Cook, in a last vain attempt to find Bouvet Island, also discovers and names Clerke Rocks and the southern eight islands of the Sandwich Islands Group in 1775, although he lumps the southernmost three together, and their status as separate islands will not be established until 1820 by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen.

Here Cook correctly predicts that:

    ...there is a tract of land near the Pole, which is the Source of most of the ice which is spread over this vast Southern Ocean

The northern three islands will be discovered by Bellingshausen in 1819.

The islands are tentatively named "Sandwich Land" by Cook, although he also comments that they might be a group of islands rather than a single body of land.

The name is chosen in honor of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty.

The word "South" will later be added to distinguish them from the "Sandwich Islands", now known as the Hawaiian Islands.

He now turns north to South Africa.