Anthony de la Roché

Anthony de la Roché was a 17th-century English maritime explorer and merchant, born in London to a French Huguenot father and an English mother, who took part in a joint venture established by English and Dutch shipowners in the Spanish port city of Cádiz in order to engage in the lucrative New World trade. During a commercial voyage between Europe and South America he was blown off course in Drake Passage, visited the island of South Georgia and sighted Clerke Rocks in 1675, thereby making the first discovery of land in the Antarctic. In doing so he crossed the Antarctic Convergence, a natural boundary of the Antarctic region that would be described two and a half centuries later by the British Discovery Investigations and the German Meteor Expedition.