The distribution is very interesting and it has been shown that the water of the Antarctic Ocean contains about 0 .
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.
A committee of the Royal Geographical Society - the deliberations of which were interrupted by the departure on his last voyage of Sir John Franklin, one of the members - suggested these meridians as boundaries; the north and south boundaries of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans being the polar circles, leaving an Arctic and an Antarctic Ocean to complete the hydrosphere.
We now know, however, that the Antarctic circle runs so close to the coast of Antarctica that the Antarctic Ocean may be left out of account.
Others, like Malte Brun (1803) and Supan (1903), take the loxodromes between the three capes and call the ocean to the south the Antarctic Ocean.
