphere of the tropics, the survivors
were ill prepared to confront the antarctic ordeal which they were
approaching. Five months longer the fleet, under command of Admiral de
Cordes, who had succeeded to the command, struggled in those straits,
where, as if in the home of Eolus, all the winds of heaven seemed holding
revel; but indifference to danger, discipline, and devotion to duty
marked the conduct of the adventurers, even as those qualities had just
been distinguishing their countrymen at the other pole. They gathered no
gold, they conquered no kingdoms, they made few discoveries, they
destroyed no fleets, yet they were the first pioneers on a path on which
thereafter were to be many such achievements by the republic.

At least one heroic incident, which marked their departure from the
straits, deserves to be held in perpetual remembrance. Admiral de Cordes
raised on the shore, at the western mouth of the channel, a rude memorial
with an inscription that the Netherlanders were the first to effect this
dangerous passage with a fleet of heavy ships. On the following day, in
commemoration of the event, he founded an order of knighthood. The chief
officers of the squadron were the knights-commanders, and the most
deserving of the crew were the knights-brethren. The members of the
fraternity made solemn oath to De Cordes, as general, and to each other,
that "by no danger, no necessity, nor by the fear of death, would they
ever be moved to undertake anything prejudicial to their honour, to, the
welfare of the fatherland, or to the success of the enterprise in which
they were engaged; pledging themselves to stake their lives in order,
consistently with honour, to inflict every possible damage on the
hereditary enemy, and to plant the banne