Leaving Hampton Roads on the 18th of August 1838, it Mopped at Madeira and Rio de Janeiro; visited Tierra del Fuego, Chile, Peru, the Paumotu group of the Low Archipelago, the Samoan islands and New South Wales; from Sydney sailed into the Antarctic Ocean in December 1839 and reported the discovery of an Antarctic continent west of the Balleny islands; visited the Fiji and the Hawaiian islands in 1840, explored the west coast of the United States, including the Columbia river, San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento river, in 1841, and returned by way of the Philippine islands, the Sulu archipelago, Borneo, Singapore, Polynesia and the Cape of Good Hope, reaching New York on the 10th of June 1842.
The chief towns in the interior were Amasia, on the Iris, the birthplace of Strabo, the capital of Mithradates the Great, and the burial-place of the earlier kings, whose tombs still exist; Comana, higher up the river, a famous centre of the worship of the goddess Ma (or Cybele); Zela, another great religious centre, refounded by Pompey, now Zilch; Eupatoria, refounded by Pompey as Magnopolis at the junction of the Lycus and Iris; Cabira, Pompey's Diospolis, afterwards Neocaesarea, now Niksar; Sebastopolis on the Scylax, now Sulu Seral; Sebasteia, now Sivas; and Megalopolis, a foundation of Pompey, somewhere in the same district.
The China Sea on the north has a maximum depth of 2715 fathoms off the Philippines, the Sulu Basin reaches 2550 fathoms, and the Celebes Basin 2795 fathoms. Some of the channels between the islands are of very great depth, Macassar Strait exceeding 1000 fathoms, the Molucca Passage exceeding 2000 fathoms, and the Halmahera Trough sinking as deep as 2575 fathoms. The deepest of all is the Banda Basin, a large area of which lies below 2500 fathoms and reaches 3557 fathomsin the Kei Trench.
Curve B shows the typical distribution of temperature in an enclosed sea, in this case the Sulu Basin of the Malay Sea, where from the level of the barrier to the bottom the temperature remains uniform or homothermic. Curve C shows a typical summer condition in the polar seas, where layers of sea-water at different temperatures are superimposed, the arrangement from the surface to 200 fathoms is termed FIG.
The enterprise of Sir James Brooke led, after 1838, to the establishment of British sovereignty in North Borneo; in 1895 New Guinea was divided between Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands; and the Spanish-American War of 1898 resulted in the cession of the Philippines, Sulu Island and the largest of the Mariana Islands to the United States, and the sale of the Caroline group to Germany.