Across the Equator: Into the Southern Hemisphere, 1800–1900

For its first 5,000 years, the language which eventually became English remained firmly geographically anchored in the Northern Hemisphere. The first expansion of English as a native language into the Southern Hemisphere was not until 1659, when it arrived on the remote island of St Helena, about 15° south of the equator in the South Atlantic. There was no further movement of English until the 1780s, when it arrived in Australia and then, during the 1800s, into the Pacific.