The South Atlantic island of South Georgia, situated south of the Antarctic Convergence, was the first Antarctic territory to be discovered. It was first sighted in 1675 by Antoine de la Roché, an English merchant born in London to a French father. He left Hamburg in 1674 as a passenger on a 350-ton vessel bound for Peru. During the return journey, it was en route to Salvador in Brazil around Cape Horn. While trying to navigate through the Le Maire Strait near Staten Island, it was driven off course far to the east. In April 1675, the vessel found refuge in a bay of an unknown island where it anchored for 14 days. La Roché published a report of his voyage in London in 1678 in which he described the new land. That report is now lost but shortly afterwards, in 1690, Captain Francisco de Seixas y Lovera, a Spanish mariner, published an account of La Roché's discovery in his "Descripcion geographica, y derrotero de la region austral Magallanica" After this, cartographers started to depict "Roché Island" on their maps. Roché Island is almost certainly South Georgia, despite the discrepancies in the coordinates given, which can be accounted for by the navigational difficulties experienced by all sailors at the time.